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How karate and yoga can have a direct impact on your everyday life.
Guest blog from Business Owners: Nicola Priest, Exhale Yoga Studio and Ady Gray, Karate Dojo.
Written by Nicola Priest, Ady Gray.
Both disciplines have many benefits but many cross over, such as the following:
Improves strength balance and flexibility
Can ease arthritis symptoms
Benefits heart health
Relaxes you and helps you sleep better
Helps manage stress
Connect you with a supportive community
Promotes better self-care
Endurance
Breathing
muscle tone
inner strength focus and discipline.
In this blog we are going to discuss how these ancient arts help your mental health in
everyday life.
Improve Sleep Quality
Yoga and Karate will not only help you feel better as a whole, but it will also help you sleep better too.
Making your classes an integral part of your weekly program will undoubtedly contribute to a healthier, more restful and uninterrupted sleep and may well help correct
sleep disorders such as insomnia by pumping your body with endorphins (feel good
hormones) and reducing your cortisol (stress hormone) levels.
Improve Confidence
Improving your practice will help build your confidence.
Knowing that we can defend ourselves and being confident in our abilities is certainly an
awesome feeling. The confidence of knowing how to defend yourself and your family is
tremendously empowering.
This confidence will make you a stronger, better person and will permeate into our daily
lives, whether it is at the office or in the classroom. Self-confidence is an incredible by-
product of Karate training. In Yoga confidence is built through focusing on your breathing,
bringing extra oxygen to the brain, helping you to remain calm and make better decisions.
You can’t control everything that happens around you, but you can control how you react to
it.
Building a strong body and mind rather than exercising to lose weight.
Losing weight will be a by-product of practicing any discipline, what’s more important is
learning to appreciate your body for what it does not what it doesn’t do. Anything can be
adapted for you. Learning to work with your body not against it will build confidence.
Improve Patience
Technique is essential to every style of Karate, but repetition is necessary to master the
method. Many martial arts schools require students to practice and perfect specific
techniques before advancing to the next level of training. Same in Yoga, repetition of moves
and having patience that a hold or balance won’t be reached straight away (crow!) plus
every day, every week you will feel different, energy levels vary and learning to you listen to
your body will help you to be patient with yourself.
Stress Relief
Any regular exercise is scientifically proven to relieve stress but being able to get that
exercise surrounded by a supportive community - the dojo or studio where you train - can
go a long way to put you at ease.
Stress management in Karate and yoga is manifested in several training methods and
techniques which includes breathing and relaxation techniques. Meditation/savasana and
Mokuso.
Improve Mood
This is obviously not only reserved to Karate and Yoga, but exercising releases endorphins in the body, and makes you feel good!
Performing Karate and practicing Yoga is not only an excellent way to relieve stress and
frustration but may actually help to make you happier. The endorphins released by your
Karate training and Yoga practice can be active in your body for as many as four hours after
you leave the dojo or studio.
Improve Emotional & Mental Health
These disciplines extend beyond just physical well-being they are also known to help you
feel better mentally and emotionally and can improve your overall quality of life.
Karate and Yoga can help you feel stronger and better able to do daily activities.
There are many great instructors/ teachers out there however do your research and choose
your teachers and clubs wisely.
Written by:
Nicola Priest, Ady Gray from Exhale Yoga studio and the Karate Dojo
