World Yoga Day 2017: Why Men Should Do Yoga Everyday; Start Today

Benefits of Yoga for Men

1. Stronger heart health

Yoga, particularly the Ashtanga branch is effective for challenging your heart, working out your abs and losing calories. It also increases your breathing volume, which means that more oxygen is supplied to your body when you work out. Ashtanga involves continual and intensive exercises that will make you sweat buckets.
 

World Yoga Day 2017: Ashtanga branch is effective for challenging your heart
Photo Credit: iStock

2. No need to compete

The envy and misery of comparing yourself to someone else while you workout in the gym or in office can be damaging to your personality. But when you do yoga, your sole centre of attention is yourself, your spirit, your body and your breathing.

3. Vent your stress

When you do yoga, your parasympathetic nervous system gets less activated. This lowers the production of molecules that regulate the triggering of stress in your body. Additionally, the deep abdominal breathing exercises you do while doing yoga will make you focus on the more important things in your life than the immediate worries you have.

4. Build your muscles

Yoga helps in building muscle strength through hypertrophy. This basically means that your muscle grows because the cells are enlarged in the body, because of yoga. Not just this, doing yoga gives our bodies a more balanced growth which means that the generally ignored parts of your body like the armpit are also exercised.

Why doing yoga daily is important

Imagine lifting the same weighted dumbbells every day when you go to the gym. Predictably, there wouldn't be much muscle growth unless you progress to higher weights. Similarly, not doing the asana every day will mean that you start from level 0 every time you perform it.

In yoga, your flexibility and the general ability to complete a pose properly increases as you perform it every day. You also spend lesser time in doing a pose and with greater holding time, the benefit is achieved faster.

This is not to say that you won't get any positives out of practicing it two times a week, but that the benefits of the third day of practice after 2 consecutive days will be exponentially more.