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It doesn’t just tone your body and combat stress. Turns out yoga also helps kick-start memory and safeguard your brain long-term – easing the kind of symptoms that precede conditions like Alzheimer’s disease.
That’s the latest from UCLA neuroscientists who compared the impact of yoga and memory training on people struggling to remember things like names and appointments.
One group was assigned an hour of brain training per week (think crosswords et al) plus 20 minutes a day of memory exercises, the other took a weekly hour-long class in Kundalini yoga and did 20 minutes of daily meditation.
After 12 weeks, both had better verbal memory skills (how well we recall words) but yoga and meditation had a greater impact on visual spatial skills, which help us navigate the world.
Researchers say regular yoga “could be a simple, safe and low-cost solution to improving your brain fitness”.
One sun salutation coming up!
