I’ve loved yoga from the moment I first tried it years ago. There’s just something that instills such a sense of peace and tranquility in the moves, and there’s something about it that also makes you feel strong, but not bulky as well. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not a super yogi who can bend her body in the most insane poses and hold it forever or anything like that.

And I certainly am not capable of some of the pretzel twisting moves that some more advanced yoga practitioners can do without thought since I do have a sensitive back, but I’m also not inflexible because I do try to normally include this in my fitness regimen, if not once a week, than once every two weeks roughly. It would be more if I didn’t have a pesky 9-5 job, but I do so that does limite the time I can do it since I work out a work quite a bit in the gym and yoga doesn’t fit into that regimen unfortunately.

Another huge benefit, especially for women, with yoga, may be that it can make women walk and be taller. A frequent phenomena for women, especially as they get older, is that they tend to “shrink”, or at least appear to do so because their bones and discs in between their vertebrae tend to wear away due to lack of calcium and women’s genetic inheritance of weakening bones as we get older.

We’ve all seen the “little old ladies”, kind of hunched over, walking very slowly. This is what we want to avoid. We want to stay walking tall, with no curvature in our spines, and yoga reportedly may be able to help us doing that longer into our later years.

Now, here’s the great news coming out of a cool little study that was done on what yoga can do for older women. Women who took a nine week yoga course reported that they could walke taller, with less effort, and had much better balance after taking the yoga sessions for nine weeks.

That’s another thing I left out is that yoga is awesome for balance because the poses really make you focus on your core strength and they kind of force the body to balance itself - that’s why you always feel a little wobbly when you first start yoga and are a beginner, because it involves so much balancing, which not everyone is used to.

Not only were they reported to have better balance and walking more easily, but they also gained an average of a centimeter of height, which researchers attributed to them standing more upright without crouching or bending. Adding to the benefits, the women, who were involved in the program that was made especially for older women, could walk with longer strides, walk faster, and reported having more confidence in their balance abilities. They could also stand much longer on one leg, indicating a better sense of balance.

Wow, reading all this makes me want to pick up and go do yoga right now! And I’m only in my early thirties. Ladies, it’s also important to drink your milk, or get some other good sources of calcium if you’re not a fan of milk like me, like maybe leafy greens such as spinach or a good calcium supplement.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 19th, 2008 at 9:12 am and is filed under Workout Regimens. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.