Nerve Growth Factor (NGF) is a key protein that helps diminish neural degradation. People with Alzheimer’s, however, are found to have significantly lower NGF levels causing them to be more vulnerable to the disease. Breakthrough research has revealed that NGF levels can be increased by introducing yoga into your fitness routines.

For too many of us, detoxing is something we think about only in January, when we’re feeling bloated from eating too much over the holidays - and which we then promptly forget about again for much of the rest of the year. If we do consider detoxing at other times, our understanding of the options available to us is often limited to drinking more water and chowing down on green juices and smoothies for a set number of days.

Despite being an athlete who sweats it out nearly every day, you still find yoga difficult to perform. If you’re an avid exerciser, you’ll most likely have tight and firm muscles, which is all fine. However, your muscular body is an obstacle in yoga, since it is less flexible and can give you a hard time balancing on some poses.

Most of us wish we could stop, reverse or simply slow down the body’s natural aging process. And while the first two options might be difficult or even downright impossible, reducing the speed at which those wrinkles begin to appear is within our reach - and one way to achieve it is through regular yoga practice.

As we covered earlier this month, inversions are powerful yoga poses that can strengthen your muscles, inspiring balance and stability and reinvigorating your circulation and lymphatic system. Yoga inversions provide a great physical challenge that boosts energy and inspires relaxation.

Fitness is not just about toned abs and a washboard stomach, it’s about feeling healthy and living life to the full. In today’s fast moving world one of the biggest factors in ill-health and a poor quality of life is stress. There’s no doubt about it that as well as potentially exacerbating a whole host of health issues, stress can be mentally and physically draining and lead to poor nutrition and unhealthy lifestyle habits prompted by the quest to destress and let off steam.

It’s a fact that some people are naturally more flexible. However, if you appear to be doing the robot dance with stiff, jerky movements every time you move, then you might need to get some looseness and flow into your limbs. Yoga is all about greater flexibility and the benefits of this go way beyond trying to bend into a position that resembles a pretzel.

A new year is the perfect opportunity to regroup, reassess and bring some balance into your life. Start 2014 with an exercise style that incorporates the idea of balanced fitness. Pilates creates stability by in the whole body by focusing on six solid principles: concentration; control; centering; flow; precision; and breathing.

You don’t need to have had the biggest party of the festive season to end 2013 feeling a bit frazzled and in need of some R & R. Work and family life demands tend to ratchet up a notch or two as well, leaving most people feeling as if they are on the final leg of a rather exhausting end to a pretty eventful year.

Mention the word ‘yoga’ to some people and they wrinkle their nose up at a memory of when they’ve tried a class before and come out either not enjoying it or feeling that they simply can’t do it. While yoga attracts millions of fans around the world, there are many who have experienced an unpleasant yoga class in the past and have been put off ever since.