Ever walked into a room full of yoga teachers and suddenly felt to pull in your tummy? As you hold your breath and tense every muscle in your core, you start to wonder about the possible link between yoga and amazing abs. And you are very right! A regular yoga practice offers many benefits for your abdominals, as well as your entire core.
What fitness gurus refer to as the “core” of the body comprises your abdominals and back – the part of the body providing support to the pelvis and the spine which gives us our posture and facilitates movement. Core strengthening is critical - not just to good fitness – but more importantly, the ability to move freely and breathe right. Here’s why a regular yoga practice is good news for your core.
- Making Gravity work for you – Yoga strengthens your core by challenging the body to support its weight in various orientations to gravity. By doing certain standing poses such as the Half Moon and Triangle, the torso muscles, including the obliques and the transversus abdominus, contract to hold up the weight of the torso which is parallel to the floor. You get added benefit when you rotate the torso in these poses, forcing the obliques to hold up the weight of the body during the motion!
- All together now – Machine exercises at the gym have their benefits but they can be quite limiting. Say you want to strengthen your biceps – the machine isolates your biceps, supports the rest of the muscles in your body and challenges the biceps to make them stronger. But by the end of the workout, you’ve strengthened the biceps in isolation and not in tandem with a group of muscles. This sort of training may be good for some things but it has also been shown to increase the risk of injury by not training different muscles to work together to perform functional tasks. Yoga offers a more functional approach to muscle strengthening by challenging various muscle groups to work together.
- Too much of a good thing – Grandma always said that too much of a good thing is good for nothing, and she was certainly right about that when it comes to abdominal training. Excessive abdominal training can be counterproductive as the abdominal muscles tend to become shorter over time, resulting in back muscles that are weak and overstretched. Not only can this create a hunched over posture, it can also negatively impact one’s breathing. Yoga, on the other hand, promotes lengthening of the abdominal muscles by working the core as a whole – that is front and back.
A regular yoga practice will boost your core strength; and maybe even give you those amazing abs you’ve been dreaming of!
Source:
http://yogauonline.com
What fitness gurus refer to as the “core” of the body comprises your abdominals and back – the part of the body providing support to the pelvis and the spine which gives us our posture and facilitates movement. Core strengthening is critical - not just to good fitness – but more importantly, the ability to move freely and breathe right. Here’s why a regular yoga practice is good news for your core.
- Making Gravity work for you – Yoga strengthens your core by challenging the body to support its weight in various orientations to gravity. By doing certain standing poses such as the Half Moon and Triangle, the torso muscles, including the obliques and the transversus abdominus, contract to hold up the weight of the torso which is parallel to the floor. You get added benefit when you rotate the torso in these poses, forcing the obliques to hold up the weight of the body during the motion!
- All together now – Machine exercises at the gym have their benefits but they can be quite limiting. Say you want to strengthen your biceps – the machine isolates your biceps, supports the rest of the muscles in your body and challenges the biceps to make them stronger. But by the end of the workout, you’ve strengthened the biceps in isolation and not in tandem with a group of muscles. This sort of training may be good for some things but it has also been shown to increase the risk of injury by not training different muscles to work together to perform functional tasks. Yoga offers a more functional approach to muscle strengthening by challenging various muscle groups to work together.
- Too much of a good thing – Grandma always said that too much of a good thing is good for nothing, and she was certainly right about that when it comes to abdominal training. Excessive abdominal training can be counterproductive as the abdominal muscles tend to become shorter over time, resulting in back muscles that are weak and overstretched. Not only can this create a hunched over posture, it can also negatively impact one’s breathing. Yoga, on the other hand, promotes lengthening of the abdominal muscles by working the core as a whole – that is front and back.
A regular yoga practice will boost your core strength; and maybe even give you those amazing abs you’ve been dreaming of!
Source:
http://yogauonline.com
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