Yoga For Couch Potatoes - Our Starting Lines Are Not All In The Same Place. Yoga As A Health Preventive And Cure

Being as physically fit as possible is an important part of emergency preparedness. If you are very out of shape, don't give up. Everyone has to start somewhere when they begin anything. 


Yoga has a lot of extraordinary health benefits that you probably wouldn't even believe until you try them and see for yourself. Yoga, unlike weight lifting, running, etc. has a great beneficial effect on internal organs. I have read old books about Yoga that have tables listing exactly what organs are benefited by particular exercises and how and why.

This post is not for the purpose of either telling you about those benefits to your internal organs or how to do the yoga exercises. I am only going to tell you why you might want to learn more and try it for yourself.

If your body is very out of shape, or you have problems moving or are obese, those problems are not a barrier to you being able to do yoga.

You do not have to immediately become a human pretzel to benefit from yoga. It is enough to do the best you can to go toward reaching a yoga position. The use of belts or towels to hold yourself in a position that is in the direction of the desired position is fine. 

You can continue to use aids like belts or towels as long as necessary. You will probably find that you will slowly inch closer to the position you wish to reach.
Even if you never reach the desired position, you will still benefit from your efforts.

I do not believe in doing Yoga until it hurts. Doing painful exercises can train you to avoid more exercise. Yoga is gentle and that is one of the good parts about it for people who are in bad physical condition. It is more important to stick with exercise for the long haul than to go all out for a little bit and quit.

It isn't healthy to go from couch potato to a marathon. It is better to be reasonable about changes that you demand from your tubby body and your flaccid will power. Small incremental steps that allow little successes along the way, are better than great leaps to failure.

Yoga is a good form of exercise for the incremental approach to fitness. I am not trying to say that yoga is the only form of exercise that allows the incremental approach to fitness. There are many other good ones. A couple of them are Tai Chi and Chi Gong. There are even courses on fitness for disabled and people who are in wheel chairs.

Our starting lines are not all in the same place. Go find yours and begin. Not every race is a sprint.