A practice of yoga helps you build strength, endurance and a healthy body. It also increases your self-awareness, and releases your potential.
Taking small steps, seeing progress and sticking with it is how confidence is built. Here are a few tips to help you get started.
Breathing
Breathing is an integral part of all yoga practices – from movement and meditation to sitting and resting – and the right breathing techniques can make all the difference in how you feel. It keeps you present in the moment, enabling you to concentrate on each pose and move effortlessly through it, Kyle Michaud tells Elite Daily over email.
He says that a focus on breath control (pranayama) can also reduce stress and induce relaxation, helping you to achieve a more centered, focused state. Plus, it can also promote a healthy metabolism and balanced hormones, which are essential to a quality night’s sleep.
Ideally, your breath should be even and rhythmic. This will prevent pauses in the inhalation and exhalation cycle, and will ensure that you get the most oxygen from each breath.
Alignment
Alignment is the key to getting the most out of your yoga practice. It helps ensure safety, maximizes the benefits of each pose, and fosters a connection with your body.
Functional alignment focuses on biomechanics of the joints and muscles to optimize performance. It also enables the body to stretch and open safely while minimizing wear and tear on the joints and tissues.
Aesthetic alignment, on the other hand, is concerned with creating certain angles and idealist poses with the body that are considered beautiful. This can be achieved through a combination of visual lines, but can also come from a sense of alignment that is more about how you feel in the pose rather than how it looks.
Many common alignment mistakes can be corrected, but establishing optimal alignment as early as possible is important for the health of your body. This means using a variety of props to support safe positioning, modifying postures to match your body’s capabilities in a way that reduces the risk of injury, and cultivating awareness to how you’re positioned so that you can get feedback from your teacher on whether you’re aligned properly or not.
Patience
Patience is the ability to remain composed and balanced in situations when you feel like things aren’t going your way. It’s a quality that’s vital to developing a strong mind-body connection, and practicing yoga can help you practice this skill more often.
A good first step to developing patience is to set a goal and work towards it. For example, instead of committing to an hour-long session, set small attainable goals: five or ten minutes of practice, at regular intervals.
The key to achieving these goals is to be fully present in each moment and to focus on breathing naturally during your yoga session. Breathing properly will ground you more into your body and will also help you go deeper into poses and hold them for longer periods of time. This will make your practice more effective and lead to greater benefits in your life.
Commitment
Commitment is the ability to make and keep a promise. Some commitments are large, like marriage, but others are small, like staying after school for a study group.
Committed people tend to be determined and hardworking. They’re willing to sacrifice their comforts and pleasures to reach their goals. They’re also able to bear infinite fortitude and keep going when things get tough.
When making a commitment, it’s important to make it clear and specific. If you don’t, you may find yourself rethinking or questioning it.
You can practice commitment through dedication and intention during your yoga practice. Dedication is a conscious decision to send positive energy to someone or something outside of yourself that inspires you to stay committed to your practice.