Yoga is good for you. Sure, that’s a fact – proven by our own feelings, experiences as well as scientific studies. I’ve wrote about it for example in my “Yoga & Healing” post or “How a Yoga Class at Work Can Improve Your Business” article before.
However, have you ever thought about yoga helping you to speed up your metabolism and increasing your metabolic rate? Your metabolism is like your nice and cozy fireplace that converts or “burns” the food you’re eating into energy and something valuable for your body and overall well-being. Do you know those fit and healthy people that eat quite a lot when you go out to eat or see them at a party? And you might think “Wow, how can they eat all that without gaining weight?”
Well, there is actually no secret to it. People who exercise regularly built up muscle, and the more muscles we have, the more calories we burn. Furthermore, when we burn more calories, we increase our resting metabolic rate (RMR) in order to burn them.
However, our muscle mass is not the only factor that increases our metabolism, there are also:
- Gender, Age
- Physical Activity
- Nutrition
- Crash-diets etc.
How does Yoga help with our metabolism?
Well, although yoga isn’t actually a workout, it does build our long and lean muscles and therefore is an effective way to get our fire on and burn more. Just holding each pose for up to a minute, really challenges our strength, balance, and concentration. The breathing is your most important tool in your yoga practice, and this fills your organs with enough oxygen and improves your circulatory system, which is another important factor for increasing your metabolism. Also the twists and turns in yoga are great digestion boosters and wonderful for detoxing our bodies!
So, stay yogilated!
This is a very helpful step-by-step guide and infographic on the most important Yoga sequences that we need to follow. I will definitely use this as a guide to my routines, for sure.
Great, Enrique! I am glad you find the info graphic helpful, too! Thanks for your comment.