Long-term yoga practitioners reported physical, mental, spiritual, and social benefits from their practice
Research Study At A Glance
The Research Question Asked
What do long-term yoga practitioners perceive as the benefits of their practice?
Type of Study
Qualitative research study
Study Participants (Sample)
- 18 total participants
- 16 female, 2 male
- Age ranged from 23-68 years old
- All participants had an established, consistent yoga practice
Methods
Researchers asked study participants to attend yoga classes twice per week for two years. They interviewed them individually and in groups regarding their perceived physical, mental, and social benefits from yoga.
Results
Study participants described the effects of yoga on their physical, mental, and social states as increasing positive emotions, relieving, reducing pain, increasing positive personality traits, raising awareness, increasing sleep quality, and improving their self-esteem.
Conclusion
Long-term yoga practitioners perceived physical, mental, spiritual, and social benefits from their practice.
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Background
A fairly large body of research has accumulated supporting the many mental and physical benefits of yoga. In particular, various styles of yoga have all been shown to reduce stress and have positive effects on many chronic diseases. However, the majority of yoga research has been conducted on novice practitioners in short-term studies. While positive effects from yoga treatment have consistently been reported in the literature, much less is known about yoga’s effects over the long term. Additionally, most quantitative yoga studies investigate one very specific potential effect of yoga.
The nature of quantitative-type experiments is that they are limited in the number of things they can measure and investigate. However, a qualitative study offers study participants the opportunity to share their experiences and respond to open-ended questions. This leaves more room for surprising results that the research team might not have thought to ask about. For all these reasons, the research team on the study we summarized here chose to conduct a qualitative-type study that investigated the perceived benefits of yoga by long-term practitioners.
Research question
What do long-term yoga practitioners perceive as the benefits of their practice?
Research methods
Researchers recruited 18 long-term yoga practitioners from a local yoga studio. The research team chose two days per week that study participants were required to attend yoga classes. One researcher attended those yoga classes along with the study participants and observed their social interactions.
Two years after participants had regularly attended yoga classes, researchers conducted an individual interview with each study participant. Additionally, researchers conducted focus group interviews. For the group interviews, researchers divided the study group into two groups of nine participants. Each group was interviewed together before and after a yoga class.
To conduct the interviews, the researchers used a Personal Information Form for the individual interviews and a Semi-Structured Interview Form for the focus group interviews. The Personal Information Form included seven questions. Those questions asked participants to share their age, gender, education, occupation, history of chronic disease, history of chronic pain, and how long they had been practicing yoga.
The Semi-Structured Interview Form asked participants to answer the following questions:
- Describe the meaning of the concept of yoga
- Tell us about your physical, mental, and social state before starting yoga
- Describe your reasons for practicing yoga
- Describe the effects of yoga on your physical, mental, and social state
- Share any difficulties you’ve experienced with doing yoga
- Use a metaphor to explain what yoga is like
Results
After conducting both individual and group interviews, the research team identified recurrent themes among the responses. They summarized and interpreted the data according to those themes.
- Theme: Meaning of the concept of yoga (number in parentheses is the number out of 18 total study participants who included this answer in their response)
- Exercise (11)
- Healthy life (5)
- Calmness (5)
- Harmony (3)
- Awareness (2)
- Balance (2)
- Theme: Reasons for practicing yoga
- To reduce pain (9)
- A healthy life (8)
- To raise their awareness (6)
- To increase calm (3)
- To cope with stress (1)
- To increase positive thinking (1)
- Theme: Physical, mental, and social state before doing yoga
- Doing sports other than yoga (6)
- Feeling fatigued (4)
- Having coping difficulties (4)
- Having physical ailments (3)
- A sedentary life (3)
- Experiencing negative emotions (3)
- Experiencing social isolation (1)
- Theme: Effects of yoga on their physical, mental, and social states
- Increasing positive emotions (12)
- Relieving (11)
- Reducing pain (9)
- Increasing positive personality traits (5)
- Raising awareness (5)
- Increasing sleep quality (4)
- Improving their self-esteem (4)
- Theme: Difficulties that arose when doing yoga
- Physical difficulties (10)
- Mental difficulties (1)
Why is this relevant to yoga practitioners?
This qualitative study highlighted the individual variability in practitioners’ perceived benefits from their yoga practice. As most long-term practitioners have likely experienced, there are many different kinds of benefits that can result from a consistent yoga practice. Early in a practitioner’s practice life, they may experience different benefits than what they experience as their practice life continues over the years. Among the types of benefits reported in this study, long-term practitioners reported physical, mental, spiritual, and social benefits from their yoga practice.
However, the specific benefits that practitioners experienced varied from person to person. Each person’s individual situation likely influenced which benefits, in particular, they were most aware of and attributed to their yoga practice.
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Conclusion
The benefits of a long-term yoga practice are individual to each practitioner. Long-term practitioners perceived physical, mental, and social benefits of their practice. However, the specific benefits were unique to each practitioner and were dependent on what they were experiencing in their life before they started a yoga practice.