Over the next few months, we will be adding more things to our website for you to enjoy, including more articles, videos and other information.

Our first new feature is an interview with Michael Wohl, the President of bodywisdom media. In this interview he offers some insights into yoga and health in general.

CLICK TO READ INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL WOHL

Please tell me about some of the physical benefits of yoga?

The physical benefits are numerous. New medical research is coming out daily about how yoga helps us physically. The most obvious, most external examples are the increases in both strength and flexibility. This helps in both the healing and prevention of injury and disease. So many injuries occur due to a lack of range of motion. Just like a rubber band looses its function and strength when it gets dry and hard, our body goes through a similar process. We were not made to sit on couches, at desks and cars. No where in our evolutionary past did our bodies need to adapt to this modern day scenario of sitting as we do. We are asking new things of our bodies and our bodies don't particularly like it. We loose strength in our backs, flexibility in our legs and hips.

Unhealthy torques are exerted on our skeletal-muscular system due to these imbalances that causes the physical breakdown of certain system (most commonly perhaps is lower back pain, ie tight hamstrings cause tilt in pelvis, which weakens lower back, etc). When you combine this with certain physical activities (ie. golf. tennis, running, etc) the load on the system can be the straw that breaks the casual athlete's back (or at least causes some injury).

Yoga also balances and strengthens the major systems of the body in a healthy way, ie cardio - pulmonary, nervous system, etc. It seems that not a day goes by that new research uncovers additional benefits.

Moreover, it is estimated that 70-80% of all doctors visits are stress related. Yoga obviously helps on this front as well. In a society where our sympathetic nervous system is forever on and taxed, you strengthens the parasympathetic nervous system and helps with what Herbert Benson of Harvard termed "The Relaxation Response" (which is in some ways opposite of the well-known Fight or Flight Response.

So while yoga externally helps with range of motion and core strength issues, it equally keeps our internal chemistry/nervous system properly balanced so that our heart remains healthy and our arteries don't harden. The implications and benefits of this have been studied for diseases such as Asthma, Diabetes, and heart disease.

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