Hatha Yoga - The Preliminary Step in your Yoga Journey

Many Americans still consider the Hatha Yoga as physical yoga whenever they come across such reference.

In reality, the main focus of Hatha Yoga is on a series of postures, asanas, and few breathing techniques such as pranayama, etc.Yoga postures or asanas are meant to keep your body in a particular position for a given length of time and you are made to meditate during the course of the practice.

Yoga postures are mainly intended or aimed to regulate the flow of energy and purify them for betterment of the whole body and mind. The yoga postures are well defined and there are more than 200 such postures designed to take care each and every part of your body for fine-tuning.

When it comes to practicing yoga postures, there are various postures and you may have to do asanas that may involve sitting, reclining, standing upright (standing on one’s head), twisting your trunk, bending in both backward and forward positions, and in most of the postures you have to hold to the stature for a given length of time.

During the end of any yoga session you will be doing one particular asana by name Shavasana and in this you will attain a corpse like stature for total relaxation.

In shavasana posture, you will be relaxing your limbs one by one then you will relax your head, trunk and the whole body in a systematic manner so as to reap a total relaxation.

The relaxation experience that one would get cannot be explained with words and it has to be only experienced by following the asana.

In Hatha Yoga breathing techniques are also to be performed for regulating ones respiratory functions. Through many breathing techniques such as abdominal breathing, ujjayi breathing, single nostril breathing, etc., the students will be made to control and enhance the flow of energy within their bodies that can result in an overall development.

The name “loud breathing” is given to the Ujjayi breathing and in this the practitioner will be taught to control one’s throat muscles while breathing through nostrils.

Hatha Yoga – Its Advantages and Disadvantages

When it comes to benefits of Hatha Yoga then there are many such benefits. Hatha yoga is known for its efficacy in promoting concentration, relaxation of tense muscles, and is capable of increasing flexibility as well as the strength.

The known limitation is that hatha yoga cannot be compared with any other cardio-vascular workouts because while doing hatha yoga there will not be any increase in heart rate and hence the blood circulation will be normal as in any other normal activities. .

Many beginners take up Hatha Yoga due to the gentleness involved, but still many people who have back and neck problems may not be able to maintain many of the postures in hatha yoga.

So it is advocated that such people can start with an alternative schedule of Iyengar Yoga that used pillows and straps for better support and balance.

Further, there are people who do Hatha Yoga only for the physical activity and ignore the meditation and breathing exercise part. Many of the yoga practitioners still feel that hatha yoga is of a mild category and doesn’t give enough workouts like Ashtanga or Power Yoga.

What ever may be the reasons said and done, Hatha Yoga is always a good starting point for any beginners and for people who would like gentle postures coupled with few spiritual enhancing techniques.

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