Those of you who are familiar with varicose veins and spider veins know that strengthening your legs and improving circulation is absolutely essential.
By adding stretches (and some yoga poses) to your exercise routine, you can easily improve upon both your leg strength and circulation, which ultimately helps to improve your overall health.
Here are 4 benefits of stretching and yoga:
- Muscle building. Believe it or not, oxygen is essential to muscle building. After exercising, it’s important to stretch in order to get oxygen circulating through your muscles. By doing this, they’re able to slowly release any lactic acid buildup that could otherwise cause major discomfort or cramps later on.
- Flexibility. Flexibility is key to better strength, better posture, and a healthier lifestyle. Flexibility helps to improve your leg strength and helps to reduce fatigue and discomfort caused by exercise. Regularly stretching or doing yoga can help increase your flexibility.
- Strength. Yoga is a beneficial exercise for both flexibility and strength. Using mostly your body weight, you can work to tone your arms and legs and increase your flexibility at the same time. By focusing on specific muscle groups at any given time, you can zero in and work different parts of the body.
- Minimize pain. Especially for beginners, increasing your flexibility will help to reduce the pain and discomfort of everyday exercise. In addition, it can also aid in the prevention of injury caused by exercise.
The key to stretching and yoga for the purposes of this discussion is to improve the circulation throughout your legs. There are many great exercises out there that can help improve your circulation, reducing the chances of developing varicose veins.
Many people don’t think twice about stretching, but it’s key to success in any exercise routine. It’s important to implement stretching and yoga into your routine, no matter how you choose to do so. The little time it takes to stretch will have long-term benefits that can make your overall quality of life that much better.
Do you have a favorite stretch, or yoga activity? Let us know in the comments or on Twitter!
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photo credit: BrittneyBush via photopin cc