Which Style Of Yoga Is Best For You?
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For you personally, that is—so let’s look at some options, their benefits, and what kind of person is most likely to benefit from each.
Yoga is, of course, an ancient practice, and like any ancient practice, especially one with so many practitioners (and thus also: so many teachers), there are very many branches to the tree of variations, that is to say, different schools and their offshoots.
Since we cannot possibly cover all of them, we’ll focus on five broad types that are popular (and thus, likely available near to you, unless you live in a very remote place):
Hatha Yoga
This is really the broadest of umbrella categories for yoga as a physical practice of the kind that most immediately comes to mind in the west:
- Purpose: energizes the practitioner through controlled postures and breath.
- Practice: non-heated, slow asanas held for about a minute with intentional transitions
- Benefits: reduces stress, improves flexibility, tones muscles, and boosts circulation.
- Best for: beginners with an active lifestyle.
Vinyasa Yoga
You may also have heard of this called simply “Flow”, without reference to the Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi sense of the word. Rather, it is about a flowing practice:
- Purpose: builds heat and strength through continuous, flowing movement paired with breath.
- Practice: dynamic sequences of the same general kind as the sun salutation, leading to a final resting pose.
- Benefits: enhances heart health, strengthens core, tones muscles, and improves flexibility.
- Best for: beginner to intermediate yogis seeking a cardio-based practice.
Hot Yoga
This one’s well-known and the clue is in the name; it’s yoga practised in a very hot room:
- Purpose: uses heat to increase heart rate, and loosen muscles.
- Practice: heated studio (32–42℃, which is 90–108℉), often with vinyasa flows, resulting in heavy sweating*
- Benefits: burns calories, improves mood, enhances skin, and builds bone density.
- Best for: intermediate yogis comfortable with heat; not recommended for certain health conditions.
*and also sometimes heat exhaustion / heat stroke. This problem arises most readily when the ambient temperature is higher than human body temperature, because that is the point at which sweating ceases to fulfil its biological function of cooling us down.
Noteworthily, a study found that doing the same series of yoga postures in the same manner, but without the heat, produced the same health benefits without the risk:
❝The primary finding from this investigation is that the hatha yoga postures in the Bikram yoga series produce similar enhancements in endothelium-dependent vasodilatation in healthy, middle-aged adults regardless of environmental temperature. These findings highlight the efficacy of yoga postures in producing improvements in vascular health and downplay the necessity of the heated practice environment in inducing vascular adaptations.❞
(“Bikram yoga” is simply the brand name of a particular school of hot yoga)
Yin Yoga
This is a Chinese variation, and is in some ways the opposite of the more vigorous forms, being gentler in pretty much all ways:
- Purpose: promotes deep tissue stretching and circulation by keeping muscles cool.
- Practice: passive, floor-based asanas held for 5–20 minutes in a calming environment.
- Benefits: increases flexibility, enhances circulation, improves mindfulness, and emotional release.
- Best for: all levels, regardless of health or flexibility.
Restorative Yoga
This is often tailored to a specific condition, but it doesn’t have to be:
- Purpose: encourages relaxation and healing through supported, restful poses.
- Practice: reclined, prop-supported postures in a soothing, low-lit setting.
- Benefits: relieves stress, reduces chronic pain, calms the nervous system, and supports healing.
- Best for: those recovering from illness/injury or managing emotional stress.
See for example: Yoga Therapy for Arthritis: A Whole-Person Approach to Movement and Lifestyle
Want to know more?
If you’re still unsure where to start, check out:
Yoga Teacher: “If I wanted to get flexible (from scratch) in 2025, here’s what I’d do”
Take care!
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Heal Your Stressed Brain
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Rochelle Walsh, therapist, explains the problem and how to fix it:
Not all brain damage is from the outside
Long-term stress and burnout cause brain damage; it’s not just a mindset issue—it impacts the brain physiologically. To compound matters, it also increases the risk of neurodegenerative diseases. While the brain can indeed grow new neurons and regenerate itself, chronic stress damages specific regions, and inhibits that.
There are some effects of chronic stress that can seem positive—the amygdalae and hypothalamus are seen to grow larger and stronger, for instance—but this is, unfortunately, “all the better to stress you with”. In compensation for this, chronic stress deprioritizes the pre-frontal cortex and hippocampi, so there goes your reasoning and memory.
This often results in people not managing chronic stress well. Just like a weak heart and lungs might impede the exercise that could make them stronger, the stressed brain is not good at permitting you to do the things that would heal it—preferring to keep you on edge all day, worrying and twitchy, mind racing and body tense. It also tends to lead to autoimmune diseases, due to the increased inflammation (because the body’s threat-detection system as at “jumping at own shadow” levels so it’s deploying every defense it has, including completely inappropriate ones).
Notwithstanding the “Heal Your Stressed Brain” thumbnail, she doesn’t actually go into this in detail and bids us sign up for her masterclass. We at 10almonds however like to deliver, so you can find useful advice and free resources in our links-drop at the bottom of this article.
Meanwhile, if you’d like to hear more about the neurological woes described above, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like to read:
- Meditation That You’ll Actually Enjoy
- How To Manage/Reduce Chronic Stress
- Lower Your Cortisol! (Here’s Why & How)
- How Healthy People Regulate Their Emotions
- Sleep: Yes, You Really Do Still Need It!
- Give Your Adrenal Glands A Chance
- The Stress Prescription (Against Aging!)
Take care!
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Securely Attached –
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A lot of books on attachment theory are quite difficult to read. They’re often either too clinical with too much jargon that can feel like incomprehensible psychobabble, or else too wishy-washy and it starts to sound like a horoscope for psychology enthusiasts.
This one does it better.
The author gives us a clear overview and outline of attachment theory, with minimal jargon and/but clearly defined terms, and—which is a boon for anyone struggling to remember which general attachment pattern is which—color-codes everything consistently along the way. This is one reason that we recommend getting a print copy of the book, not the e-book.
The other reason to invest in the print copy rather than the e-book is the option to use parts of it as a workbook directly—though if preferred, one can simply take the prompts and use them, without writing in the book, of course.
It’s hard to say what the greatest value of this book is because there are two very strong candidates:
- Super-clear and easy explanation of Attachment Theory, in a way that actually makes sense and will stick
- Excellent actually helpful advice on improving how we use the knowledge that we now have of our own attachment patterns and those of others
Bottom line: if you’d like to better understand Attachment Theory and apply it to your life, but have been put off by other presentations of it, this is the most user-friendly, no-BS version that this reviewer has seen.
Click here to check out Securely Attached, and upgrade your relationship(s)!
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Calm Your Mind with Food – by Dr. Uma Naidoo
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From the author of This Is Your Brain On Food, the psychiatrist-chef (literally, she is a Harvard-trained psychiatrist and an award-winning chef) is back with a more specific work, this time aimed squarely at what it says in the title; how to calm your mind with food.
You may be wondering: does this mean comfort-eating? And, well, not in the sense that term’s usually used. There will be eating and comfort will occur, but the process involves an abundance of nutrients, a minimization of health-deleterious ingredients, and a “for every chemical its task” approach. In other words, very much “nutraceuticals”, as our diet.
On which note: as we’ve come to expect from Dr. Naidoo, we see a lot of hard science presented simply and clearly, with neither undue sensationalization nor unnecessary jargon. We learn about the brain, the gut, relevant biology and chemistry, and build up from understanding ingredients to dietary patterns to having a whole meal plan, complete with recipes.
You may further be wondering: how much does it add that we couldn’t get from the previous book? And the answer is, not necessarily a huge amount, especially if you’re fairly comfortable taking ideas and creating your own path forwards using them. If, on the other hand, you’re a little anxious about doing that (as someone perusing this book may well be), then Dr. Naidoo will cheerfully lead you by the hand through what you need to know and do.
Bottom line: if not being compared to her previous book, this is a great standalone book with a lot of very valuable content. However, the previous book is a tough act to follow! So… All in all we’d recommend this more to people who want to indeed “calm your mind with food”, who haven’t read the other book, as this one will be more specialized for you.
Click here to check out Calm Your Mind With Food, and do just that!
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Age Later – by Dr. Nir Barzilai
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Dr. Barzilai discusses why we age, why supercentenarians age more slowly, and even, why it is so often the case that supercentenarians outside of Blue Zones have poor lifestyles (their longevity is because of protective genes that mitigate the harmful effects of those poor lifestyles—the ultimate in “survivorship bias”).
He also talks not just genetics, but also epigenetics, and thus gene expression. Bearing in mind, there’s a scale of modifiability there: with current tech, we can’t easily change a bad gene… But we often can just switch it off (or at least downregulate its expression). This is where studies in supercentenarians are helpful even for those who don’t have such fortunate genes—the supercentenarian studies show us which genes we want on or off, what gene expressions to aim for, etc. Further clinical studies can then show us what lifestyle interventions (exercise, diet, nutraceuticals, etc) can do that for us.
With regard to those lifestyle interventions, he does cover many, and that’s where a lot of the practical value of the book comes from. But it’s not just “do this, do that”; understanding the reasons behind why things work the way they do is important, so as to be more likely to do it right, and also to enjoy greater adherence (we tend to do things we understand more readily than things we have just been told to do).
There are areas definitely within the author’s blind spots—for example, when talking about menopausal HRT, he discusses at great length the results of the discredited WHI study, and considers it the only study of relevance. So, this is a reminder to not believe everything said by someone who sounds confident (Dr. Barzilai’s professional background is mostly in treating diabetes).
In terms of style, it is very much narrative; somewhat pop-science, but more “this doctor wants to tell stories”. So many stories. Now, the stories all have informational value, so this isn’t padding, but it is the style, so we mention it as such. As for citations, there aren’t any, so if you want to look up the science he mentions, you’re going to need a bit of digital sleuthery to find the papers from the clues in the stories.
Bottom line: if you’re interested in the science of aging and how that has been progressing for the past decades and where we’re at, this book will give you so many jumping-off points, and is an engaging read.
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When “Normal” Health Is Not What You Want
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It’s Q&A Day at 10almonds!
Have a question or a request? You can always hit “reply” to any of our emails, or use the feedback widget at the bottom!
In cases where we’ve already covered something, we might link to what we wrote before, but will always be happy to revisit any of our topics again in the future too—there’s always more to say!
As ever: if the question/request can be answered briefly, we’ll do it here in our Q&A Thursday edition. If not, we’ll make a main feature of it shortly afterwards!
So, no question/request too big or small
❝When going to sleep, I try to breathe through my nose (since everyone says that’s best). But when I wake I often find that I am breathing through my mouth. Is that normal, or should I have my nose checked out?❞
It is quite normal, but when it comes to health, “normal” does not always mean “optimal”.
- Good news: it is correctable!
- Bad news: it is correctable by what may be considered rather an extreme practice that comes with its own inconveniences and health risks.
Some people correct this by using medical tape to keep their mouth closed at night, ensuring nose-breathing. Advocates of this say that after using it for a while, nose-breathing in sleep will become automatic.
We know of no hard science to confirm this, and cannot even offer a personal anecdote on this one. Here are some pop-sci articles that do link to the (very few) studies that have been conducted:
- Mouth taping may be a trending sleep hack, but the science behind it is slim
- Mouth Taping for Sleep: Does it Work? And What are the Side Effects?
This writer’s personal approach is simply to do breathing exercises when going to sleep and first thing upon awakening, and settle for imperfection in this regard while asleep.
Meanwhile, take care!
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Dr. Greger’s Anti-Aging Eight
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Dr. Greger’s Anti-Aging Eight
This is Dr. Michael Greger. We’ve featured him before: Brain Food? The Eyes Have It!
This time, we’re working from his latest book, the excellent “How Not To Age”, which we reviewed all so recently. It is very information-dense, but we’re going to be focussing on one part, his “anti-aging eight”, that is to say, eight interventions he rates the most highly to slow aging in general (other parts of the book pertained to slowing eleven specific pathways of aging, or preserving specific bodily functions against aging, for example).
Without further ado, his “anti-aging eight” are…
- Nuts
- Greens
- Berries
- Xenohormesis & microRNA manipulation
- Prebiotics & postbiotics
- Caloric restriction / IF
- Protein restriction
- NAD+
As you may have noticed, some of these are things might appear already on your grocery shopping list; others don’t seem so “household”. Let’s break them down:
Nuts, greens, berries
These are amongst the most nutrient-dense and phytochemical-useful parts of the diet that Dr. Greger advocates for in his already-famous “Dr. Greger’s Daily Dozen”.
For brevity, we’ll not go into the science of these here, but will advise you: eat a daily portion of nuts, a daily portion of berries, and a couple of daily portions of greens.
Xenohormesis & microRNA manipulation
You might, actually, have these on your grocery shopping list too!
Hormesis, you may recall from previous editions of 10almonds, is about engaging in a small amount of eustress to trigger the body’s self-strengthening response, for example:
Xenohormesis is about getting similar benefits, second-hand.
For example, plants that have been grown to “organic” standards (i.e. without artificial pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers) have had to adapt to their relatively harsher environment by upping their levels of protective polyphenols and other phytochemicals that, as it turns out, are as beneficial to us as they are to the plants:
Hormetic Effects of Phytochemicals on Health and Longevity
Additionally, the flip side of xenohormesis is that some plant compounds can themselves act as a source of hormetic stress that end up bolstering us. For example:
In essence, it’s not just that it has anti-oxidant effect; it also provides a tiny oxidative-stress immunization against serious sources of oxidative stress—and thus, aging.
MicroRNA manipulation is, alas, too complex to truly summarize an entire chapter in a line or two, but it has to do with genetic information from the food that we eat having a beneficial or deleterious effect to our own health:
Diet-derived microRNAs: unicorn or silver bullet?
A couple of quick takeaways (out of very many) from Dr. Greger’s chapter on this is to spring for the better quality olive oil, and skip the cow’s milk:
- Impact of Phenol-Enriched Virgin Olive Oils on the Postprandial Levels of Circulating microRNAs Related to Cardiovascular Disease
- MicroRNA exosomes of pasteurized milk: potential pathogens of Western diseases
Prebiotics & Postbiotics
We’re short on space, so we’ll link you to a previous article, and tell you that it’s important against aging too:
Making Friends With Your Gut (You Can Thank Us Later)
An example of how one of Dr. Greger’s most-recommended postbiotics helps against aging, by the way:
- The mitophagy activator urolithin A is safe and induces a molecular signature of improved mitochondrial and cellular health in humans
- Urolithin A improves muscle strength, exercise performance, and biomarkers of mitochondrial health in a randomized trial in middle-aged adults
(Urolithin can be found in many plants, and especially those containing tannins)
See also: How to Make Urolithin Postbiotics from Tannins
Caloric restriction / Intermittent fasting
This is about lowering metabolic load and promoting cellular apoptosis (programmed cell death; sounds bad; is good) and autophagy (self-consumption; again, sounds bad; is good).
For example, he cites the intermittent fasters’ 46% lower risk of dying in the subsequent years of follow-up in this longitudinal study:
For brevity we’ll link to our previous IF article, but we’ll revisit caloric restriction in a main feature on of these days:
Fasting Without Crashing? We sort the science from the hype!
Dr. Greger favours caloric restriction over intermittent fasting, arguing that it is easier to adhere to and harder to get wrong if one has some confounding factor (e.g. diabetes, or a medication that requires food at certain times, etc). If adhered to healthily, the benefits appear to be comparable for each, though.
Protein restriction
In contrast to our recent main feature Protein vs Sarcopenia, in which that week’s featured expert argued for high protein consumption levels, protein restriction can, on the other hand, have anti-aging effects. A reminder that our body is a complex organism, and sometimes what’s good for one thing is bad for another!
Dr. Greger offers protein restriction as a way to get many of the benefits of caloric restriction, without caloric restriction. He further notes that caloric restriction without protein restriction doesn’t decrease IGF-1 levels (a marker of aging).
However, for FGF21 levels (these are good and we want them higher to stay younger), what matters more than lowering proteins in general is lowering levels of the amino acid methionine—found mostly in animal products, not plants—so the source of the protein matters:
For example, legumes deliver only 5–10% of the methionine that meat does, for the same amount of protein, so that’s a factor to bear in mind.
NAD+
This is about nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide, or NAD+ to its friends.
NAD+ levels decline with age, and that decline is a causal factor in aging, and boosting the levels can slow aging:
Therapeutic Potential of NAD-Boosting Molecules: The In Vivo Evidence
Can we get NAD+ from food? We can, but not in useful quantities or with sufficient bioavailability.
Supplements, then? Dr. Greger finds the evidence for their usefulness lacking, in interventional trials.
How to boost NAD+, then? Dr. Greger prescribes…
Exercise! It boosts levels by 127% (i.e., it more than doubles the levels), based on a modest three-week exercise bike regimen:
Skeletal muscle NAMPT is induced by exercise in humans
Another study on resistance training found the same 127% boost:
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