Are all these "yoga for..." REALLY yoga's benefits?

What benefits do you get from yoga?

I hear this question often from beginners right through to yogis who seem to have a need for everything to have a specific benefit.

Fair enough. We need to have an appropriate ROI (return of investment) for the effort and money we put into anything, really.

This mindset of needing an ROI has led to the health, wellness, and fitness industry to parse out all of its myriad of modalities. Let's take yoga, for example. There's yoga for, well, fill in the blank and you'll likely name something that actually exists; you know "Yoga for___".

In marketing terms, it's called niching. The unspoken mantra of which is "niche down and they will come". Nothing wrong about this. In fact, it creates space for our audience, our tribes, if you will, to find us and hopefully stick with us because we speak their language and they identify with us.

The problem is, all of this "yoga for___" implies that poses, movements and sequences only target certain areas or, conversely, give you only a limited number of benefits. Ergo, even the amazing benefits of yoga is niched down.

Don't get me wrong; of course a hip-opening pose like Hanumanasana (Monkey God pose / front split) will strongly target the hip joint and introduce articulation. But to say or even imply it's the only benefit is a disservice; Hanumanasana requires strength from the upper body to help us into and out of the pose.

But those are just the physical benefits.

Another example is meditation and pranayama (breathwork). These have been marketed as beneficial for stress-relief. While true, these practices are commonly offered by themselves with little to no physical work.

This niching and marketing of yoga becomes a cycle of what yoga teachers offer and what customers/students expect, and ultimately partitions out the benefits of yoga.

The simple truth about "yoga benefits"

Here's the simple truth - the yoga flow (or class, if you like) addresses our physical, mental and emotional beings at the same time, and all other, more specific benefits also contribute to this three-scaled balance.

Here's what I tell my in-studio class:

While the yoga class is physical, that is just 1/3 of the equation. The other 2/3 are the mental and emotional benefits which interplay with the physical at every moment of the flow.

Everything else - stress relief, hip opening, and everything you've ever heard of in practically all yoga marketing - fall under these three.

It's that simple.

How to access the mental benefits

The mental benefits come from the engagement of the mind through concentration and observation. When we engage in Active Meditation (observing while moving) we train the mind to create an internal pin-point focus while broadening the awareness to what is happening externally without interacting with it.

This focus also keeps us safe because we are aware and engaged in our movement. When we sharpen our mind, we can objectively choose the options of poses appropriate to our current situation and move accordingly.

How to access the emotional benefits

The emotional benefits are connected with the breath, and I'm not only talking about pranayama (or the yogic breath) and certainly not as its own practice. Further, pranayama isn't the only breathwork that's available to you. Mindful breathing, like the Mad Yogi Shape-breathing, can give you the same benefits.

So how does this work? Deep, controlled breathing settles our emotions because it gives us another internal focus point. Our basic Circular Breath prevents us from holding our breath, especially during poses that tend to encourage this like twists and balances. And as we know, holding your breath usually leads to light-headedness and even falling unconscious - we don't want that!

Also, controlled breathing triggers the Parasympathetic Nervous System, our rest and digest state, as opposed to the fight, flight or freeze state when the Sympathetic Nervous System is triggered.

You've probably heard of the "nervous system soothing yoga", both as a "type"  of yoga or a marketed benefit, right? This is it.

Breathing = settled (soothed) nervous system, and when the nervous system is settled, we feel relieved of tension and stress. Simple.

How to access the physical benefits…better

Let's close the circle.

There's nothing wrong about wanting "hip opening", "chest opening", "more strength", "more flexibility", "correcting tight hip flexors", "addressing tight shoulders", "tight hamstrings", etc. I use quotations because these are what I hear from my own classes and from, again, all the yoga marketing floating in the internet aether.

But, I believe it is an injustice to ourselves to limit our mindsets into these small boxes of yoga benefits. Remember that our body functions as an inter-related, inter-connected system. When we lengthen or stretch one portion, contraction will necessarily happen in another. This is called the agonist (contracting or working muscles), antagonist (lengthening or releasing muscles), and synergistic (not directly the main contracting or lengthening muscles but supports the agonist and antagonist muscles) activation or engagement of the muscles.

I won't go too in-depth with anatomy, but for example, we can use Warrior 1 to lengthen out the iliopsoas (hip flexors) muscles by engaging the back leg. The gluteal muscle contracts, the iliopsoas lengthens, and all the other muscles of the leg synergises - the muscles of the back of the leg generally engages and the front muscles stretch.

The torso muscles, in our Mad Yogi Hug & Lift, will also have to synergise through contraction to hold us upright. Then depending on how you want to position your arms (side note: yes, you can change the arm position in Warrior 1 and in basically any pose) the upper back and upper chest muscles will also synergise with each other. For example, if your arms are up, the back muscles (agonists) will contract, the upper chest muscles (antagonist) will lengthen, and the muscles of the shoulders and arms also activate and synergises, so they're not just dangling in air!

I find myself always reminding my class to include their whole body in the pose, all the way through to their fingers. No part of the body is slack. Even if what we are looking for is to just lengthen your hamstrings, there's so much more your body benefits.

An important part of this shift in how we move is how we think.

Concentrating and engaging in what is happening on the mat sharpens our focus and awareness. This in turn helps us actually do the work, i.e. engaging your muscles, and making informed choices via listening to the options given to you and assessing what you want or can do (conversely, not want or can't do).

Sharpening your mind in this way also keeps you safe because you are choosing pose modifications that are appropriate to you at any given time.

Breathing through all these helps oxygenate the blood and fuel the body. And because controlled, deep breathing triggers the Parasympathetic Nervous System, we come into a relaxed state even during a physical activity. This helps sooth the nervous system, settle the emotions, and in turn, helps us find our peace in the pose and in the flow.

The whole experience becomes meditative, serene and relaxing, giving us a sense of coming home to our own body - a sense of rediscovering ourselves.

To sum it up -

Yoga is a practice of finding yourself and a journey to wholeness.

I will admit that all these "yoga for" works well for the clicks, so yes, I do it too.Shocker.

They are descriptive and immediately addresses the "pain points"  that people have.

This helps you - all the yoga teachers' various tribes - to decide whose video to click on, whose course to take, whose yoga content to consume. So, this is all ok.

But I stick to my point - the sense of wholeness is the benefit of yoga. It's not just to open the hips, or gain flexibility, or take a magic pill to dispel all the stress in your life.

If we shift our mindset that this wholeness comes from the trifecta of physical, mental and emotional practice during any yoga class, specifically during a flow class, then it doesn't really matter if the class was labelled as "yoga for___". You'll still get the benefits you need, whatever that is.

Have a think.

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