Will Yoga Get You Your Revenge Body?
Why does it seem like everyone and their cat is doing yoga?
Your best friend, your co-worker’s baby, even your neighbor’s cat is doing yoga. In 2016 alone 21 million people practiced yoga. My relationship status with yoga is: it’s complicated. In theory it sounds great, but in reality most days I end up being too busy to do what feels like glorified stretching. Other days I might have time, but I feel like I have to get a more serious workout in, like running or HIIT. Actually, why should any of us do yoga?
What Can Yoga Help You With?
Not surprisingly yoga can help you improve your flexibility and balance. Why is this important? Because improving your flexibility and balance can help you improve your other workouts too. Yoga can also help you improve your strength. One study showed it can even help you increase your deadlift strength.
Yoga usually involves some type of meditation. Both can help you deal with stress and anxiety better. Also, studies show that people doing yoga feel like they have a better quality of life versus people who don’t. Yoga can help you feel better all day. Personally I had never had much luck with learning how to meditate until I started doing vinyasa yoga. My yoga teacher at the time always spent the last 5 minutes of class on meditation. Yoga is how I started getting into meditation too. If you’ve been trying to figure out meditation, yoga could be your back way into it.
What Can’t Yoga Help You With?
Yoga won’t help you improve your cardiovascular fitness, i.e it won’t help you get heart healthy or lose weight. Sad, I know, I’m a cardiologist. It also won’t help you live longer.
My opinion on why yoga doesn’t help you get heart healthy or lose weight is that most forms of yoga don’t increase your heart rate. If your yoga is more rigorous and increases your heart rate it might help you get more heart healthy and lose weight. Unfortunately there’s no great medical data for or against this idea right now.
Ask Again Later
The jury is still out on whether yoga improves your cognitive function, i.e. your memory and focus. Some studies show it does, some studies show it doesn’t.
Part of the problem with knowing the benefits of yoga is that there are a limited number of studies on it. Many aspects of yoga haven’t been studied enough to really know whether or not it helps. Unlike medications which have big pharmaceutical companies funding all of their research, yoga studies don’t seem to have the same level of funding from the yoga industry. Maybe they’re all too busy doing downward dog.
New or New-ish to Yoga?
If you’re new to yoga and afraid of looking dumb in a class, try it out at home first. There are a lot of videos on YouTube. I like Tara Stiles’ videos (I have no affiliation with her) because she has a lot of short (15 minutes or less), beginner ones.
If you’re trying a class for the first time, start out with room temperature yoga. Usually this will be a class that doesn’t have Bikram in the title. The first time I tried Bikram yoga I had muscle spasms for the next few days, even though I had lots of electrolytes and water afterwards, it still wasn’t enough. In my experience, the least crowded classes are usually mid-morning on weekdays. If you can, try to make it to one of those classes, so you can get more one on one help from the teacher.
Although yoga probably won’t help you get your revenge body, it’s worth checking out because the balance, flexibility, and strength benefits can help you with your other workouts. The mental benefits can help you with your head game at work and in your personal life.
If You Liked This Article
Check out my site If We Were Family to easily learn how you can lose weight and prevent heart disease with the same science backed advice I share with my family.
