Bikram yoga is a style of hatha yoga involving a standarized series of asanas performed to an instructional dialogue in a heated environment (40.6°C, 40% humidity). Several studies evaluating the effect of Bikram yoga on health-related outcomes have been published over the past decade. However, to date, there are no comprehensive reviews of this research and there remains a lack of large-scale,...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of one-month fasting along with yoga training on the body composition of novice female athletes. Twenty trained women were randomly assigned to experimental (n=10) and control (n=10) groups. The experimental group participated in yoga training classes for 4 weeks, two 60-min sessions per week; the control group did not participate in any r...

BACKGROUND Emotional distress is an increasing public health problem and Hatha yoga has been claimed to induce stress reduction and empowerment in practicing subjects. We aimed to evaluate potential effects of Iyengar Hatha yoga on perceived stress and associated psychological outcomes in mentally distressed women. MATERIAL/METHODS A controlled prospective non-randomized study was conducted i...

The majority of research on yoga focuses on its psychophysiological and therapeutic benefits, while the spiritual aspects are rarely addressed. Changes of specific aspects of spirituality were thus investigated among 160 individuals (91% women, mean age 40.9 ± 8.3 years; 57% Christians) starting a 2-year yoga teacher training. We used standardized questionnaires to measure aspects of spirituali...

BACKGROUND Psychological distress is prevalent among people with Parkinson's disease (PD) and aggravates their motor symptoms, thereby leading to increased disability, high healthcare costs, and poor health-related quality of life (HRQoL). The under-recognition and adverse effects of the pharmacological management of anxiety and depression among the PD population are considerable. Thus, adoptin...

Purpose More than 65,000 women are diagnosed with gynecologic cancers (i.e., ovarian, endometrial) in the United States each year. Exploratory laparotomy is a common primary treatment for these diagnoses; however, it leads to pain and distress in a majority of patients. Yoga is a promising intervention for improving these negative surgical outcomes. The purpose of this study was to explore the ...

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) in standard medical care, specifically in cancer populations. Yoga, a mind-body practice, is one of the most common modalities of CAM therapy used in the United States. Both healthy individuals and diverse patient populations utilize the fundamental practices of yoga. Yoga therapy, a broad based ter...

Mindfulness-based skills training has been increasingly incorporated into psychotherapeutic treatment for a variety of presenting complaints, most notably anxietyand stress-related disorders. While there has been considerable literature documenting efficacy of full mindfulness-based treatment regimen (e.g., MindfulnessBased Stress Reduction [MBSR]), fewer studies have examined the influence of ...

There is evidence that the practice of yoga improves physical and mental performance. The present investigation was undertaken to study the effect of yoga training on visual and auditory reaction times (RTs), maximum expiratory pressure (MEP), maximum inspiratory pressure (MIP), 40 mmHg test, breath holding time after expiration (BHTexp), breath holding time after inspiration (BHTinsp), and han...

OBJECTIVE To compare muscle activation patterns in 14 dominant side muscles during different yoga poses across three skill levels. DESIGN Mixed repeated-measures descriptive study. SETTING University neuromuscular research laboratory, Miami, US. PARTICIPANTS A group of 36 yoga practitioners (9 M/27 F; mean ± SD, 31.6 ± 12.6 years) with at least 3 months yoga practice experience. INTERVE...