I've Been Doing Yoga 3-4x A Week For The Past Year — Here's What I've Noticed

Yoga, like any good habit or routine, takes consistency in order to reap the benefits. I've been practicing yoga for years, but it was only in the past year that I've been consistently practicing three to four times a week.

I have my yoga teaching schedule to thank for that, which gets me into the studio to teach hourlong Vinyasa classes on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. I do the poses with the students as I teach, and on a good week, I'll take at least one class as a student myself.

So many people suffer from rounded shoulders, tight pecs, stiff necks, and upper back pain. I did too, with frequent tightness on my right shoulder that would run up into my neck, sometimes causing tension headaches!

But over the past year, I've been practicing plenty of neck and shoulder stretches, including simple neck-release stretches, thread-the-needle, and shoulder rotations.

I always start my yoga classes with a few staple core exercises to get the abdominal muscles warmed up and activated.

It's no secret that good core strength helps improve posture by way of supporting your upper body and taking pressure off the low back, and I've felt those benefits firsthand this past year. I've especially seen benefit with functional core moves that work the deep, low abdominals that can be hard to reach (i.e., planks and hollow holds instead of just situps).

As my core got stronger this past year, I noticed it helped me stand up a bit straighter, but that made me realize my hip flexors were tight. To support the newfound openness and strength on the front side of my upper body, I had to address the lower half of my body too.

This led me to (pretty intensely) focus on opening my hips and stretching out my hip flexors. For a few months, I was hellbent on stretching the fronts of my thighs and counteracting the effects of sitting—and I did!

This one might sound silly, but you'd be amazed how many problems can start down at your feet and run up the body, causing ankle pain, knee pain, hip pain, low back pain, and yes, even shoulder pain.

Our joints are designed to stack and support our weight, but if our weight isn't evenly distributed through our feet, we don't have the proper foundation set.

For me, this looked like pronating heavily on my right foot (placing more weight on the inside of the foot), which caused the whole right side of my body to be out of alignment. Now that I think about it...that could've been contributing to the aforementioned shoulder pain on my right side—but I am certain it contributed to knee pain.

So now, I always do foot mobility drills before balancing postures, fanning out my toes and stretching my feet and ensuring I'm distributing my weight evenly.

I touched on this benefit already, but I'll say it again: Consistent practice over the past year has helped improve my posture in so many ways.

With my chest more open and shoulders relaxed back, I can sit up straight without difficulty or much effort, and the increased core strength helps with that too.

A majority of my aches and pains have historically been on the right side of my body. As I mentioned, my right knee and right shoulder have given me a bit of trouble, as well as my right-side hip and low back.

And I'll never stop singing the praises of yoga because with the right postures—and consistency!—I've been able to dramatically reduce that pain.

Last but definitely not least, the benefits of a regular yoga practice are not just physical. To say my yoga practice has been a journey of self-exploration isn't an overstatement. In fact, it is written in the Bhagavad Gita that, "Yoga is the journey of the self, through the self, to the self."

Getting through a yoga class (especially a hot yoga class) isn't just about physical strength, endurance, and flexibility. It takes mental fortitude, focus, concentration, will, and equanimity. I've been forced to confront myself on my yoga mat and have realized it is our minds, and our reactions to our minds, that create the experiences we have in class.

If I had known just how good I could feel from a diligent yoga practice, I would have been way more adamant about being consistent in the past. But now that I do know, I'll never go back!