The Flexibility benefits of Yoga

Maintaining flexibility as you age is so important, isn't it?

We're all about yoga but we hear people say all the time “I can't do yoga because I'm not flexible enough”. We are here to tell you the story that one yoga teacher used to say, “saying you're not flexible enough to do yoga is like saying you're not dirty enough to have a bath”.  The point of yoga is to improve your flexibility and maintain what you've got. It doesn't matter where you start.

Any good, trained yoga will support you to improve your flexibility, you don't need to be able to touch your toes, because you can use blocks, or take your feet out wider, or bend your knees to bring the floor a little closer to you. A great yoga teacher will be able to meet you where you're at and to improve your flexibility and mobility over time.

Right now, if you are thinking I'll never be able to do that pose, to touch the floor or balance in space but you can use the wall or use a chair. Yoga poses can be modified, supported, and propped to enable you to have an experience of a pose that would otherwise be too challenging.  

We know how good yoga is. But it must be a habit.  

Tip number one – consistent regular practice

To improve your flexibility and even to maintain what you've got you need to be doing a little bit every day, or at least regularly (three times) during the week. There's that regularity of practicing consistently so you're moving your muscles in a different way. The first time you do yoga, your muscles will go “I don't like this”, even the second time or third, fourth, fifth time your muscles won’t like it. But after you do it repeatedly and consistently over a month, at least two or three times a week, you will be able to start noticing how you are reversing those flexibility issues that you might have been having with stiffness and soreness.

You can maybe even reverse the aging process. Now, wouldn't that be good? If you're in your 60s or 70s or 40s or 50s, you've got the opportunity to do yoga and improve. Because yoga is nothing more than a practice.  Yoga is a practice, and it connects and integrates you to yourself. Through the practice, through those daily flexibility stretches, those daily flexibility routines, you start to progress yourself and win back or take back some of the aging that happens through lack of mobility and lack of flexibility.

Tip number two - yoga helps with your daily life

 Yoga helps you to be able to reach for that glass up on the high shelf, without you getting a crack in your neck, or a sore back. Yoga helps you to tie your shoelaces up, be comfortable walking up steps, and on uneven ground as you age. Because the types of moves that you do with yoga are for your whole body. Yoga allows you to move your whole body and helps with the everyday life as it's functional movement, where you are lengthening your muscles, toning your muscles, you get strong as well as flexible.   

When you start to age you start to lose your strength, you start to lose your mobility and you start to lose your flexibility because everything starts to atrophy. Yoga reverses that, keeps you moving but it's functional exercise. Bodybuilders and people into heavy gym workouts, can still end up with the bad back and with the inability to

Stretch. When they come to a yoga class, we see in their faces they are in excruciating pain because they're so tightly bound up and they're slowly losing the functional ability to tie their shoelaces, or to get out of bed without hurting themselves.   

You might have aging parents or grandparents, or you might see people who walk flat-footed, they're shuffling and not lifting their legs, it’s those sorts of things through the practice of daily flexibility exercises that yoga can help with.

Tip number three – your breath helps

Your breath helps to get the blood flowing back into your body and enables the oxygenation of the whole system. When you are breathing well you flood your body with oxygenated blood and take away all the impurities by transporting them back through to the waste system to get rid of them out of them.

Yoga improves your breathing. In the practice we teach you to fully allow your whole lung and heart motion to work properly. Most of us are only using 10 percent of our lungs capacity and yoga teaches you to take a deeper, fuller breath. Your breath is your vitality and lifeforce, so it is important to breath deeply to support your flexibility and mobility.

Tip number four – yoga maintains spine health as you age

Yoga teaches you to stand without being crunched or hunched over. Most of the yoga teachers we know their spine their spine health has maintained over the long term. I read in a yoga book once that the reason people who practice yoga appear so vital, young and vibrant as they age is because they're maintaining the flexibility and mobility of their spine. The spine health is maintained, which is essential for general everyday movements – twisting, turning, bending forwards and backwards etc.

 While we are upright beings although we spend a lot of time seated and driving and not in the right position to maintain our posture easily. Yoga strengthens your core stabilisation muscles and enables you to maintain a better posture.

Tip number five – start with 10 minutes a day

 Starting out as a beginner you could do 10 to 15 minutes finding new flexibility, improving your balance, deepening your breath, standing up tall using your feet and it will move you in the right direction.

 We're not saying you must do yoga for an hour a day. We are suggesting that maybe you start with ten minutes of yoga if you could do that every day or at least every second day you will notice a difference. Our daily practice is on average about 30-45 minutes a day. Some days we could do two hours of practice, but we can only do that because of our regular daily practice.

 Sometimes just saying you will do five minutes of gentle yoga will lead to a thirty-minute practice. Because once you get moving it feels good. The main thing is to do some daily yoga for flexibility and just notice how it changes your experience or your state afterwards.

 Ultimately while the practice of yoga is so good for you physically, it does elevate your mood, it shifts your state, it energizes your whole system and that vibrancy of life floods back in. It might not happen straight away, but it will happen. But, going back to tip number one, it has to be a daily flexibility routine. 

Yoga to transform flexibility course

 If you're really interested Yoga to Transform offers a flexibility course which you can purchase for three months or for a lifetime access. It's designed as a 28-day course, with a week-by-week theme and weekly yoga class over four weeks that focuses on different parts of your body, it includes guided meditation, bonus practices and loads of tips and tricks to help you live your life in a better way to improve your flexibility and mobility.

 This course is for beginners.

 We hope you no longer use the excuse that you're not flexible enough for yoga, because that's your mind holding you back from a whole new way of experiencing living. You can live well when you improve and maintain your flexibility.  

Given it is Audrie’s birthday month we are offering a special course price. Sign up for our flexibility course before 31 July 2022 and when you buy the lifetime access course for $199, we will include you in the Yoga to Transform Flexibility group coaching cohort that begins 1 August 2022.

 What people are saying about our Yoga to Transform courses:

 “It was really unexpectedly transformational, way beyond just getting a good night's sleep” – Dinah

 “I thoroughly recommend the flexibility course - helps so much with the stress and strains of life!” – Jacqui

“I've learnt more in the last 45 minutes than in the past 10 plus years of trying out yoga” - Alison

 Join our Facebook group “Yoga to Transform” to participate in our free monthly Satsang occurring on 30 June at 8pm – The easy ways Yoga improves your Flexibility - June Satsang: Easy ways yoga improves your flexibility | Facebook

 To sign up for the Yoga to Transform flexibility course - Yoga To Transform

To download our free ebook ‘The five flexibility habits that work’ - Free eBook - Yoga to Transform Flexibility

We offer free yoga classes on our Facebook page each week, but if you visit our YouTube channel 'Yoga to Transform' you will find archived yoga classes and weekly Thankful Thursday talks - Yoga To Transform - YouTube