by Kayleigh Miller Yoga offers a multitude of benefits to practitioners, from improvements in stress related health issues* to improved joint movement and strength, and potential changes in behaviors**. Both yoga and other movement styles can have a profound positive effect on the relationship between the brain, the body, and the somatosensory experience. To start [...]
brain
This is some much-needed fantastic news you can share with all your friends and family…and, no, it has nothing to do with putting your feet over your head, Uncle Charlie. A recent study found that yoga, yes yoga, is better at keeping your memory sharp than all those puzzles and brain training apps you download [...]
Can meditation change your brain longterm? Can anyone prove it? A recent study found out what happens when you teach one group of people mindfulness practices and give the other group a totally fake program. Published in Biological Psychiatry, the study involved 35 men and women who were unemployed and stressed out looking for jobs. Half [...]
Stretching Is In Your Brain (PART 2): What is the Value of Flexibility Without Strength?
in
YogaDork Ed
In Part 1 of my “Stretching Is In Your Brain” series, we looked at some updated information on what happens physiologically inside of us when we stretch. To re-cap, new science is revealing that the widely-held belief that we physically grow our muscles longer during a stretch is inaccurate. Instead, flexibility is controlled by our nervous system, which determines how far it will allow us to move into a stretch based on how safe it perceives our body to be in that range of motion.
In yoga, we tend to place a lot of emphasis on stretching as a means toward more flexibility. But what actually happens in our body when we stretch? Most of us envision our bodies as consisting of play-doh like tissues that we pull on and make longer through stretching, but new science is revealing to us a model of stretching that is much more complex, dynamic, and fascinating than what has previously been imagined. And it turns out that thinking of our bodies in this older “play-doh” like version may be counterproductive and can lead to a number of injuries and structural problems resulting from our yoga practice.
Grey or gray matter. However you spell it, if you meditate, oh, it’s a-changin’. And that’s what a team of Harvard researchers is telling us. The most astounding part? Our brain’s gray matter can change in shape and size (for the better, mind you) in just eight weeks of practicing meditation. Signs of improvement showed [...]
This is just about the coolest, yogadorkiest meditation video we’ve had the pleasure of discovering on the interwebs. Sure, meditation helps us relax, focus, and feel good, but did you know about all the fascinating science stuff? In just 3 minutes there are more juicy science-y tidbits in this cute video than you could possibly remember [...]
A little bone for the yogis in the age old yoga versus exercise debate? A small new study shows 20 minutes of yoga beats out 20 minutes of aerobic exercise for the old thinking noodle. (That’s your brain!) Researchers at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign studied “The Acute Effects of Yoga on Executive Function“, or as [...]
What is it that meditation can’t help us do? Or how about another rhetorical question: The brain is a funny thing, isn’t it? We try to stuff it with good things, we are unable to undo any unintentional stuffing (for the most part) and then we have to tell it to stop talking to us [...]
