Currently I am 6-7 weeks into doing Yoga 3-4x per week, and all I can say is: WOW! Not only has my back not felt this good in 10 years or more, but there are so many things have dramatically improved, and continue to improve. My gast is flabbered.
First off, there is the expected flexibility benefits. My spine has become noticably more limber in all directions - side to side, full backward bending, and forward bending. My hips, although still tight, are loosening up gradually to the point where sitting indian style (always quite uncomfortable for me) is doable. It still isn't a comfortable position, but it is significantly less uncomfortable. My ankles have become more flexible - when I started, sitting on my knees with my ankles under my legs resulted in a big stretch of the muscle in front of the shin. Now it is not uncomfortable in the least, and I'm hoping this increased ankle flexibility will help with kicking propulsion in swimming. Even the connective tissue in my knees has loosened up a noticable amount. And this isn't even going into the obvious muscle related flexibility - quads, hamstrings, back muscles, shoulders, thighs, etc.
Second, there is a lot more strength benefit than I ever anticipated. The first I noticed was all the soft tissue (muscles, ligaments, tendons) involved in balance and stability. When I first started, my lower legs were heavily fatigued after the balancing series of poses, and I often could not maintain balance during the full posture count. I still lose the balance every so often, but all that connective tissue is much stronger and has more stamina, and I can maintain the pose for the full count. Even the connective tissue on the bottom of my feet gets fatigued - which causes me to hope that it is also being strengthened, to help prevent potential PF issues in the future. I still need to work on fine tuning, as my standing leg isn't quite as still and stable as it should be, but it is getting there.
Then there is also strength in the quads. When I first started, a series of postures in what is called Awkward Pose was very tiring, and I could not sit down very far into it (the pose is essentially a few variations on squats). Now I am able to generally hold the pose for the full count (if I dont lose balance while on my tip-toes), and I'm able to squat down much farther - in some cases to the point where my thigh is parallel to the floor with my back straight up and down as if against a wall.
Less noticable, but still improved, is overall core strength. It is never something where I feel fatigued or sore or anything, but just general daily life tasks that require core strength (lifting things up off the floor, improved sitting posture, getting up out of bed, getting out of the car) are done more easily and with more stability.
Another big strength improvement, and this is related to core strength, is the hips. The standing head to knee pose is killer for the hip stabilizing muscles. While my balance in this pose has improved, I'm less concerned about balance at this point, and more concerned about strengthening the stabilizers, as weak gluteus medius muscles are a key component cause of IT band issues.
Finally, the other major area of strength increase is the back itself - lower, middle and upper. Strengthening the back is a tough thing to do, as it is difficult to isolate the muscles in the back, but there is a series of spine strengthening poses in the Bikram routine that does a pretty good job of it.
There are still some things that I am told improve over time (breathing, as an interesting example) - sometimes taking a year or more to fully 'get' - but one thing I noticed recently is the improvement in diet. Normally, I go to class at 7:30 on weekdays. Due to the intensity of the workout, I dont eat anything for a few hours before class, making lunch the last meal I eat before class. Then a couple hours before class, I start hydrating and drinking water. Usually in class I drink another 24 oz of either gatorade or water, followed by another 16-20 oz immediately after, and another 24 oz in the 60-90 minutes following class, when I am recovering. After class, I don't much feel like eating anything significant (and by this time it is often around 10 pm), so I have gotten to making fruit smoothies (3/4 cup blueberries, 5-6 large strawberries, 1 banana, some orange juice and some cranapple juice) afterwards - both as a recovery drink due to the fast absorbing sugars, and as a dinner of sorts. The result of this is that I haven't been eating as many dinners at night, cutting a huge number of calories. And since I often would eat dinner at 8:30 or later, this is doubly beneficial because eating dinner that late is not necessarily the best thing. Even the days that I don't go to yoga, I find myself passing on foods that I would normally eat with little hesitation - things like cookies and what-not that people bring into the office to get rid of. I'd normally grab a cookie or brownie or two on my way by the kitchen - now I pass by them and think 'meh.. not worth it unless it is homemade'.
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