CHAPTER 7
PHYSIOLOGICAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL BENEFITS OF YOGA
Yoga is not a religion. It is science, science of well-being, science of youthfulness, science of integrating body, mind and soul.
–AMIT RAY
IN THIS CHAPTER WE WILL TAKE A LOOK AT CURRENT RESEARCH ON THE MANY BENEFITS OF YOGA, AND KOKORO YOGA IN PARTICULAR. BUT BEFORE WE DIG THROUGH SOME OF THE MODERN RESEARCH THAT HAS EMERGED IN RECENT YEARS THAT HAS HELPED SCIENTISTS UNDERSTAND WHAT A YOGA PRACTICE CAN DELIVER, I FIRST WANT TO ENCOURAGE YOU TO BE YOUR OWN SCIENTIST: TO HONOR ANY SKEPTICISM YOU MAY HAVE AND FIND A BALANCED APPROACH to being analytical in your appraisal of yoga, but to also be rigorous and dedicated to testing it out for yourself.
I’m a big believer in trusting through verification. By giving this training a concentrated, objective, personal trial, you’ll be able to verify the benefits I’m discussing. What I don’t want to see you do is to slide into the trap of prejudging yoga as an excuse to not give it a valid try.
Lack of time also should not be a barrier. Kokoro Yoga is designed for a busy individual going 100 mph, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. So even if it’s 5 or 10 minutes a day for 3 months, I encourage you to conduct your own science by testing out the program and noting how it works for you.
Yoga has thousands of years of subjective science within its foundation, but for the Western audience seeking validation from a peer-reviewed research study, it’s only in recent years that we have plowed deeper into the subject. Scientists and medical professionals—in pursuit of effective, low-cost health-care solutions, are using high-tech tools to uncover the most detailed and objective data in history. For example, they are now able to chart changes in brain growth and function (neoplasticity), hormonal and electrical patterns associated with thoughts and emotions, and changes in gene expressions from exercise that lead to physiological improvements (epigenetics). There’s much about yoga that I believe is still out of the current range of modern science to test, but I’m confident that if you integrate Kokoro Yoga rituals and disciplines into your life, you won’t care about what the scientists say, you will just love the benefits and growth you are experiencing.
BENEFITS ACROSS THE SPECTRUM
The following is a holistic review of the benefits, both physiological and psychological, of what you can expect to get from a disciplined, daily practice:
Body Control
Yoga develops body control through an acute awareness of body position and movement. This control extends to awareness of how you move safely and effectively throughout each day: from standing to walking, running, lifting, or even the inherently unhealthy act of sitting. It will allow you to maintain connection with and move from your center (the Hara in Japanese and Dantian in Chinese), and extend to control over your physiological adaptation to stress.
As mentioned earlier, yoga shares a common history with the martial arts, and engaging the core of your body while moving is a focus of the movement practice. If you have some training in martial arts, then you know what I mean by this. Others will have to experience it. You will learn to sink into a stable position of deep balance and engage all the muscles of your core as your primary source of physical strength and stability. Too often we focus on the extremities (arms and legs) in training, ignoring the critical source of power of the core, which is more than one’s abs. It is the entire body minus the limbs and head. Building a strong core starts with deep connection to the muscles protecting the spine, engaging the root near your tailbone, and extending to all of the supporting muscles of your glutes, lower back, abs, chest, and obliques.
Concentration
In yoga practice, you sharpen your ability to concentrate on one thing, and for long periods of time, by focusing your mind on a single point, such as your breathing or the structure of a pose. Research clearly supports how this brand of exercise elevates the ability to concentrate. In one study, 60 subjects were involved in a 3-month retreat where they practiced focusing on the breath. The group was split into those who participated in the practice and those who were on a wait-list group that weren’t. The test they were given involved watching lines flash on a computer screen. Each time they saw a line that they believed was shorter than the others, their job was to click the mouse, an exceptionally boring task where the mind was apt to wander. Those performing concentration practice consistently demonstrated significantly greater capacity to focus than those who weren’t. As reported when the study was published in 2010, the researchers at University of California, Davis, wrote, “Training produced improvements in visual discrimination that were linked to increases in perceptual sensitivity and improved vigilance during sustained visual attention.”
Flexibility and Durability
For many, this is the sum total of what yoga is expected to deliver. Through the work of the sequences, you develop flexibility of your muscles and durability of your spine, joints, and connective tissues.
Controlling and enhancing energy, which can be conceptualized as life force, through breath control and visualization drills. Learning to draw energy into the body, to move it, and enliven the body at a cellular level, comes from a long-term practice of yoga.
Detoxification
One of the first benefits I registered in my initial exposure to Hot Yoga was the detoxification of the muscles, the blood, and the organs. We accomplish this in Kokoro Yoga without the need for a superheated room by using breathing techniques and, of course, vigorous movement. These detox benefits can be keen for desk warriors in the world. Prolonged sitting not only degrades the tissues of the hip capsule, but also weakens and shortens all of the machinery of the trunk that protects the spine. As you can feel after unhinging yourself from the window seat after a long flight, prolonged periods of sitting shut off the lymphatic system and retard the removal of waste products from the muscles, connective tissues, and nervous system.
Improved Immune Function
Hard-charging athletes typically have some experience in what is often referred to as “overtraining syndrome.” Overtraining means, obviously, the athlete has been overdoing it: relentless training without adequate recovery. Symptoms include chronic fatigue, iron deficiency, states of depression, upper-respiratory infections, and a sharp decline in performance. This syndrome is not limited to the sports arena: special operators, first responders, and those in high-stress business pursuits can also get caught in this psychophysical quicksand. When decline in performance begins to show up in the training journal, the highly motivated individual can react by training even harder, making things worse.
In specific regard to overtraining and the prevention of overtraining, first consider the vast complexity of the immune system, with multilayers of protection throughout the body that works tirelessly to screen out or kill viruses, microbes, pathogens, and cancers.
As you’ll note from the chart, the quality of your immune function is affected not just by training but by just about every part of your life that you can imagine. Stress is stress, and if on top of your training stress, you are absorbing vast amounts of stress, incurred from either bad diet, lack of sleep, poor relationships, and the like, then your immune system will ultimately fall into what is known as immunosuppression.
Along with the basic habits of good health, like a smart diet, drinking plenty of water, and getting adequate sleep, consistent yoga practice will help boost your immune function. A 2013 Bloomberg article reported that, “Scientists are getting close to proving what yogis have held to be true for centuries—yoga and meditation can ward off stress and disease.” The story centered on a 5-year study being conducted at the Harvard Medical School that was examining the effects of yoga and meditation on brain activity and gene function.
John Denninger, a psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, is leading the study on how the practices affect genes and brain activity in the chronically stressed. His latest work follows a study he and others published earlier this year showing how so-called mind-body techniques can switch on and off some genes linked to stress and immune function. Using neuroimaging and genomics technologies, Denninger and his colleagues are finding that yoga can switch specific genes, related to immune function, on and off, and how yoga can play a powerful role in reducing hypertension and preventing depression. “There is a true biological effect,” he told Bloomberg. “The kinds of things that happen when you meditate do have effects throughout the body, not just in the brain.”
In another key study conducted at Ohio State, surgical nurses, who experienced high levels of stress through their work and proximity to death, were shown to have a 40 percent decrease in salivary alpha amylase, a stress marker, after practicing yoga on a consistent basis.
Neuroscientists have come to believe that the toll of aging on the human body and brain is an outcome of disuse rather than use. In fact, in pioneering research conducted in the 1970s at the University of California (Berkeley and San Francisco), it was discovered that the brain responds favorably, at the microscopic level, to movement and stimulating experience. It was when usage came to a stop that the part of the brain associated with the usage weakened.
In this study, the scientists determined that the brain was “neuroplastic,” a term meant to describe how connections between brain cells are circuitlike—strengthening, changing, or weakening in response to how and how much the circuits are being used.
The implications of the neuroplasticity model are huge. In a long-term study performed at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom, researchers took a detailed look at the effects of exercise and lifestyle choices on 2,235 men, ages 45 to 49, over the course of 30 years. The results were powerful: consistent exercise was the most cogent factor in reducing the risk of dementia by 60 percent. In reporting on the magnitude of this study, The Wall Street Journal said, “Imagine if there were a drug that could reduce the risk of dementia by 60%. It would be the most talked-about drug in history.”
Brain exercise has been shown to improve cognitive computing power against the grain of decline normally associated with aging. After completing 10 1-hour brain exercise sessions, 2 per week over the course of a month and a half, the subjects demonstrated remarkable effects on their ability to think, reason, and function even 10 years after the brain exercise workouts.
That’s just the beginning when it comes to what a mental training exercise, like meditation, can do. Studies at the University of California, Davis, have looked at the effect that meditation has on telomerase activity in the brain—telomerase is known as the “immortality enzyme.”
The key action can be found in the infinitesimal corners of genes in what are called “telomeres.” Telomeres are found at the ends of chromosomes in sequences of DNA. Typically, they shorten every time the cell divides, and when they get too short, the cell dies. Telomerase actively rebuilds and lengthens the telomeres, consequently promoting a longer cell life, and studies have suggested that by higher amounts of telomerase equates to improved states of mental and physical health, and that it can have a direct role in preventing stress-related aging rates.
Researchers at UCLA found that a mere 12 minutes of yoga per day, increased telomerase by 43 percent.
Increased Stamina and Endurance
In a study published in 2013, researchers in Boston took a high-tech look at what they termed the “relaxation response” that occurs from yoga and meditation. Using blood samples taken before and after a meditation session, the blood was analyzed to extract gene transcription profiles. The results were powerful and all-encompassing: “Practice enhanced expression of genes associated with energy metabolism, mitochondrial function, insulin secretion and telomere maintenance, and reduced expression of genes linked to inflammatory response and stress-related pathways.” The researchers found that the greatest benefits were harvested after a long-term practice, with improved energy metabolism and mitochondrial function some of the especially appealing benefits that an endurance athlete might be interested in.
Cognitive Performance
A New York Academy of Sciences review showcased the value of yoga in regards to cognition and mental performance, with researchers emphasizing that yoga may be an effective intervention for the elderly dealing with a decline in memory and other aspects of brain performance. The research team concluded: “Studies involved a wide variety of meditation techniques and reported preliminary positive effects on attention, memory, executive function, processing speed, and general cognition.”
Decrease in Cellular Inflammation
Decreasing cellular inflammation is important for overall health, but also for peak performance. There have been some breakthrough studies being performed using blood testing that are answering the question of why yoga has a positive effect on cellular inflammation. Since cellular inflammation is one of the root causes of type 2 diabetes and chronic diseases like cancer (as well as Alzheimer’s, which is predicted to join the diabetes epidemic), this finding is particularly forceful. In the athletic training world, a lot of attention is paid to the effect diet has on cellular inflammation. Basically, a crappy, high-carb diet (rich in processed foods and sugars) sends the body into a state of hyperglycemia, or chronic state of high-blood sugar, because of the fatigue associated with overtapping the insulin response that occurs when we eat a high-carb meal. Hyperglycemia is the precursor to diabetes and a host of related chronic diseases that you want to prevent at all costs. In addition to actively getting a handle on your diet, research shows that yoga and meditation can be a powerful anti-inflammatory. In a study published in The Clinical Journal of Oncology, Ohio State scientists looked at three different cytokine levels in the blood in breast cancer survivors. The cytokines analyzed were distinct proteins commonly used as markers for cellular inflammation levels. After 12 weeks of yoga practice, the subjects of the study showed a 10 to 15 percent lowering in all three cytokine markers.
Depression and PTSD
A 2008 RAND Corporation study indicated that one out of five combat troops that had returned from the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan met the criteria for PTSD. Incorporating an assortment of studies supporting that yoga is an effective management tool in regards to chronic depression and PTSD, psychiatric researchers at the Boston University School of Medicine took an in-depth look at the mechanisms involved with PTSD and has proposed that there are “far-reaching implications for the integration of yoga-based practices in the treatment of a broad array of disorders exacerbated by stress.”
Lower Back Pain
In 2008, the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey collected a data set that suggested that 100 million American adults were affected by chronic pain, back pain, and arthritis. The study estimated that the health-care costs due to these maladies, when you add up the productivity costs and health-care costs, is in the range of $560 to $635 billion—annually. In 2011, the largest study ever conducted on the subject, published by the Archives of Internal Medicine, found that 12 weeks of yoga diminished symptoms and improved overall back function. As far as research goes, yoga has been highlighted as an answer to lower back pain, a problem that costs the United States billions in terms of lost productivity from the workforce.
Power is found by focusing on the right thing, right now. A quality of the peak performance flow state is to be fully in the moment. Not distracted by emotionally charged memories or the fear of what may happen in the future, but being comprehensively engaged with the present moment. Kokoro Yoga training will guide you on how to use your mind powerfully in the future and past, so that you don’t need to dwell there, but can release those time-based mental constructs and stay in the here and now—and perform.
Fitness and Wellness
As discussed in this chapter, research has found that yoga is helpful in treating high-blood pressure, diabetes, back pain, sleep problems, depression, anxiety, stress, and more. But the benefits can be enhanced with more rigorous interval training. Before I began my practice of yoga, I tried to use yoga programs for my fitness needs. I soon learned that they were a poor substitute for real functional fitness, the type required of warriors and athletes. Though it has some cardio benefit, traditional yoga focuses mostly on balance, flexibility, and core strength. Because it is lacking in strength, stamina, work capacity, and durability, we introduced more intense functional fitness routines to Kokoro Yoga.
A POWERFUL FUTURE
My intent throughout this chapter was to explore the benefits and take a short dive into the science behind the principles in this book. I believe Kokoro Yoga is a Trojan horse ready to unleash a host of benefits, ultimately leading to the highest levels of performance and even consciousness itself. I know, it may sounds too good to be true, but if you stay with me and begin a daily routine that meets your practical needs, body type, and goals, then you will be planting the seeds for a powerful future.
A quick note: I included this chapter as review of the more recent research that is currently being conducted in regards to yoga, and as such have included references so you can validate what’s being learned.
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