Does Yoga Have Real Fitness Benefits?
Take a look at someone in the Scorpio position and you will find that yoga can build strength and balance. But how does this stack up against traditional strength training and what yoga can’t do for your body?
Before we start, it’s important to note that there are many different yoga styles , and some will bring more athletic benefits than others. If you’re looking for yoga for fitness, look for the words ashtanga and vinyasa to find more athletic styles, although individual classes and instructors vary greatly and may not use these specific terms. Sometimes the titles are even more informative, such as “strength yoga,” but sometimes you just need to read the descriptions of the sessions or ask the instructor what to expect.
With that in mind, let’s talk about what yoga can (and cannot) do for your body.
Suitable for: Strength
Yoga can be beneficial for strength, depending on your current condition. Like any bodyweight workout , it starts out with difficulty, but it can be difficult (though not impossible) to maintain this challenge over time.
If you start out lounging around, it’s easy to find exercises – yoga poses or whatever – that challenge you. If a pose is fatiguing or painful in the muscles , it can help build strength.
Of course, the best exercise – this is something that you’ll actually perform, so at the beginning of your fitness journey (or when you come back after the break), select it with what you want to start . For many, this is yoga.
However, once you start, how do you progress? Strength training requires progressive overload : basically, working harder and harder over time. In the gym, this usually means using heavier weights. With yoga, you progress by holding the pose for longer, keeping it in better shape, or moving to a more advanced version of the pose.
This is why it is difficult: Yoga movements involve multiple muscles at once, supporting each other to make the pose possible. This is good and has to do with functional training – you teach your body parts to work together in useful ways. But this relationship makes it difficult to build muscle as quickly as possible. Your quads may be fully prepared for a single-legged chair pose, for example, but it can take weeks or months to prepare your smaller stabilizing leg muscles for their role in this pose.
This may be fine, depending on your goals. If you want to lose weight or build muscle in a short time, yoga alone will not help. But if you want to use yoga to work on other aspects of strength than what you do in the gym, or if advanced yoga exercises are an end in itself, yoga is a great choice.
In this case, how you do it matters. Home videos can take you far because the right shape is essential to build the right muscles in every pose. To build strength through yoga, you need to get feedback on how to do it right, so finding a good instructor is essential.
Suitable for: flexibility and balance
Yoga is great for flexibility. Some styles make this their main focus, but even more athletic styles tend to spend a lot of time stretching as you prepare for the more challenging movements of the day and when you cool off after them.
For those of us who never find time to stretch, this is a great way to make time for flexibility training. The more time you spend stretching, the more it helps your overall flexibility, so doing yoga will do much more for you than a few 30-second stretches at the end of your workout day.
Yoga also helps in neuromuscular training: coordination between the brain and muscles. Good communication here helps to maintain balance and possibly prevent injuries in sports – neuromuscular training (but not specifically yoga) seems toreduce some types of knee injuries .
Not suitable for: cardio
No matter how intense your yoga practice is, it doesn’t replace running, cycling, or other aerobic training: you just never get to a place where you breathe hard enough. Some studies have found benefits that may be associated with the risk of heart disease, such as lowering BMI and blood pressure. But in terms of cardio fitness – like the ability to run faster or farther – yoga is unlikely to help.
Yoga instructors agree that you will have to do some crazy intense yoga that goes far beyond your normal range to get your heart rates in areas that are considered vigorous exercise. In terms of cardio, yoga is more like walking: it can be done, but it doesn’t provide the same benefits as running.
Not good at: flushing out toxins, aligning chakras (whatever they are).
No matter how much you sweat or twist your spine, you are not going to excrete anything from your body . This is normal because your body is excellent at detoxifying it .
If you are going to do yoga for fitness, sometimes you have to put up with a little bit of pseudoscience from the instructors – for example, they may tell you not to do headstands during your period, which is a complete myth . Ignore any advice based on the flow of imaginary energy and focus on the real things going on in your body: what muscles are working, relaxing and stretching, and what your body is like. You know, just like any other exercise.
Illustration by Tara Jacoby.
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