By Indira Midha
We’re all tired, tense and pressed for time. After all, we’re college students – what else is new? I’ve recently started taking five minutes each morning to do the following three poses; they help me feel stretched out and overall less tense in preparation for my day.
The Cobra
Yoga Journal states these are the benefits of this pose:
- Strengthens the spine
- Stretches chest and lungs, shoulders, and abdomen
- Firms the gluteus maximus
- Stimulates abdominal organs
- Helps relieve stress and fatigue
- Opens the heart and lungs
- Soothes sciatica
- Calms asthmatic people
- Increases body heat, destroys disease, and awakens kundalini, according to traditional texts
Downward-Facing Dog
Yoga Journal states these are benefits of this pose:
- Calms the brain and helps relieve stress and mild depression
- Energizes the body
- Stretches the shoulders, hamstrings, calves, arches, and hands
- Strengthens the arms and legs
- Relieves menstrual discomfort when done with head supported
- Helps prevent osteoporosis
- Improves digestion
- Relieves headache, insomnia, back pain, and fatigue
- Soothes those with high blood pressure, asthma, flat feet, sciatica, sinusitis
Extended Triangle
Yoga Journal states that these are the benefits of the pose:
- Stretches and strengthens the thighs, knees, and ankles
- Stretches the hips, hamstrings, and calves; shoulders, chest, and spine
- Stimulates the abdominal organs
- Helps relieve stress
- Improves digestion
- Helps relieve the symptoms of menopause
- Relieves backache
- Soothes those with anxiety, flat feet, infertility, neck pain, osteoporosis, and sciatica
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The Spread 