Many yoga practitioners love to travel, but, despite good intentions, keeping up with the practice while on the road can be challenging. As you explore new places, cultures and foods, it’s easy to forget about the routines of your normal life, yoga being one of them.

Competition and yoga are two words you don’t see put together very often. It’s also quite difficult to imagine yoga as anything more than a class that you go to after work. However, it’s a thing, and the world of competitive yoga is making great leaps to establish itself as an Olympic sport.

Nowadays, we listen to music wherever we are. We listen to it while we’re in the train, while we’re in a restaurant, while we’re working out and even while we’re walking around town. But should we be playing it during our yoga sessions? Since yoga is a meditative practice that involves movement, it can seem ineffective to listen to any sort of music while doing some much needed self-reflection.

Yoga can seem a bit like a cult. Dozens of people line up in a classroom, all dressed in similar outfits, moving in unison and sometimes chanting words in a foreign language. To an outsider, this odd display of behavior can bring up a lot of questions.

When you’re in yoga class, balancing in scorpion pose, focusing on your breath and pondering the greater mysteries of the universe, have you ever felt like there was something missing? No, we’re not talking about that special someone who magically completes your life.

Two strong young women demonstrating an acrobatic yoga pose in a yoga studio

This particular discipline of yoga combines traditional yoga poses and flows with basic acrobatic skills to enhance strength and core training. Among the many variations of yoga available today, acroyoga stands out from the rest because it’s a focused and fun way in which you can enhance flexibility, mobility and core strength without having to give in to repetitive sequences and inconsistent levels of workout intensity.

Nerve Growth Factor (NGF) is a key protein that helps diminish neural degradation. People with Alzheimer’s, however, are found to have significantly lower NGF levels causing them to be more vulnerable to the disease. Breakthrough research has revealed that NGF levels can be increased by introducing yoga into your fitness routines.

Your first yoga class can be intimidating. You’re in a room full of strangers, some wearing very little clothing, all stretching and contorting their bodies. As you see some of the more experienced students shifting into poses straight out of the cirque du soleil, you may feel a mixture of shock, amazement and embarrassment.

You’ve likely heard of hot yoga. And if you’re like any sane individual, the idea of performing yoga in a room heated to 105 degrees may not sound all that appealing. So why do people do it? Well, there are quite a few benefits to this relatively new yoga practice.

For a lot of people who do yoga, they end up sticking with the first instructor they visit. This is out of convenience or fear of the unknown more than anything else. Maybe it’s because the studio is close to their house or maybe it’s because they get a great discount for buying class sessions in bulk.