Yoga's Health and Fitness Benefits

Yoga has been around a long time-longer than interval training, Zumba classes, and free weights. But can a consistent and challenging yoga practice really lead to overall body fitness? Many experts say yes. But the good news doesn't stop there. Not only can you increase and maintain your level of fitness through a yoga practice, you can also become a healthier person. Let's take a look at some of the specific benefits that yoga practitioners experience.
- Yoga strengthens your muscles-depending on the type of yoga practiced, various poses might be held for several seconds to several minutes-but it also increases your body's flexibility. Ironically, many gym devotees strengthen their muscles by lifting heavy weights, creating strong short muscles that are more susceptible to injury. Yoga, however, strengthens and stretches; a key component to the creation of injury-resistant muscles.
- The power of yoga lies in the breath. Yoga instructors coach students in their breathing-as they move into, sustain, and move out of each yoga pose. Various types of breathing are taught and practiced. More than anything though, yoga lovers are simply made aware of breath and how important proper breathing is to overall yoga technique and everyday living. They come to understand the power of breath, how to integrate breath to get the most out of each pose and how proper inhalation and exhalation can relieve stress, lower the heart rate and increase lung capacity.
- By practicing this type of breathing, you can also up the amount of oxygen in your system. More oxygen means increased energy levels. The more yoga you do, the more energized you feel.
- Daily yoga practice has a variety of positive health benefits. Researchers have found that yoga, when consistently practiced, can relieve the symptoms of arthritis, chronic fatigue syndrome and asthma. Yoga can also bring down high blood pressure and help people manage their weight.
- When you practice yoga regularly and over a sustained period of time, you will experience an increase in your body awareness, diminished stress levels and a fine-tuning of your ability to concentrate.
- Finally, yoga can improve your mood, help you relax and even help you perform better on tests! Yoga often involves unilateral movements (like breathing out of only one nostril at a time) and movements that require students to cross the median line of the body (like touching the left big toe with the right hand). These kinds of movements increase brain activity. More brain activity is a part of better cognitive performance.
As you can see, yoga isn't just about stretching. It is physically demanding, it can increase your overall fitness and help you mentally. Integrate one or two yoga classes into your weekly calendar, and you will see a tremendous difference in all aspects of your physical being.

Bain Training

A spate of recent news coverage on brain fitness and "brain training" reflects a growing interest in natural, non-drug-based interventions to keep our brains sharp as we age. This interest is very timely, given the aging population, increasing Alzheimer's rates, and soaring health care costs that place more emphasis than ever on prevention and changing lifestyle.

This past Tuesday, the MIT Club of Northern California, the American Society on Aging, and SmartSilvers sponsored an event on The Emerging Brain Fitness Software Market: Building Better Brains to explore the realities and myths of this growing field. Before the panel, I had the chance to present an overview of the state of the Brain Fitness Software Market.

Why are we talking about this field at all? Well, for one, an increasing number of companies are achieving significant commercial success in packaging "brain exercise". An example is the line of Nintendo games, such as Brain Age and Brain Training, that have shipped over 15 million units worldwide despite limited scientific support, since 2005. What is less visible is that a number of companies and scientists are partnering to bring products to market with a more solid clinical validation. We estimate the US market was $225m in 2007 (growing from $100 in 2005). Whereas K12 Education used to be the major segment, adult consumers are responsible for most of that growth: we estimate the consumer segment grew from a few million in 2005 to $80 m in 2007.

Who is buying these products? Yes, of course, many adults over 50 who want to protect their memory are among the pioneers. 78 million baby boomers are eager to try new approaches. A growing number of retirement communities and nursing homes are offering programs to their residents to expand their usual fitness and social activities. And we can't forget about K12 education: certain brain fitness software packages have shown they can help kids who have dyslexia and related difficulties.

Is there science behind these claims? Do these products work? It depends on how we define "work". If "working" means quantifiable short-term improvements after a number of weeks of systematic "brain training" to improve specific cognitive skills, then the answer is that a number of programs do seem to work. If , on the other hand, "working" means measurable long-term benefits, such as better overall brain health as we age, or lower incidence of Alzheimer's symptoms, the answer is that circumstantial evidence suggests they may, but it is still too early to tell.

Are there any public policy implications? We certainly believe that there are. The Center for Disease Control recently partnered with the Alzheimer's Association to develop a comprehensive Cognitive Health road map to better guide research efforts and improve public education on the lifestyle habits that every proud owner of a brain could benefit from following. Given the high rates of traumatic brain injuries and stress disorders found in a large number of the men and women coming home from the Iraq war, the military is investing heavily in research to help identify problems to develop tools to solve them, and we expect that research will translate into wider health applications. No presidential candidate, to our knowledge, has directly addressed his or her priorities in the cognitive health realm but, given the growing importance and economic impact of brain-related disorders, we expect that to happen soon.

What are some trends that executives and investors should be looking at to understand this growing market? Let me make a few predictions:

1) An increased emphasis on Brain Maintenance, from retirement communities to gyms and health clubs. Will health clubs one day offer brain fitness programs, and perhaps "brain coaches"? We think so.

2) Better and more widely available assessments of cognitive function will enable of all us to establish an objective baseline of how our minds are evolving, identify priorities for "workouts" and lifestyle interventions, and help us measure progress. Science-fiction? Not really. there are already pretty good tests used in clinical and medical environments, the challenge will be to refine and package those assessments in a consumer-friendly way.

3) We will see more and better computer-based tools, each of which may be more appropriate to work on specific priorities. Just as we find a variety of machines in health clubs today, in the future we can expect different programs tailored to train specific cognitive skills.

4) More non-computer based tools will also provide much value. There is more and more research on how meditation and cognitive therapy, to mention 2 examples, can be very effective in literally re-wiring parts of the brain.

5) Insurance Companies will introduce incentives for member who want to follow brain fitness programs. Perhaps even companies will offer such programs to employees to attract and retain mature workers who want access to the best and the latest innovations to keep their minds sharp.

Now, this being a pretty new field, many questions remain open. For example, how will consumers and institutions receive quality information and education to navigate through the emerging research and the overwhelming number of new programs, separating reality from hype?

In summary, what were the main take-aways from the event?

1. Research indicates that a number of cognitive abilities (attention, memory...) can be assessed and trained

2. An emerging market is starting to develop-growing from an estimated $100m in 2005 to $225m in 2007, in the US alone-, and is poised to keep growing at significant rates.

3. Many companies are currently selling products direct to consumers (as well as through institutions) with sometimes unclear claims - this threatens to confuse consumers and present a major obstacle to the growth and credibility of the sector.

If you are interested in this rapidly growing field, please stay tuned! There are fascinating research reports every month

Health and Fitness Level

Article 4 of 7
This article is about the completion of a key element of the proposed medical information system--the national research center.
To realize the most from this article you need to read the 3 previous articles. However, I will try and summarize some of the key points of those articles here.
The most effective means of evaluating a person's health would of course be through some direct means of looking into the human organism to see what is truly taking place. Fortunately, as strange as it may seem, the human body does provide such a window in the form of its biochemical makeup. Furthermore, even more encouraging, there is a science already fully developed that is taking full advantage of that body phenomenon called clinical laboratory science. These are major factors in the success any advanced health care system.
I highly recommend that you take a minute here to read what the experts have to say on that matter by clicking on the link (called page 18) at the end of this article. These experts are from text books located in the University of Michigan's Medical Library.
As described in the link reference on page 18, the advantages of the biochemical makeup of the body is very impressive indeed. Clinical laboratory science is a highly computerized and a very rapidly moving industry. Hundreds of critical tests are now available for use. That industry is an important part of the current health care system. The blood or tissue tests that your doctor orders for you when he or she is suspicious of a given medical condition that needs verification usually involves clinical laboratory science.
The key difference between the proposed national medical information system and the current health care system lies in the difference in the use of these data. The current health care system primarily uses it to evaluate a disease condition whereas the proposed system would apply it on a broader scale basis to include disease prevention and wellness--taking advantage of far more of what clinical science has to offer.
To get a good feel of some of the amazing success in clinical laboratory science click on link (45-47) at the end of this article.
The proposed medical information system would use a completely new and far different type of application of clinical laboratory data. Far larger test profiles (100 blood constituents taken from one blood test) would be used in conjunction with a very sophisticated national research system for massive correlation to human health--including disease prevention and wellness.
Following is a remaining key element of the proposed system.
Article 3 was discussed with the use of handout A. A link to handout A is provided at the end of this article and should be referred to again here. This article will discuss the underlying technical strengths of that system by showing briefly how and why the health data fed into the national research center is so effective in its correlation to human health and wellness.
Referring back to the 100 test profile pattern discussed in article 3, it was shown that the 100 individual bits of test information along with patient environmental and patient data would be fed to the national research computer center (marked case #1). The research computers would record the profile pattern results and correlate that particular combination of test results to a particular health related condition. With the size of this 100 test profile pattern, as discussed earlier, there would be literally trillions of possible combinations involved. Of those trillions of possibilities, there would conservatively end up being at least millions of what we would call significant combinations that would represent significant health related information. The National Research Center would then relate that data to the individual's current health condition, history, family history, the individual's environment, and also to the same data of tens of millions of other patients. This is an enormous amount of health information for the supercomputers to pull together and relate to human health conditions!
In addition, there would no doubt also be smaller sets of tests of interest within that overall 100 test profile, such as separate groups of hormones, enzymes, antibodies and other special tests that could also be read and analyzed as separate group combinations as well. Many of us realize how very important these various groups are to our well being.
Let me stop here and review this for a moment. We talk about millions of significant health data combinations. So why is it necessary for such a breadth of examination capacity? Basically, because of the extreme complexities involving our environment, our health and of course their complex inter-relationship. For example, if we (as individuals) try to determine what it is in our environment that is having an effect on our health, either positive or negative, we know it's usually very difficult to do. We know there are literally dozens of elements (variables) in our personal environment that could affect our health. So how do we go about narrowing it down to determine what it is in a person's environment that is likely affecting his or her health?
The system described here does it in two ways, it uses the extreme reading breadth of the profile pattern (as discussed in article 3), to read an individuals test results along with the input of the environmental and doctor's medical examination report. It was shown that this data was then fed into the national research center system and compared to millions of other patient's health conditions, environments and test results.
This comparison, to the millions of other patients, would soon be very effective in narrowing the unknown element, or elements, down to the common denominator (or denominators) of what it is in the environment that normally affects people's health in certain ways. Very few patients would have the exact same environment and health conditions. Comparing millions of patient's health to their environmental exposures would provide a very effective screening process. The results of this research would then be fed back into the state diagnostic computers to diagnose specific individuals based on their individual profile pattern results and their individual environmental and physical examination reports.
This article discusses the key to success for any highly advanced health care system, and also the sophisticated features of the proposed medical system's research center.