Are you getting enough exercise from yoga?

Transcript

hello welcome back to my channel thank you for joining me for another video today we're talking about yoga as a form of exercise is it enough how effective is Yoga as a form of exercising our bodies and is Yoga even supposed to be considered a form of exercise those of you who might have seen that I opened up this question to add a little community so I've got some questions some brilliant questions from you so we're going to get to that a little quick fire q a at the end of the video first of all we're going to look at how effective yoga is as a form of exercise and whether or not yoga is actually supposed to be a form of exercise so let's get into it so first of all is it right or wrong to consider yoga a form of exercise you might have seen in the kind of day of a life Vlog that I posted a little while ago I talked a bit about why I do strength training and then I talked a little bit about yoga as a form of exercise and in that video I explained that yoga historically was not really considered a form of exercise yoga was a spiritual practice that over time these asanas these postures kind of developed as part of this spiritual practice so really the postures the movement was a way of shifting and moving Prana um that's the word in Sanskrit that means like subtle energy it's a way of Shifting and moving Prana and preparing our bodies and our minds for meditation so it wasn't developed as this full exercise system that we kind of see yoga as or we might see yoga as here in the west at least in the modern day so the question could be asked is it actually maybe a little bit disrespectful to think of yoga as just a form of exercise when really it has this Broad and deep and Rich philosophy and history that comes along with it and really it's a spiritual practice these are things that we have to consider for the purpose of this video I am going to talk about yoga as if it were just a movement practice I'm going to pick apart the Asana part of yoga so USANA is a Sanskrit word meaning the postures so let's delve into how effective yoga asanas are as a form of movement I'm going to break this down into three parts so we're going to look at Mobility strength and cardio respiratory Health let's start with Mobility this is often a kind of overlooked element of physical well-being and fitness and health but it's so important if we think about when we get older our Mobility naturally decreases examples that we can look at are if you wanted to bend down or sit down on the floor to play with a baby or to stroke a dog for example are you right now watching this video able to sit down onto the floor cross your legs and get comfy and then stand back up from that position that requires a pretty good level of Mobility if you are in your kitchen can you reach right up to the top shelf and get things down from there without straining or hurting yourself these are simple functional things that we want to be able to do and hopefully we can do them but we want to be able to keep doing them into our later life as well so Mobility so important and yoga is brilliant for helping us with our Mobility for increasing our flexibility our range of motion so of those three things strength mobility and cardio Fitness Mobility is probably the biggest one that yoga helps us with so it's a big tick for Mobility so now let's look at Fitness cardio respiratory Fitness here in the UK the NHS guidelines show that we should be aiming for at least 150 minutes of moderate intensity activity per week or 75 minutes of vigorous intensity activity per week and in case you're not sure they give some pretty specific examples moderate activity is something that raises your heart rate and makes you breathe faster and feel warmer brisk walking water aerobics riding a bike dancing doubles tennis not singles tennis but doubles pushing a lawnmower hiking rollerblading vigorous intensity they describe as something that makes you breathe hard and fast if you're working at this level you will not be able to say more than a few words without pausing for breath examples are running sitting writing like fast or on Hills walking upstairs sports like football ripping skipping aerobics gymnastics martial arts if we're coming back to yoga as a practice does it fit the bill does it work as moderate intensity or vigorous intensity activity the answer really is it depends it depends on what your starting point is if you are someone who's fairly inactive and then you start a yoga practice where you're moving through these Dynamic asanas and postures then probably it will be enough to get your heart rate up enough to challenge your cardio respiratory system so it will increase your Fitness but if you're coming to yoga from a point where you're already moving around fairly regularly you're used to doing some kind of physical activity then chances are unless you're doing a super intense vinyasa flow you're not going to be getting your heart rate up and enough to really challenge your cardio respiratory system as a fun little visual I thought I'd show you my heart rate data from my Fitbit for a couple of different forms of exercise here's my heart rate data doing a yin yoga practice now of course this is not something that's designed to lift your heart rate in fact it's probably going to drop down to almost a resting heart rate when you're practicing in yoga because the purpose of that practice is to relax you and then if we compare it to a strong vinyasa flow so this is where I was moving quite quickly through different postures this is about as energetic as a yoga practice can get then let's compare that to going for a walk so walking at a fairly quick pace and you can see that my heart rate is actually even higher than it was when doing the Vinyasa low so in terms of cardio Fitness even going for a walk is going to challenge your cardio system a little bit more than a vinyasa flow and then here is my heart rate on my bike so going on a bike ride where I was pushing myself fairly hard going up and down Hills so you can see that my heart rate goes up to quite a high level and it is consistently relatively high so this is something that is really challenging my cardio system so to sum up in terms of cardio respiratory exercise yoga is not really enough on its own looking to do something else to challenge the cardio respiratory system to get a whole sort of well-rounded level of fitness and physical health and the third and final element of exercise that we'll look at is strength papow I can't believe I did that I'm really sorry that's really embarrassing I might not put that in the video yoga asanas are brilliant excellent at increasing your overall strength levels and you might remember if you've been practicing yoga for a little while when you first started you may have found things like downward facing dog or holding a plank really challenging and then after a few weeks or maybe a few months of practice you could probably hold them fairly easily breathe and relax there for quite a long time and that is your body your muscles adapting to that movement getting stronger and you'll notice this through your whole body your legs are going to get stronger and your Warrior poses and standing balances your arms and your upper body is going to get a lot stronger through planks downward dog and all of the vinyasas so Cobra upward dog things like that so overall your whole body is likely to get a lot stronger through practicing yoga the only thing that's missing from a yoga practice is one type of movement and I'm really curious before I reveal it if you know already so if you do leave it in the comments below let me know if you knew this already or if this is news to you can you think of what type of movement pattern is missing from a yoga Asana practice I'll give you three more seconds to guess and the answer is drumroll uh a pulling action when we break down different types of movement if you were to do strength training in the gym you might know a bit about this we're looking to replicate you know functional things that we can do so pushing pushing actions are really important we get a lot of those through yoga with pushing the ground away when we're in plank when we're in downward dog all of this lifting and lowering from the ground we get twisting actions we get sort of side Bend lateral flexion action all of that stuff we get to do a lot through yoga but there's no way of replicating a pulling action and this is the kind of movement that translates in the real world to things like picking up something really heavy picking up your shopping bags picking up the laundry basket we don't really get to replicate that movement through a yoga Asana practice so in the gym examples of this would be a deadlift where you're picking weight up from the ground or a row where you're pulling something in towards your body a heavy weight but that really is the only kind of movement pattern that we are missing in a yoga Asana practice so across those three things yoga really ticks two of the boxes really well mobility and Strength yoga is brilliant for cardio respiratory Fitness Yoga is not so great for let's finish up by answering a few questions that you had on Instagram so first one is Daily Yoga enough to tone abs and another question that was similar was can you tone up through yoga when we use the word tone we're talking about trying to make the muscles look a little bit more defined to make our bodies look a little bit more muscular and lean the only way you can really tone up is two things firstly increasing your muscle mass so making the muscles stronger and larger and we do this through strength training so yoga can help with this it can help to make those ab muscles or muscles throughout the body a little bit bigger weight training in the gym is possibly more effective because we can use Progressive overload where we're going into heavier weights and just increasing the load on the body and then the second thing the slightly harder thing I would say to make those bigger muscles visible is to reduce body fat so this is the tough bit we have to build strength in the muscles make the muscles bigger and then it's the layer of fat that's on top of the muscles that prevents them from being visible so essentially we have to reduce our body fat percentage can we do this through yoga potentially but as I said before yoga isn't great as a form of cardio so yoga alone is probably not going to help you to reduce your body fat percentage enough to make it that noticeable annoyingly we can't just spot reduce fat so that means picking an area where we want to get leaner so for example your tummy you can't do certain exercises that are just going to burn fat from your tummy fat just exists over your body as a whole and it will be reduced in general as a whole reducing body fat percentage comes from movement and also looking at your nutrition what is the best form of exercise to do alongside yoga I would say my opinion any form of cardio is going to be your best bet the obvious ones are running cycling swimming things that really get your heart rate up but and this might sound a little bit cheesy but it's so true the best form of cardio is the one you enjoy if you can find something that you actually enjoy doing you're so much more likely to stick with it and keep at it it doesn't have to be stuffy and boring it doesn't have to be going and running on a treadmill for hours or going on the rowing machine at the gym you can make cardio fun and just as a side note I was a child and a teenager who hated exercise I used to skip PE at school I used to forge notes from my mum to say that I couldn't I couldn't swim because I'd hurt my back like I hated it so if the teenage version of me Could See Me Now saying cardio can be fun I think she'd probably throw up but here we are it's happened so cardio could be putting on some music and giving yourself half an hour where you just dance around your living room if you've got kids that's a great way of doing some cardio get them involved have a dance around as long as you can feel your heart rate increasing you're getting warmer you're getting a little bit breathless that's all you need to increase your Fitness getting involved in a sports team that's a great way of keeping up that kind of motivation to keep going back is if you're part of a team and you're doing a group activity the other thing that I find works really nicely alongside yoga is strength training so going to the gym and picking up heavy things I started doing this about a year and a half ago and it's really helped my yoga practice as well it's made me much more strong and stable in the postures and the two things feed into each other my yoga practice really helps to stretch and release all of the muscles that I worked when I'm in the gym and my work in the gym helps me to get stronger in my yoga asanas as well so win-win and of course in the gym you can you can do that pulling action that we're missing a little bit in our yoga practice are there particular types of Yoga that will get your heart rate up more I think we kind of covered this already so obviously something like Yin Yoga is going to actually potentially lower your heart rate and bring it down to a resting state something like vinyasa flow at the other end of the spectrum is going to get your heart rate up much more the other type of yoga that's not my favorite but you might consider here is hot yoga it's not for everybody but Hot Yoga is when we practice yoga in a heated environment this puts a bit more strain on your cardio respiratory system so potentially could get your heart rate up more yeah hot yoga might be a good one to try if that's something you're interested in personally my body doesn't really get on with hot yoga I get a little bit too faint and wobbly so it's not my favorite is Yoga enough to lose weight it depends my answer to all of these things is it depends it depends what else you're doing yoga on its own just doing yoga is probably not going to make you lose weight unless you are also changing your nutrition doing other forms of exercises that get your heart rate up so cardio yoga can be a piece in the puzzle of helping to reduce your body fat or your weight but probably on its own no do you have advice for practicing yoga alongside marathon training wow that's very impressive and very exciting um yoga is brilliant to do alongside marathon training or running in general running is a great form of cardio great way of building strength through your body it can leave you feeling very tight so yoga and stretching and movement is a great way to cool down after a run and get your keep your body nice and mobile yoga also can be great for preventing injury because if we're running all the time and they're not stretching afterwards muscles can get very tight and that's when injuries can happen so yoga alongside marathon training brilliant great idea I would recommend before each run it's better to do some kind of dynamic stretch rather than just a static stretch where you're holding before running so I'm going to do it for you here one of the things I tend to do to warm up for I mean I don't run a lot at the moment but if I'm warming up to go on my bike for example or anything like that a good Dynamic stretch would be coming down into your Yogi Squat and then lifting up and coming into a forward fold and doing this a few times to get those muscles really nice and warm moving through your range of motion getting the mobility up and then another one is coming into a big lunge position going from there to pulling the hips back and moving forwards and backs with it lots of times so doing something like that before a run you don't need to do much more than that is great and then it's after your run when your yoga practice is gonna probably be the most beneficial so after you've come back from running same with cycling with any other form of like sport where your muscles are going to be tightening up a bit afterwards is when we look at going into those deeper static stretches so a yin yoga practice could be really nice after it's also a nice way of getting your heart rate back down again calming the nervous system so that would be my advice I think we'll leave it there I hope this has been helpful um if you have more questions leave them below I'll try and get back to as many of you as I can if you enjoyed this video you may enjoy some of these videos on the screen now other things that I have talked about here on YouTube uh thank you again for watching hope to see you again soon