The Benefits of Practicing Yoga - What Research Tells About Its Use for Common Health Problems
8:05 PM
History in Brief
Recent research shows that people with atrial fibrillation (irregular heartbeats) can benefit from practicing yoga.
Three months of regular yoga sessions
resulted in a 50 percent reduction in reported cases of heart palpitations. The mean heart rate was also reduced from 67 beats per minute to 61-62 beats per minute after doing yoga. Participants also reported less anxiety and depression.
resulted in a 50 percent reduction in reported cases of heart palpitations. The mean heart rate was also reduced from 67 beats per minute to 61-62 beats per minute after doing yoga. Participants also reported less anxiety and depression.
A review of more than 100 studies analyzing the effect of yoga on mental health found evidence that yoga has a positive effect on mild depression, sleep problems, schizophrenia, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in English).
A study published last year found that yoga has a beneficial effect on leptin, a hormone that plays a key role in regulating consumption and energy expenditure.
Experts in yoga had 36 percent higher leptin levels compared to novices, prompting researchers to speculate that regular yoga practice can benefit their health by altering leptin production.
Ideally, it would be important to implement a comprehensive fitness program that also includes anaerobic and aerobic endurance training, plus flexibility, and exercises for your core muscles like yoga.
By Dr. Mercola
Your body and your health can - and should - change as you begin to implement the appropriate lifestyle changes. Yoga has recently received some well deserved attention by the media.
Two recent studies show that regular yoga classes can help improve atrial fibrillation (irregular heartbeats) and common psychiatric disorders.
Although I believe it is necessary to incorporate anaerobic exercise (high intensity interval training) for optimum health, there is no doubt that yoga can be an important part of a complete exercise program.
Yoga is especially useful for promoting flexibility and main muscles, and has shown benefits in people suffering from back pain. As we will show later in this article, if you are overweight like to perform types of strenuous exercises, yoga can also help improve your health.
Ideally, it would be important to implement a comprehensive fitness program that also includes aerobic, anaerobic and endurance training, plus flexibility, and exercises that benefit your core muscles like Yoga or the Foundation Tarining (created by Dr. Eric Goodman) , which incorporates many principles of yoga but are modified to focus on muscle groups that most people are at risk of injury due to the large amount of time they spend sitting.
Do you have Irregular Cardiac Rhythms? Yoga Could Help You...
The first study, included 49 patients who had been diagnosed with atrial fibrillation (AF) for an average of five years. AF - a condition in which the upper chambers of the heart are shaken in disorder - affects about 2.7 million Americans.
There are drugs that are typically prescribed as beta-blockers as an effort to relieve symptoms, but these drugs do not work in all patients, and cause quite a few side effects.
Beta blockers work by "blocking" the normally stimulating effects of the adrenaline hormone in the heart. They also lower your heart rate and reduce the need for oxygen in your heart when you strain, which means your heart does not have to strain.
These medications have been used for over 30 years to treat high blood pressure, and are recommended as a first line of defense both in the United States and in international health standards.
In addition to being frequently ineffective, they are known to cause a number of serious side effects, including heart attack and stroke, type 2 diabetes and sexual dysfunction, just to name a few.
Given the dangerous paradigm of the medication, it is certainly prudent to look for safer or additional alternatives, yoga may offer some relief.
During the first three months of the study, patients' heart symptoms, blood pressure, heart rate levels, anxiety and depression, and overall quality of life were assessed and monitored. During the second phase, participants took yoga classes at least twice a week for three months, while monitoring their symptoms was ongoing.
At the end of the study, the number of times participants reported heart palpitations (confirmed by heart monitors) was halved. His average heart rate also dropped from an average of 67 beats per minute during the first three months to 61-62 beats per minute after yoga. Participants also reported feeling less anxious and depressed. Anxiety scores were reduced from an average of 34 (on a scale of 20-80) to an average of 25.
According to the authors:
"There was a significant decrease in heart rate and systolic and diastolic blood pressure before and after yoga... In patients with paroxysmal AF, yoga improved symptoms, arrhythmia burden, heart rate, blood pressure, scores anxiety and depression, and several areas of quality of life. "
Impact of Yoga on Your Mental Health
In related news, researchers at Duke University recently published a review of more than 100 studies that looked at the effect of yoga on mental health. The lead author, Dr. P. Murali Doraiswamy, professor of psychiatry and medicine at Duke University Medical Center told Time Magazine:
"Most people already know that yoga produces a kind of calming effect. Individually, people feel better after exercising. "Mentally, people feel calmer, more relaxed, perhaps more content. the time to see if we could gather [the literature] all the information ... to see if there was enough evidence that the benefits present in individual people could be used to help people with mental illness"
According to their results, yoga seems to have a positive effect on:
- Mild depression.
- Sleep problems.
- Schizophrenia (among patients on medication).
- ADHD (among patients on medication).
Some of the studies suggest that yoga may have a similar effect to antidepressants and psychotherapy, by influencing neurotransmitters and by increasing serotonin. It was also discovered that yoga reduces levels of inflammation, oxidative stress, blood lipids and growth factors. As reported by Time:
"Practicing yoga as a complementary treatment for mental disorders is not uncommon." Yoga is a feature of many veteran clubs across the country, backed by research funded by the Department of Veterans Affairs... The Huffington Post reported that many troops use yoga as a form of treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder, for example, training instructors on yoga techniques in Warriors at Ease, are specifically military personnel who impart training.A study published earlier this year month in 70 active duty soldiers, found that practicing yoga daily relieves anxiety and improves sleep.
Researchers say there is enough evidence to justify a wider study on the effects of yoga on mental health, and should be considered as part of the treatment for other disorders...
"What we are saying is that we still need to do more large-scale studies before we are ready to conclude that people with mental illness can practice yoga as a first-line treatment," says Doraiswamy.
"We are not saying that you cancel your Prozac and that you change it for yoga, we are saying that it is promising and potential.If a large national study is done, it could turn out that yoga is so good and can be a low cost alternative for people with unmet needs. " Meanwhile, he says it's no use adding yoga to existing treatments so that patients can take advantage of the potential benefits."
Will Exercise Be the Best "Drug" for Depression?
Some psychologists recommend exercise as a primary way to cure depression, anxiety and others. Research has shown time and again that patients following aerobic exercise regimens get improvement in their depression - improvements comparable to that of patients treated with medications. The results are really impressive if we consider that exercise is virtually free and can also provide many other health benefits.
Exercise not only relieves depressive symptoms, but also seems to prevent them from recurring. For example, a study by Duke University in the late 1990s divided patients with depression into three treatment groups:
- Those who only exercised.
- Those who exercised and took antidepressants.
- Those who only took antidepressants.
After six weeks, the medication-only group improved slightly compared to the other groups. However, after 10 months of follow-up, the only exercise group was the one with the highest remission rate and highest stability rate. In another study, which included 80 adults aged 20 to 45 years who were diagnosed with mild or moderate depression, the researchers only focused on exercise to treat the disease and found that:
Those who did low-intensity exercise for three to five days a week showed a 30 percent reduction in symptoms.
Participants who exercised flexibility and stretching exercises for 15 to 20 minutes three days a week on average had a decrease of 29 percent.
Yoga to Lose Weight and Maintain Health
The next video, featuring Arthur Boorman, a disabled Gulf War veteran, is perhaps one of the most inspirational yoga success stories I've ever seen. His wounds made him ill for 15 years, and doctors had told him he would never be able to walk without help again.Because of his injuries, he could not perform high impact exercises, but one day, he found an article about yoga, and the rest, as he says, is history...
If you have ever doubted the transformative ability of a low-impact exercise, such as yoga, I invite you to take a look at this video. It is a truly remarkable story. Not only did he start to lose weight fast, he also gained tremendous strength, balance and flexibility - to the point of showing that the doctors' diagnosis was wrong, since he was able to walk without help in less than a year!
Curiously, research published last year found that yoga has a beneficial effect on leptin, a hormone that plays a key role in regulating energy consumption and attrition. According to the authors, novice yoga practitioners had 36 percent higher leptin levels compared to experts, leading to the theory that regular yoga practice can benefit their health by altering leptin production and adiponectin:
"Leptin plays a pro-inflammatory role, adiponectin has anti-inflammatory properties. "Leptin was 36 percent higher among novices compared to experts. average ratio between diponectin and leptin was almost double that of beginners"
Insulin and resistance to leptin are linked to obesity, and impairment of its ability to transfer information to recipients that is the true core of most chronic degenerative diseases. Leptin tells the brain whether it is hungry or not, that it eats or makes more fat, if it reproduces, or (partly through insulin control) it participates in maintenance and repair. In summary, leptin is the way fat stores communicate with your brain in order to know the amount of energy available and, very important, what to do with it.
Therefore, leptin may be at the top of the food chain concerning metabolic importance and relevance to the disease. If leptin signaling works correctly.
When your fat stores are "full", this extra fat will cause an increase in the level of leptin, which tells your brain to stop feeling hungry, stop eating, stop storing fat and start burning some extra fat . Controlling hunger is one of the main (but not the only) way in which leptin controls energy storage.
Hunger is a very powerful, ancient and ingrained impulse that if stimulated enough, will make you eat and store more energy. The only way to eat less in the long run is to not be hungry, and the only way to do that is to control the hormones that regulate hunger, the main one being leptin.
Help for the Integral Exercise Program
Yoga and other restorative exercises, polish and strengthen the body, improve circulation and oxygen flow, give you energy for the day and help you relax at night. However, although recent studies support the use of yoga to improve atrial fibrillation and psychiatric disorders (along with many health benefits, such as promoting flexibility and promoting major muscles, relieves back pain, and more), I think it's important to incorporate a variety of exercises into your routine to get optimal health outcomes.
Ideally, you will implement a comprehensive fitness program that also includes anaerobic and aerobic endurance training, as well as flexibility exercises that improve your core muscles - such as yoga.
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