UHCL’s Friday Morning yoga program: benefits beyond the mat

August 9, 2017 | UHCL Staff

UHCL’s Friday Morning yoga program: benefits beyond the mat

Over the course of the last 10 years that University of Houston-Clear Lake Assistant Professor of School Psychology Julia Englund Strait has been regularly practicing yoga, she noticed two significant changes in her life. First, she found she could better cope with the stress of graduate school. Beyond that, she discovered that her mental clarity and problem-solving skills had improved, as well as her ability to focus longer. “The benefits of yoga go far beyond just relaxing or improving flexibility,” Strait said. “There are real mental benefits through the regular practice of yoga.”

Starting Sept. 8, UH-Clear Lake’s Friday Morning Continuing Education Program will offer faculty, staff, students, and the community the opportunity to explore the mental, physical, and emotional benefits of yoga for themselves. “I’ll be teaching a beginning yoga class Fridays at 1 p.m. for eight weeks and I hope people will give it a try,” Strait said. “If people would like to just come and learn about yoga, I’m glad to have them, but I’m also giving people the option to participate in some research I’m doing. This class is a bit of a pilot program as well.”

Strait, who is also Assistant Professor of School Psychology and Health Services Psychology and is serving as director of UHCL’s Psychological Services Clinic is primarily focused on studying and creating behavioral assessments and measurements. Together with her graduate students, she’s working to develop a survey designed to collect specific feedback from participants before and after the yoga class. “It’s just a few questions to ask about participants’ stress levels and higher-level mental processes like memory and attention, and at the end of the eight weeks, they’ll get a progress report to show whether yoga has made a difference in their overall mental and emotional health.”

The data will be used to support Strait’s ongoing research on executive function. “To get both mental and physical benefits, it’s better to do yoga for 20 minutes daily than once a week for three hours,” she said. “If you even do something for five minutes a day, it creates a habit. That’s another reason we’re collecting this information from participants. I’d like to look at the variables about the person participating and about their experience that predict improvements in behaviors related to higher-level mental processes, like memory, attention, and self-regulation.”

Christine Paul, director of UHCL’s foreign language and continuing education programs, said that the yoga class is the first step in the program’s goal of adding health and wellness components to continuing education. “I’m very impressed with Dr. Strait’s curriculum because she’ll be collecting data for research purposes and this is an opportunity to help further scientific knowledge as well as improve mental balance on campus and in the community,” she said.

Yoga, Strait acknowledged, isn’t necessarily for everyone. “I’d like to find out what elements about this class experience will predict who will get the most benefits from it. That way we can target people who are likely to get the maximum positive effects.”

If future “stress relief” classes are planned, Strait said the data she’s collecting can enable instructors to gear them to offer participants more useful interventions. “In order for the intervention to improve higher order thinking skills, it has to be restorative and relaxing, but also challenging and complex,” she said. “So, I’d like to find out if the class should be more challenging or more relaxing. I’d like to go further than just teach people to use yoga to relieve stress. I really want to know the ways in which it’s improving their mental clarity.”

Measuring the change that results from certain interventions is difficult. “In the survey we’re creating, I’m including questions purposely formulated to track change in executive functioning and higher order thinking,” Strait said.

“Throughout all the upheavals and changes I’ve had in my life for the past ten years, yoga has always been a constant for me,” she said. “Graduate school, several moves, a pregnancy and a new job – yoga was always there. It doesn’t have to interfere with your day. Just committing to taking a few minutes and doing two or three poses a day can make a big difference.”

To register for yoga or any Friday Morning Continuing Education class, visit www.uhcl.edu/academics/extended/friday-morning-ce.

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