Lose weight, tone up and live your life without fatigue - practise yoga. It is a natural and scientifically proven way to improve fitness and drop the pounds - and you don’t need a gym membership or an intensive exercise and diet regime. Yoga boosts your energy levels, improves cardiovascular fitness and burns fat…
But is yoga enough?
Surely yoga can’t provide a complete fitness regime? It must need combining with running, weight lifting or some other exercises, right? No. Practicing yoga offers you many more health benefits than relaxation and increased flexibility - yoga improves strength, endurance, aerobic capacity, burns fat and reduces risk of heart attack and disease.
Yoga can be the solution for you - it provides you with what you need to stay fit. Plus, it’s great for toning, so you’ll look as well as feel great.
What is fitness?
- The ability to function without feeling fatigued
- The ability to maintain physical activity over time
- Remaining healthy, for example being at a low risk of disease
The science
According to the American College of Sports Medicine - the largest exercise science association in the world - there are four cornerstones of fitness. These are
flexibility, muscular fitness,
cardio respiratory fitness and
body composition (fat and non fat ratio)
- Cardio respiratory fitness and yoga
This refers to the condition of your heart, lungs and blood vessels, including heart rate and lung capacity. These aspects determine how efficiently oxygen enters your lungs and bloodstream and how efficiently your muscles use this oxygen. The better your cardio respiratory fitness, the lower your risk of diseases, including diabetes, cancer and heart disease.
The way to build cardio respiratory fitness is by exercising at an intensity, which raises your heart rate significantly - something you can do effectively and mostly easily with yoga. You may not consider yoga an intense, heart-pumping workout, but it actually raises your heart rate as much as running does, providing the perfect cardio workout.
Yoga also allows lung capacity to increase by improving the flexibility of the rib area, shoulders and back, so the lungs can expand more fully. Breath work boosts lung capacity further, as the diaphragm is conditioned to move more effectively, allowing blood to be fully oxygenated. In addition, as muscles become larger through yoga they are able to use more oxygen more efficiently.
- Muscular fitness and yoga
Muscular fitness comprises muscle strength and muscle endurance. Muscle is such an active tissue that it plays a vital role in regulating your metabolism - every pound of muscle burns 35 to 50 calories per day. Without exercise, muscle mass is lost more quickly than the average rate that is inevitable with ageing.
Exercise science experts recommend that you improve your muscular fitness - and therefore your efficiency at burning calories - by targeting each major muscle group in turn in a repetitive and weight-bearing way. When you practice yoga with a qualified teacher, you will spend time focussing on distinct muscle groups by moving through a flow of specific poses and repeating. You bear weight by holding your body up and in position, and the longer you can hold each pose for, the more intensely you target the muscles.
Your flexibility is the range of motion you have around joints and connected bones, such as knees, shoulders, elbows and the spine. Loss of flexibility increases the chance of pain and injury, even in other areas of the body. For example, tight hamstrings will pull down on the pelvis, putting pressure on the lower back and causing
backache.
Increased flexibility is the most commonly known benefit of yoga, a practice, which requires much stretching. In addition, a side effect of increased flexibility is better muscular fitness, as well as cardio respiratory fitness due to the effort exerted by powerful stretches and positions.
Body composition refers to the ratio in your body between fat and non-fat tissues (muscles, bones, organs). Essentially, too much fat in comparison with other tissues raises your risk of disease and decreases your general fitness and ability to live without fatigue.
As a sufficient and subtly intensive fitness routine, yoga ensures your muscles as well as your bones and even internal organs remain healthy and capable, while fat is burned through the cardio respiratory effects and through having more muscle mass to burn calories.
A holistic approach
Yoga addresses all aspects of physical fitness, but it also offers you something more - it brings your body into a state of physical
harmony and heightens your
awareness.
Yoga’s flow and emphasis on balance ensures that you stretch and exercise muscles equally, so that they become equal in strength and flexibility - this harmony allows your body to work at maximum capacity, including during exercise.
Your awareness of your physical being is also heightened through yoga as you focus on breathing and meditation, coming to feel a strong connection with and appreciation of your own body. This powerfully improves your emotional health, which is an important part of keeping fit as it affects your lifestyle choices, your happiness, your desire to take care of yourself, even your relationship with food.
Stress-busting
Stress is extremely damaging to your health, yet many people live with it constantly. Modern life is often stressful, but yoga teaches you how to relax deeply and
reduces everyday stress levels.
Mainly, yoga offers you a combination of the three main practical
stress-management techniques – breathing exercises, muscle exercise and meditation. Yoga activates your body’s own natural relaxation response, which is a powerful antidote to stress and important for your well-being - this response deepens your breathing, reduces stress hormones and blood pressure, slows your heart rate, relaxes your muscles and regulates the nervous system.
In addition,
yogic philosophy and
meditation guides you towards contentment, so you get less stressed about life and stay healthier.
Being energetic
Yoga is your chance to refresh after a hectic day, regaining energy lost and bringing your body back into balance. Everyday energy levels are boosted through regular yoga practice combined with proper relaxation at the end of a session.
Top tips and the best yoga poses for fitness
Standing poses and balancing poses - These positions often call for more strength and make your yoga session more aerobically challenging when performed in succession. They require sustained exercise for many muscle groups and increase the heart rate.
Sun Salutations (Surya Namaskar) - These aerobically challenging sequences will stretch, strengthen and energise the whole body. The sequence should flow well, so that continual movement and sustained exercise improves muscular fitness while providing a cardio workout.
Plank Pose (Chaturangadandasana) - A great pose for improving your core strength and abdominals. This is a challenging static posture that can be repeated with short rests in between for exhaling.
Warrior Pose (Virabhadrasana) - A powerful standing pose which works the thighs.
Bridge Pose (Setu Bandha Sarvangasana) - A strong backbend and gentle inversion that works the thighs and buttocks.
Corpse Pose (Sivasana) - After a yoga session, rest in the Corpse pose for at least five minutes while you consciously relax each part of your body and breathe deeply through your abdomen. This is important in order for your body to be able to reap the benefits of the past session.
Remember!
A good yoga session will include a balance of poses for strength, stamina and flexibility, as well as breath work and meditation.
If you want to use yoga to get fitter, lose weight and live a more energetic, healthy life, have a look at my about me page and browse my courses, workshops, weekend and holiday retreats. I am a qualified yoga teacher, trained by The International Sivananda Yoga Vedanta Centres, a yoga organisation recognised worldwide.
More benefits
Apart from helping you to get into shape, yoga also offers you:
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
- Improvement of many medical conditions
- Relief from allergy and asthma symptoms
