Scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have found that yoga is more useful for improving brain functions than traditional aerobics.

This was reported in the American Journal of Physical Activity & Health.

The authors explain in their article that yoga in the last decade has become very popular in America, therefore additional research is needed on the health effects of this technique.

They say that in the question of the influence of yoga on the cognitive functions of information,.

Researcher Neha Gothe and her team tried to determine the influence of the yoga session on the cognitive capabilities of the patient compared to aerobic exercise. By "cognitive capabilities", scientists meant memory, attention, speech, learning, problem solving, logic, decision-making.

They wrote in the study 30 volunteers - young women from the University of Illinois. The average age of participants was 20 years.

All of them passed three test sessions:.

• Hatha Yoga. The 20-minute session consisted of several exercises requiring the reduction and relaxation of certain muscle groups, as well as the control of breathing. Participants finished the session with a meditative posture and deep breathing.

• Aerobic exercise. Participants warmed up and worked at 60-70% of their maximum heart rate for 20 minutes.

• In the last test session, participants did not perform any exercises to assess their mental performance at rest.

After each test session, researchers studied the cognitive performance of participants. They found that after the hatha yoga session, performance improved more significantly than after a traditional aerobic session or at rest.

Professor Gothe says: "Breathing and meditative exercises are aimed at abstracting from the surrounding things and concentrating on one's own body, posture and breathing. Perhaps this skill helps a person to focus on performing practical intellectual tasks ".

The researchers suggested that a deep knowledge of oneself that comes during meditative exercises is one of the mechanisms that help in such tasks. We know that meditation and breathing exercises reduce anxiety and stress, and thus they can improve cognitive performance.

Other Western studies suggest that yoga has many beneficial effects on health:.

• Yoga helps to raise mood and control anxiety. This was announced in August 2010 by scientists from the School of Medicine at Boston University in the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine.

• Yoga and meditation change the response of genes to stress. Such a serious statement was made back in 2008 by researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Beth Israel Medical Center on the site of PLoS One.

• Yoga can be effective in hypertension. A team of scientists from the University of Pennsylvania found that yoga contributes to a slight decrease in blood pressure in some patients. The information was presented in May 2013.

• Yoga is a method of treating back pain with an optimal cost-effectiveness ratio.

Such data led British scientists in the magazine Spine in 2012, after spending 12 weeks working with the experimental group on a new program of its own design.

• Yoga reduces the risk of atrial fibrillation. Researchers from the University of Kansas demonstrated that cardiac patients who regularly do yoga are less likely to have episodes of atrial fibrillation - an important risk factor for stroke in the elderly.

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