Suryanamaskara is an Effective Practice for Overall Health Management: A Preliminary Review Study

Abstract

Background: With the increased physical inactivity and extreme demand for yogic culture worldwide, the author emphasized particularly one of the main yogic activities namely suryanamaskara (SN), or sun salutation, which has been carrying importance since the Vedic age. Purpose: The author did envisage analyzing as a preliminary review of how SN has been applied to overall health management. Method: A general google search was done for collecting articles, followed by major electronic databases which included Google Scholar, BASE, Semantic scholar, Science direct, ResearchGate, PubMed, DOAJ, and EBSCO. While searching, the keywords had been “surya namaskar*”, “suryanamaskar*”, and “sun salutation”. To enhance the chance of getting relevant articles, the author had gone through all references of each article and searched manually. Thereafter, the data were extracted. Result: A total of ninety-five (n=95) articles were amassed from all sources. Eight were excluded as they didn’t meet the inclusion criteria. The study had been done with 87 articles. Among these 87 articles, 24 articles were published particularly in yoga-related journals, 12 were published in health, physical education & sports-related journals, and the rest were in other journals. The average of publications on suryanamaskara in the first decade and second decade of the twenty-first century were 0.7 and 8.0 respectively. Overall, the proportion of physiological, psychological, health & fitness, biomechanical, combined, and other studies were 19%, 16%, 44%, 5%, 9%, and 7% respectively. Conclusion: Suryanamaskara had been applied as a medicine in different ways, to different health problems. It is highly established and proven as complementary medicine. Often used in place of a typical fitness program also.