Another benefit of yoga is mental.

Yoga clears your mind and helps you focus your attention. – During your practice, you are focusing your attention on your breath and turning inward. This concentration allows you to withdraw from distractions in your environment. A significant benefit of yoga practice is that you can take this ability to focus your attention into every aspect of your life. You can be fully present with whatever you are doing instead of worrying about tomorrow or regretting yesterday. Not only will your actions be more productive, you can also enjoy them in a greater way.

Yoga helps reduces stress. - Deep breathing helps reduce hormones that are released when you are feeling overwhelmed, overloaded, and frazzled. The internal focus that accompanies poses helps create a relaxation response in your body.

Yoga can help release stuck emotions. – Often stuck emotions find their way into our bodies. Remember, your mind and body are one, and if you are suppressing any painful emotions, you will often experience that as pain in some part of your body. A benefit of yoga is that by breathing deeply into places in your body that hold tension, you can help release emotions that may be buried there. You can then examine these emotions and let go of those that do not serve you.

Also, as you take your body past limits of where it has been, you start to feel that you can move past other limitations in your life as well.

You gain a sense of peace and tranquility. - Most yoga practices include some time for meditation. Regular meditation helps your mind reach a state of inner calm. It helps you gain control over your thinking instead of being at mercy of wayward thoughts.

As you can see, benefit of yoga has far reaching effects in every area of your life. Maintain a regular yoga practice, and you will see for yourself, how yoga can benefit you too.

In addition, some balance postures such as Tree Pose and Shoulderstand require enormous muscle control in order to prevent you from falling over. This helps to build and strengthen your muscles.

Muscle Balance – In weight training, you isolate a specific muscle as you perform an exercise and this leads to a short, tightened muscle. The muscles you develop during yoga are more likely to be elongated, because while you are strengthening them, you are simultaneously lengthening them. You also do not focus on an isolated muscle, but actively recruit smaller muscle groups as well. You truly work your entire body when you practice yoga.

Practicing yoga can help realign your muscles, so they are more balanced. Since you are not overworking any specific muscle group, you are less likely to get injured.

In addition to all its other benefits, yoga can help you improve muscle fitness. Whether you choose to use it as your primary means of strength training or you want it to supplement your other exercises, yoga can help your muscles grow fit, balanced, and strong.