There's nothing like an intense yoga session that can put your mind and body at ease.
Whether you're a beginner or full-fledged yogi, yoga has been proven to improve flexibility, help you get stronger, increase your blood flow and correct that slouch.
In fact, yoga's popularity has recently surged among adults, children and seniors.
But sometimes, you can get way more than what you signed up for at a yoga class: the Big O.
That's right. An orgasm. Many yoga gurus and instructors have told the Daily Mail that they or their students are experiencing an exercise-induced orgasm, or yogasm, during yoga.
But it doesn't stop at just anecdotal evidence: There's a growing range of scientific evidence supporting the ability to climax in Downward Dog.
One study from Indiana University found that 40 percent of women have experienced a coregasm, an orgasm induced by ab workouts like crunches and planks, and 20 percent of women achieved an orgasm through yoga.
It makes sense considering much of yoga involves stabilizing your core and strengthening your core muscles through longer-held poses.
But it's not just yoga.
The study found that a lucky selection of subjects even reported orgasms or sexual pleasure during weight-lifting, cycling, running hiking or brisk walking.
If climaxing in class isn't more incentive to hit the mat, another study found that regular yoga helped improve women's sex lives, from getting in the mood to the Big O, in the long run.
In fact, yoga's not too far from getting intimate in the sheets (or floor, if that's your thing). In both cases, you're getting flexible and sweaty, using your deep, pelvic floor muscles, and likely listening to music to reflect the mood.
One of yoga's main goals is to activate and strengthen muscles in and around the genitalia, or the mula bandha, according to the Daily Beast.
Raj Barker, a Sydney-based yoga instructor told the Daily Mail,
It's a practice that requires you to be body aware and present, not dissimilar to love making. And the main poses that can help 'get you there' are the ones that engage the core and therefore impact the sex organs.
So your best bet at achieving the Big O would have to include poses that focus on your core and pelvic areas.
The Daily Mail lists a few, including the Boat Pose, Yogi Squat, Wide Leg Child's Pose, and Happy Baby Pose, and notes the importance of focusing on rhythmic breathing. May the force be with you.
Citations: Rise of the Yogasm (The Daily Mail), Yoga in female sexual functions (The Journal of Sexual Medicine), Exercise can lead to female orgasm, sexual pleasure (Sexual and Relationship Therapy)
