The meta-study said that yoga has variously been found to beat other alternative interventions when it comes to improving balance, fatigue, flexibility, menopausal symptoms, chronic pain, sleep disturbance, stress, cholesterol levels and quality of life.
If you engage in regular aerobic exercise or yoga (or both), you no doubt understand the importance of good health. Americans have been doing yoga – a low-impact, highly meditative form of physical and mental reconnection – for decades, and now researchers are striving to determine just how good for you this subtle system is.
A literature review published in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine explored the outcomes of dozens of previous studies, all of which had weighed the value of yoga against that of typical exercise, as well as of other physical interventions.
The authors, who hail from the University of Maryland, strove to see how yoga-based treatments measure up to their commonplace counterparts, and the results were fairly stark.
"Studies comparing the effects of yoga and exercise seem to indicate that, in both healthy and diseased populations, yoga may be as effective as or better than exercise at improving a variety of health-related outcome measures," the team stated.
They noted that in some reports, yoga conferred benefits similar to those of exercises like walking, running, stationary cycling, aerobics and even African dance. In many more, yoga was even better than these activities for a good, healthy life.
The meta-study said that yoga has variously been found to beat other alternative interventions when it comes to improving balance, fatigue, flexibility, menopausal symptoms, chronic pain, sleep disturbance, stress, cholesterol levels and quality of life.
These benefits may explain why nearly 16 million American practice yoga, meditation and tai chi, according to a survey conducted by the Yoga Journal. The source stated that among non-practitioners, an estimated 18.3 million people stated that they were interested in a holistic mind-body system as a way to stay mentally and physically healthy.
Of that group, 9 million concluded that they would try yoga within the year, the news source added.
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Tags: good health, Good health habits, good healthy life, importance of good health
