From building mental fortitude to honing flexible muscles, the benefits of doing yoga encompass both mind and body. The good news is that you do not have to practice all day to achieve the best results. Essentially, the benefits of yoga are so resounding that even a 20-minute routine is enough to completely transform your health.

Yoga is a combination of spiritual, physical, and mental practices that together delivers a great dose of wellbeing. Not sure yet, here are the benefits of doing yoga in the morning.

Eliminates Morning Muscle Stiffness

Doing stretching exercises or yoga asanas helps the joints and muscles loosen up, get rid of stiffness, and hence allow improved blood flow. Technically speaking, when you sleep, the muscles rest, and bodily fluids and connective tissues can easily build up. These layers of connective tissues could cause muscle stiffness and needs to be released after you’ve woken up. If you avoid any exercises or stretching early in the morning, these bodily fluids can easily build-up, become even thicker and this could lead to pain in the joints or tight muscles.

Helps Relieve Stress

Giving yourself a few minutes every morning to do some yoga allows the body’s cycle including your nervous system to get back to normal. Also, this helps start the new day in a more relaxed state and helps relieve stress. Relaxing in the morning helps improve the mind and body immeasurably.

Improved Breathing

Breathing Exercise or ‘Pranayam’ as its known is a common practice that lets you control breathing. Breathing exercises have been thoroughly investigated to boost lung capacity, which is the maximum amount of air, which can be expelled from the lungs. This can be very beneficial for the better functioning of your organs.

Releases Happy Hormones

Ever felt sad and happy in the scope of few minutes? If so, it’s the hormones in your body messing with you. Hormones usually play a crucial role in the proper functioning of the body, mainly helps control our moods and some hormones such as endorphin and dopamine are known to largely promote happiness and positive feelings. Research shows that morning meditation can help endorphin and dopamine production and ultimately lead to a productive and happy day.

Time For Yourself

It’s always important to take about 15 minutes of “me time”. Since research has clearly shown it helps boost productivity and provide the highly needed mental wellbeing to start your morning chores. Doing yoga in the morning allows you to have more peace and energy to face life. This is a way to know how you care for yourself – whether it’s just for 15 minutes or 2 hours.

Improves The Digestive System

Studies have shown that your brain and gut are interconnected. If the body can’t absorb and digest the food you’ve eaten the next morning, this creates other health problems and might even affect your wellbeing the same day. Doing yoga in the morning helps boost metabolism and your digestive system starts releasing waste products and digests all the required nutrients. Your health begins from your belly.

Avoid Caffeine

After you’ve just woken up in the morning, the body and mind might not sync and this is why we crave morning coffee. Also, as mentioned earlier, the body might feel stiff and tight. Suryanamaskar is a series of 12 yoga asanas. It doesn’t just heal your body and mind, but it also helps get instant energy. Thus, one can easily say bye to your coffee or tea.

Breathe Better

Pranayama also known as yoga-breathing techniques largely focus on slowing down breathing and breathing from the bottom of your stomach. This helps send messages to your brain that soothe the sympathetic nervous system that’s responsible for the ‘flight or fight response we usually feel when you’re stressed – these yoga exercises have been found to increase vital capacity.

Reduces Inflammation

Although inflammation is a normal and vital immune system response, chronic inflammation is usually associated with different health conditions such as cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. Regular practice usually enhances chronic inflammation by reducing the levels of pro-inflammatory markers such as cytokines.

References

Mansour, S. (2020, June 21). This 5-minute yoga routine will boost your energy. CNN. https://edition.cnn.com/2020/06/21/health/morning-yoga-in-bed-wellness/index.html

Santas, D. (2017, August 18). 5-minute morning yoga to seize the day. CNN. https://edition.cnn.com/2015/09/23/health/five-minute-morning-yoga/index.html

Want to relax? Try yoga. (0001, January 1). The New York Times – Breaking News, US News, World News and Videos. https://www.nytimes.com/guides/well/yoga-stress