Yoga For Sore Muscles – Why Yoga Is Great For Sore Muscles

Yoga is great for sore muscles. Often, you’ll find yourself suffering from Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS) a day or so after a hard strength training session.

You’ll find it hard to walk up stairs… sit in chairs… or even get out of bed sometimes. The best thing to do in situations like this often feels like the worst — you have to move your body around!

Why are your muscles sore?

You muscles have experienced acute trauma. And now they’re sending off a pain signal to your brain because they’re trying to warn you not to damage them anymore.

The old advice used to be “wait for the pain to go away before exercising again”. Now, we know that it’s actually beneficial to do a LITTLE bit of the same exercise(s) that made you sore because when you use those muscle groups and put your body through those movement patterns you’re forcing nutrient rich, healing blood into those muscles. This speeds recovery (provided you don’t overdue it).

Why Yoga For Sore Muscles?

Yoga usually starts slowly and you go at your own pace. Your instructor puts you through various different positions and gives you options to increase the difficulty of each of them. You push, pull, stretch, reach, slightly strain and flex your body into different poses.

All the while you focus on your breathe. Deep breathing has so many benefits it’s ridiculous. Think of all the benefits of meditation, and the whole time you’re moving your body into relaxing and sometimes challenging positions and stances.

It’s great. There’s even a version where you do the whole yoga class inside some type of “sweat room” where the heat is turned up really high. I’d LOVE to do this but I haven’t yet.

But basically, all this controlled stretching for a minimum of 45 minutes and focusing on controlling your breathing helps your mind to calm down, focus and your muscles to relax. Your joints and muscles feel a LOT less sore after a yoga session. Try it!

More Reasons To Do Yoga!

Yoga is great all by itself. Here’s just a few of the benefits of yoga…

• Cute girls – you’ll often find lotsa women go to classes
• Better Flexibility – different positions help you to stretch out your muscles and joints in ways you’ve probably never used them.
• Massaging of Internal Organs – According to yogis, the different poses massage different internal organs which is good for your energy levels and overall health.
• Detoxification – It’s also thought that the massaging of internal organs, and external muscle/joint stimulation helps to flush out toxins from your body.

I go to yoga classes at my gym. I’d like to find one of those “sweat yoga” places and if I ever do I’ll let you know how it is. Until then, there’s more than enough reasons to give Yoga a try for sore muscles.