Physical activity has been shown to reduce stress, improve mood, and boost overall mental well-being. Today, we will explore the relationship between exercise and anxiety, and delve into different types of exercises that can help alleviate anxiety symptoms.

Let’s discover how you can beat anxiety through the power of exercise.

Understanding the Connection

Anxiety is closely linked to our body’s stress response system, which triggers the release of stress hormones such as cortisol. Exercise acts as a powerful counterbalance to this stress response, as it helps release endorphins, the body’s natural mood enhancers.

By engaging in physical activity, we can effectively reduce the levels of stress hormones while simultaneously promoting the production of feel-good chemicals, which can lead to a significant reduction in these symptoms.

Aerobic Exercises

Aerobic exercises, such as running, cycling, swimming, or brisk walking, are excellent choices for combating anxiety. These activities increase your heart rate and promote deep breathing, which help activate the body’s relaxation response.

Aim for at least 30 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic exercise most days of the week to experience the anxiety-reducing benefits.

Strength Training

Engaging in strength training exercises, such as weightlifting or bodyweight exercises, not only builds physical strength but also bolsters mental resilience. By challenging your body, you can boost self-confidence and improve self-esteem, which can alleviate anxiety symptoms.

Aim for two to three sessions of strength training per week, targeting major muscle groups, and gradually increase the intensity over time.

Mind-Body Practices

Mind-body practices like yoga, tai chi, and Pilates offer a unique blend of physical movement, breath control, and mindfulness.

These exercises promote relaxation, reduce muscle tension, and enhance body awareness, helping to alleviate anxiety. Additionally, the mindfulness aspect of these practices trains the mind to stay present and focused, reducing anxious thoughts.

Incorporate mind-body practices into your routine, either through guided classes or online tutorials, and experience the holistic benefits they offer.

Outdoor Activities

Exercising in nature has been shown to have additional benefits for anxiety reduction. Spending time in natural environments, whether hiking, gardening, or simply taking a walk in the park, can have a calming effect on the mind.

The combination of physical activity, fresh air, and the beauty of nature can help reduce stress levels. Whenever possible, opt for outdoor exercises to maximize the therapeutic effects on your mental well-being.

Anxiety can be debilitating, but it doesn’t have to control your life. By incorporating regular exercise into your routine, you can take proactive steps toward managing and reducing anxiety symptoms. Remember, finding joy in the process is essential, so choose activities you enjoy and gradually increase the intensity as your fitness improves.

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Yoga is well-suited for strength building for two reasons. First, it utilizes repetition, which progressively fatigues our muscles and allows them to grow back stronger. Secondly, each posture in yoga has numerous modifications that allow us to make it easier or more difficult. Therefore, as yogis build strength, it’s easy to find more demanding and difficult progressions that will allow us to continue that growth. By utilizing reputation and adaptation, we’re able to achieve the principle of progressive overhead just as we would in any other athletic discipline.

Gaining strength in yoga requires us to incorporate principles from exercise science into our approach to structuring our yoga practice. Exercise science tells us that strength is equal to neural adaptations, how our body responds to a stimulus, plus cross-sectional muscle growth, the size of our muscles. Neural adaptations are more influential on our overall strength. When talking about neural adaptations, we can think in terms of motor units (motor neurons sent by the brain to the muscles) and the type of muscle fibers being activated.

The two ends of the motor unit spectrum are Low Threshold Motor Units (LTMUs) and High Threshold Motor Units (HTMUs). LTMUs correspond with a slow twitch, endurance-focused muscle fibers and take a weaker electrochemical brain signal to activate. HTMUs correspond with strength and power, innervate fast twitch muscle fibers, and are activated by a higher-intensity electrical impulse in the brain. To gain strength and nail challenging yoga postures, we need enough stress to activate HTMUs and fast twitch muscle fibers.

To build strength, we need to think about how we structure our yoga practice. Here are a few ideas.

Begin with a warm-up that doesn’t exhaust you. A heavier-than-usual stress on the body is essential to strength-based yoga practice, and it’s important to warm up thoroughly without wasting energy or exhausting yourself. A few Sun Salutations or a short flow will suffice.

Do some skill-based work first. If you’re trying to nail challenging yoga postures, do it after your warm-up. This is the time when you have the most energy and focus on working on skill-based movements.

Add some strength-based work early on. After warming up and working on skills, it’s time for your strength work. One of the best ways to do this is with a short but challenging flow that you can repeat 1-3 times. Make the difficulty of this mini-flow match your level while throwing in one or two “reach” movements or postures.

After having used your maximum strength in your mini-flow, feel free to move through the rest of your practice as you usually would. This could focus on more dynamic movement, slow endurance-focused postures, breath work, or whatever other priorities you have.

Since you’re putting an extra level of stress on the body during your difficult strength-focused flow, be sure to end by giving those parts of the body a little extra love. If you were hand-balancing, open up the wrist joints. If you were working the core, take some time in the Sphinx pose. The extra work means you’ll need a little extra cool down to ensure that you’re able to avoid injury and keep up with your practice.

Yogis are able to accomplish some amazing feats. But to do so, we have to be experimental and scientific about our approach to practice. Part of this should be drawing on what we know from other disciplines. Gaining strength in yoga isn’t difficult. However, it does require us to structure our flows so that we explicitly perform a strength-focused movement at the right times while using repetition and adapting to use progressively harder variations of each posture as we grow.

Hopefully, these quick tips can help you along your journey. Have you tried our (or a similar) approach? Let us know about your experience!

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