In my last Fitness blog I addressed the issue of yoga being a potentially dangerous form of fitness. Not that I believe yoga in itself is dangerous but I do agree that doing it wrong could lead to injuries.
Well now we are going to consider the flipside of yoga, a health benefit recently discovered in a small study. I read an article in “Reuters Health” that talked about survivors of breast cancer benefiting from yoga.
Apparently fatigue can become a lifelong casualty for a surviving breast cancer patient. Many don’t understand why this continues to be a problem, but now yoga is found to help with that.
This comes from a study involving a group of breast cancer survivors from California. They took a yoga class twice-a-week for three months. They felt less fatigue (26% drop) and more energetic (55% increase). They compared this group to another one that didn’t take yoga; instead they only attended post-cancer health classes. They experienced no changes in their level of fatigue.
The researchers were quick to point out that it doesn’t necessarily “prove” yoga was the cause for improvement. Cancer survivors might benefit from other types of fitness and exercise. In fact, the researchers tend to think that anything which helps cancer patients pay closer attention to their form can be a benefit.
I’m of the mindset that exercise can help virtually any ailment. But most especially fatigue. Now I’m not a breast cancer survivor but I have definitely struggled with fatigue for many years. At certain points in my life I couldn’t even make it an entire day without a catnap. But once I started exercising, the fatigue went away and the energy increased.
When I get off my exercise regimen, I see the fatigue creep back up. So it seems to make sense to me that yoga or any other type of exercise would be beneficial to not just breast cancer survivors, but everyone.
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Photo by SCA Svenska Cellulosa Aktiebolaget in Flickr