The Super Benefits of Yoga
June 21 is International Yoga Day, which makes it a great time of year to talk about the unique benefits of yoga — the “superfood” of fitness. As a mixture of exercise and mindfulness, yoga is not only challenging but also has myriad health benefits. Many people assume yoga is mainly useful for increasing your flexibility. However, it’s also excellent for further developing your strength, mobility, and balance. These can be key benefits for living a healthier lifestyle, whether you’re an athlete or concerned about aging.
Multiple studies agree: Yoga can significantly decrease the secretion of cortisol, the primary stress hormone. In one study, 64 women with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) participated in a 10-week program, performing yoga at least once a week. By the end of the 10 weeks, 52% of participants no longer met the criteria for PTSD at all. As with starting any new hobby or regular exercise, it may help to set clear goals for yourself. By doing yoga regularly, there are several physical improvements you can look forward to, such as:
• Improved range of motion or ease of movement
Kaitlyn Hochart, a yoga instructor from San Diego, California, writes on Healthline, “During yoga, your body goes through a full range and variety of motion that can counteract aches and pains associated with tension or poor postural habits.” Yoga can help you become more aware of these habits, “[allowing] you to fix these imbalances and improve overall athleticism.” Many forms of exercise are useful against depression and cardiovascular disease, but in yoga’s case, you don’t have to break a sweat to start benefiting from its stress-relieving properties. “The breathing exercises you practice during yoga can help lower your heart rate and shift your nervous system into a more relaxed state. It also promotes better sleep and increased focus,” Hochart writes.
• A reduction in pain, discomfort, or other symptoms
• An increase in physical strength and endurance
• Less weight fluctuation
• Changes in the way your clothes fit
• Better-quality sleeping habits and increased or stabilized energy levels One of the best qualities of yoga is that you can be of any age or fitness level. So, pull up a YouTube video, find a soft surface, and give it a try!
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However, more restrictions have come up. In Miller v. California (1973), the U.S. Supreme Court found that the First Amendment’s freedom of speech doesn’t apply to obscenity.
How does the court define obscenity? There are three things they’ll take into account:
1. Will the average person (applying contemporary “community standards”) find the work appealing to the overly sexual interests?
2. Does the work depict or describe, in an offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions as defined by state law?
3. Does the work, when taken as a whole, lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value?
deletes a post, these actions don’t count as violations of free speech. Could that change?
Certain types of hate speech are legal, so long as they don’t incite violence and cannot be categorized as obscenity as described above. But what about more ordinary political opinions? Can those be legally censored?
According to legal experts, the big question now is how to treat large social media platforms. Clay Calvert, professor of law at the Levin College of Law, asks, “Should we treat them differently and regulate them more closely? Have we reached that stage where we need to antitrust litigation, perhaps, and say they have such powerful platforms, they’re like near-monopolies that we should do some trust-busting and break them up?”
The First Amendment’s Boundary
Corporate censorship and censorship by private entities are legal because the First Amendment only applies to government censorship. That’s why when Twitter bans an account or Facebook
Would it be a good idea for the First Amendment to apply to private entities? We’ll leave that to the future debates that are sure to come.
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