Yoga can strengthen muscles without the risk of injury associated with weightlifting. Furthermore, yoga helps increase flexibility and endurance.
Yoga may not provide as many aerobic benefits as running or biking, but it still can raise your heart rate and help build muscle across all major muscle groups. More intense yoga styles like Yin, Bikram and power may even assist with endurance.
Flexibility
Flexibility refers to your ability to move your joints through their range of motion. In fitness yoga, flexibility is important because it enables you to gain maximum benefit from strength training and cardiovascular exercises that you incorporate into your exercise regimen.
Training can also play a vital role in injury prevention by increasing muscle range of motion, helping prevent strain on muscles and joint damage.
Flexibility can be measured using various tests, including the sit-and-reach test. As opposed to other aspects of physical fitness, flexibility varies significantly across individual joints and muscles and by gender and age; making comparison across a large population challenging. Research does show that higher flexibility may correlate with less back pain and greater musculoskeletal health benefits.
Strength
Yoga helps build strong foundations of muscle while increasing balance and strengthening your core. It makes an excellent complement to weight training programs.
When combining yoga and weight training into your workout regime, it is essential to begin with a warm up session in order to prevent injury or increase efficiency. Yoga provides an effective warm up option as its short hold times help stretch out muscles before beginning weight training routines.
Yoga as a warmup can also help increase flexibility and lower injury risks, so beginner styles of yoga may be preferable to more intensive HIIT classes.
Yoga poses that involve holding your body still for extended periods can help stabilize muscles and joints while building bone strength in legs, arms, and back. Strength training such as this also increases bone density which may reduce your risk of osteoporosis.
Endurance
Endurance refers to your body’s capacity for sustained physical exertion, whether that means cardiovascular endurance or muscular endurance. Cardiovascular endurance refers to how efficiently oxygen is provided during intense physical activity while muscular endurance refers to how your skeletal muscles respond when under continuous physical pressure.
“Endurance” comes from the Latin verb for suffering, and refers to someone’s ability to persevere through challenging events or situations without giving up, such as running a marathon without succumbing to fatigue. Additionally, “endurance” refers to mental strength used to cope with painful times in one’s life such as bereavement or separation.
Yoga can help build muscular endurance as it involves repeated strengthening movements over long periods. Furthermore, many poses use your own body weight as resistance for maximum muscle strengthening effectiveness compared to using machines or free weights. Yoga may also improve cardiovascular endurance; studies have indicated regular practice of yoga reduces cardiovascular disease risk factors like high blood pressure and cholesterol.
Mental Health
Mental health refers to the state of an individual’s emotional, psychological and social well-being that determines their mood and behaviors – including how well they manage stress or hardship.
Yoga can play an invaluable role in improving mental health. Studies have demonstrated its beneficial properties to reduce depression symptoms, ease anxiety and bring on feelings of calmness. Yoga practice also reduces blood pressure while increasing oxygen delivery to the brain, and even decrease blood pressure by improving breathing patterns.
Yoga offers an alternative form of exercise that encourages deep breathing and relaxation, making for an excellent way to relieve stress and promote better restful sleep. Classes often feature meditation-inspired practices and an idyllic environment which help facilitate this goal.
Recent research also demonstrated that yoga could significantly decrease frequency and severity of posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms in women who had experienced trauma, prompting many psychiatric physicians and medical professionals to recommend it as a therapy option for depression, anxiety or other related conditions. It’s no wonder so many medical professionals now recommend it!
