By Pamela Herrington

You know you should be practicing yoga, everybody else certainly is! And it’s no wonder, considering that the health benefits of yoga are practically endless. One study indicated that a couple of months of yoga classes can have such a significant impact on your brain that you’ll be calmer, more focused, have a better memory and find it easier to learn. (It makes one wonder how many children would benefit from yoga to ease the symptoms of ADD).

And those are just the benefit to the brain. The physical benefits of yoga are equally impressive. You have probably know intuitively that yoga will increase flexibility, improve your posture, increase strength in all major muscle groups, and improve your balance.

But did you also know that yoga also produces a number of bio-chemical responses in the body? For example, practicing yoga can decrease the amount of catecholamines which are produced in the adrenal glands during stress. By lowering levels of hormone neurotransmitters, such as dopamine, norepinephrine, and epinephrine, the yoga student feels an increased feeling of calm and well-being. By boosting oxygen levels to the brain, yoga is likely to reduce anxiety and depression.

The heart benefits of yoga are well known. Yoga has been credited with lowering cholesterol and triglycerides, and slows the heart rate which reduces the risk of heart disease, high blood pressure and stroke. In fact, Dean Ornish, who is famous for his program to reverse heart disease using lifestyle habits rather than surgery, teaches a combination vegetarian diet combined with yoga.

There are current medical studies cited at webMD that study the effects of yoga when used as a secondary treatment for all types of medical conditions including clinical depression and heart disease. It is already known that yoga can reduce the symptoms of asthma, back pain and arthritis.

One of the author’s favorite benefits of yoga is to reduce the appearance of cellulite. It turns out that by stretching the muscles length-wise, less cellulite builds around the muscle. That benefit alone justifies a couple of yoga classes each week!

The author is a yoga fanatic and freelance writer on the topics of health and fitness. She has several articles on yoga published at WomensFitnessToday.com, a website that often helpful information on women’s fitness and weight loss.