Can Yoga Improve Your Sex Life?

The ancient Indian practice of Yoga offers many well known benefits: it promotes relaxation, eases anxiety, and improves joint function and flexibility.  But there’s another potential benefit that researchers have been exploring:  Yoga may also enhance sexual function, particularly in mid-life women. As reported in the April issue of the Harvard Women’s Health Watch newsletter, medical researchers focused on 40 healthy, married women, ages 22 to 55, who were enrolled in a Yoga program in India:

“They were instructed in a protocol of 22 Yoga poses that are believed to have positive effects on abdominal and pelvic muscle tone, digestion, joint function and mood. Each participant filled out a standard sexual-function questionnaire at the beginning and end of the 12-week program, which featured an hour of yoga practice each day, followed by breathing and relaxation. At the end of the program, researchers found improvements in the women’s sexual-function scores in the six domains that were assessed (desire, arousal, lubrication, orgasm, pain and overall satisfaction), particularly among women over age 45, who showed the greatest improvement in arousal, lubrication and pain. Nearly 75 percent of the women said they were more satisfied with their sexual life following the yoga training.”

If this study piques your interest and you want to test this hypothesis yourself, check out the complete list of the 22 poses (asanas) that were practiced in the study.  Here are just a few of them:

• cat’s posture (marjariasana) (shown above)
• triangle pose (Trikonasana);
• the snake (bhujangasana); and
• half spinal twist (ardha matsyendra mudra
• breath control (pranayama)

(The results of the study were published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine (11/12/09) and was the source of the HWHW newsletter story that I summarize here).