If you’ve ever wondered whether practicing yoga can effectively make you lose weight, now is the perfect time to find out.

Although losing weight is not easy for everyone, with the right kind of attitude and discipline, it becomes less of an ordeal and more of a pleasant reality that can be acquired.Using yoga for weight loss can provide you with the discipline you need to succeed.

How Yoga Can Promote Weight Loss

1. Stimulates the Liver

Your liver has many essential functions, chief of which is to process nutrients from food that you eat. Other functions include the removal of toxins from your body, bile production, and protein building. Certain activities, such as drinking alcohol, can overload the liver. Infections can also make the liver lose its health and function poorly.

Yoga is an extremely powerful cleansing agent and detoxifier; it helps to purify your blood, and hasten fat processing by stimulating the liver. Having a healthy liver is greatly instrumental your body’s removal of unhealthy fats more easily, instead of storing them in your body.

2. Improves Heart Rate

People jog or run for a long time to get their heart rates up, believing that this makes their goal of losing weight more achievable. Research, however, has shown that this is a misconception, and is not a very good way to lose weight at all. It actually stresses the nervous system to the point of creating greater exhaustion, leading to adrenal fatigue.

For better weight loss, your heart rate should be change in intervals, and raising the heart rate should happen in very short bursts – raising it, dropping down, and getting it up all over again. Yoga can make this form of “interval training” possible.

At this point, you can check out the videos to be able to do a round of poses such as “Low Runners Lunge” or the “High Lunge.” Do this for some time and for a few rounds you will feel that your heart rate is at its optimal level, without the exhausted feeling that could get from jogging or running.

3. Develops Strength

Moving your body for shortening or lengthening the muscles will help you lose weight. Muscles are active tissues that consume fat for energy. When you build your muscles, your stored fats get used for energy. That is why strength work is very good for losing weight.

Towards this end, doing yoga for weight loss by practicing proper arm balancing positions are great because the poses engage a lot of your muscles, not just the arms or shoulders, but also your abdominal muscles, your core, and your legs.

In essence, yoga can give a full body workout, depending on your selection of the poses that you hold. Proper breathing is also key to burning more energy as you assume the poses, and that, in turn, helps to remove fats from your body.

Other Yoga for Weight Loss Benefits Include:

• Activating the internal heat in the nervous system
  Cleansing the colon
• Creating the right amount of pH levels
• Maintaining the right balance between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system
• Activating the thyroid gland

In the next article we’ll cover doing “Yoga Stretches” to get your blood flowing. If you have not done so already, be sure to subscribe to the MyFitnessNut.com Newsletter so that you can get access to the Hatha Yoga Video demonstrations and get started doing yoga for weight loss right away.

For many years now, ever since it was introduced to the West, yoga has been mostly popular among women. While this is a good state of affairs, the fact that not as many men practice yoga is disappointing, to say the least. Yoga for men, at this point, continues to be an unusual concept of sorts.

There’s a notion that “yoga can’t be for men because it’s not active or challenging enough, as far as physical exertions are concerned.”

Right? Nope. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

Yoga for Men – The Quest for Fitness

Striving to be fit, to attain health and wellness does not always require a certain level of aggressiveness or competitiveness, whether you are competing against others, or yourself.

If you’re male and you’re reading this, understand that you don’t necessarily have to be a grunting, heavily perspiring, excessively muscle flexing real-life version of He-Man, Master of the Universe all the time to prove that you are taking care of your body seriously.

In your quest for fitness, testosterone-driven activities such as competitive swimming, running marathons, weight lifting, and cross county cycling can do you good, no doubt about that. But can those activities also give you inner tranquility and mental acuity or keenness of thought?

That’s very much debatable.

Why Yoga for Men is Recommended

If you work in an office, think of someone who highly irritates you over there. It could be your boss, a co-worker, or even yourself. Maybe you don’t know how to express your dislike for certain systems, procedures or situations that are not conducive to your well-being without coming across as a totally aggressive and unreasonable Neanderthal.

Yoga helps you to focus your negative energy, and convert it to a positive way of thinking and dealing with things, in order to have a favorable outcome for yourself, as well as others around you. And when you are able to use your clear mind and focused logic to easily deal with stressful situations, then you achieve inner peace.

How’s that for a triple home-run?

Mountain biking across the whole country can’t do that for you. Neither can lifting all the weights in the world, but doing yoga for men most certainly can. In the previous article we talked a little bit about doing basic yoga poses. Be sure to subscribe to the MyFitnessNut.com Newsletter to get access to the 70 Hatha Yoga Videos that go with this guide. Next we’ll look at “Yoga for Women” and the development of harmonious and beautiful proportions.

Are you thinking about getting into doing yoga? If so, you are making a step in the right direction. There are many benefits that yoga can bring you and it is a perfect way to exercise for beginners because it can be adjusted to get more challenging as you progress and become more fit.

Yoga for the Beginner

As a beginner it is always best to take your time and learn the proper posture for the many different yoga poses available to you. You might even think about taking a “yoga for beginners” class to get personal instructions to learn the various yoga poses.

There are many qualified yoga instructors you can learn from, possibly right in your back yard, but here we are going to focus our attention on giving you a well rounded introduction and some Hatha Yoga training videos, compliments of MyFitnessNut.com that you can use to get started in your own home and at your own pace.

First, Let’s Cover Some Benefits of Yoga for Beginners

Among the many top benefits of yoga you’ll find happening is that you’ll start to become much more flexible. Not mentally flexible, physically flexible, but in time and with practice you’ll find mental flexibility occurs and a more confident point of view materialize as you discipline and develop yourself.

Simply put, yoga is good for your body and your mind.

Yoga can help you be calmer, more in control and reduce stress in your life. It can help you improve your self confidence, let you concentrate and think clearer and promote your overall well being.

Some people decide to practice yoga as a means to simplify and de-stress their busy life because it can help train you to calm your mind and find peace. Yoga can renew and invigorate your mind and body to thrive in a healthy state.

Let’s face it, in today’s hustle and bustle life that many of us lead, finding a good stress reliever is important and yoga is also about deep breathing and relaxation which even on their own promote stress relief, calmness and harmony in your body.

Best of all, yoga is an excellent fitness workout for most anyone regardless of their current physical condition, size, weight, sex or age. It is purposely designed to give all of your muscle groups a good healthy workout.

Yoga is great for beginners and people who are out of shape, overweight and maybe have a difficult time moving because most of the beginner’s poses are very gentle on your body.

In a short period of time you will find that yoga will help you gain fuller control over your joints and muscles and you’ll find that you’ll be gaining much more control over your body. Some of the areas you’ll see more flexibility in are your legs, arms, shoulders, hips, abdomen and back.

Yoga Involves Balance which Develops Core Body Strength

Yoga involves doing a lot of balancing in the poses and this develops solid core body strength without bulking huge muscle mass. Some of the yoga poses you’ll be doing will involve balancing on your arms and hands, on one leg and some have you moving slowly thus helping you develop better control and core strength.

It takes time to develop and get used to doing yoga poses but the results you get from have a toner and stronger body is well worth the effort. With regular practice your legs, stomach, back, arms, shoulders and chest will become more toned and defined.

And what do you think the outcome of that is going to be?

Other people will see you more toned and defined, healthier, happier and you’ll feel more confident and attractive to a potential mate. There’s nothing like it for a great self confidence booster too.

Yoga for Beginners Provides for Better Breathing

One important part of yoga that’s often overlooked by beginners is that yoga helps teach you how to breathe more properly than you’ve been used to in the past. Both adults and children alike can benefit from this and it is specially well-suited for people with asthma and other breathing disorders.

Learning advanced breathing techniques can help condition your lungs for increased lung capacity to deliver more life giving oxygen throughout your entire body. If needed for allergy sufferers there are advanced breathing techniques that can be used to help clear the nasal passages and free up life giving oxygen flow for your entire body.

Yoga for Beginners – What’s not to Like?

There are lots of good reasons why people would want to learn and practice yoga. Whole body fitness is probably the top of most people’s list but many people see yoga as a way to develop themselves as a better person.

Feeling stronger, more confident, flexible and resilient is just the beginning. Breathing better, increasing stamina and warding off allergies are all great side benefits but as you stick with it and progress, your mental state will begin to evolve with your newly fit body. You’ll feel calmer and more secure in your life and that benefits you and everyone around you.

How Can a Beginner Get Into Yoga?

When you’re getting into yoga for the first time, where you’ll want to start depends a lot upon you. Do you want the social aspect and support of learning in a group? Or do you feel more comfortable starting out alone in the privacy of your own home?

And then there’s always the in between, where you hire a personal one-on-one yoga instructor that will work with you on a personal and private level.

There are many choices and different levels of advancement in yoga too. You can find classes, videos and private instructors for the beginners to advance, from children to seniors, to pregnant women and even people with certain disabilities including the morbidly obese.

Our goal at MyFitnessNut.com is to get you started moving in the right direction when you’re considering yoga, or anything regarding the improvement of your health and fitness levels. To that point, we’ve prepared 70 different follow along Hatha Yoga for Beginners poses that are great for both beginners and hard core fitness nuts alike.