Yoga... What's the point?

When you think about Yoga what comes to mind? A bunch of women doing some fancy breathing and bending into weird positions all the while passing gas? That is what I used to think about yoga, but that all changed when I decided to take yoga my sophomore year of high school.

 Before I started yoga I thought I would take it, it would bean easy A and I could take it after school to free up my schedule, I mean it's just a bunch of stretching and breathing, right? I don't think I could have been any more wrong. Yoga was not as easy as I had thought, aside from people consistently passing gas, everything I had thought was pretty off point.

Sure, we did a lot of breathing and stretching, but it certainly was not easy. We were constantly moving, "Now move into downward facing dog, raise your right leg in the air and then bring it forward, then move into Warrior 1 pose... etc. etc." It doesn't sound very difficult, but keeping proper form and and focusing so hard on breathing is a lot more challenging than I had expected for my first time at yoga.My favorite part of class quickly became the end of every class when we would do a pose called Savasana or Corpse Pose.  In this pose you simply lay on your back on the floor.

Despite how difficult yoga had been at first, I quickly began to really enjoy it, I could feel myself becoming stronger and more flexible, I had gained some muscle, and it became increasingly relaxing. After taking just a few classes we had already started to learn the first steps to standing on our heads! I had no idea that I could gain so much from something as simple as a little bit of fancy breathing and stretching. In addition to feeling good, yoga has many health benefits including increased flexibility and muscle strength and tone as well as things like maintaining a balanced metabolism. Doing yoga even improves posture and has been known to lower blood pressure as well as cholesterol. 

One of the best things about yoga is that ANYBODY can do it. Not all yoga consists of constant movement and learning specific poses, some yoga is more relaxed and meditative, and some yoga is extremely warm rooms and the routines are intense. There is even yoga for pregnant women. 

Yoga can be done anywhere, in any form all of the time. I encourage everybody to at least try doing yoga two or three times. It can change your life in more ways than you would think. If you want to try out yoga but you don't want to take a class, youtube has some great yoga routines and Netflix also has some yoga videos to follow along to. 

Namaste.