Eri Redmond, SPENGA Wheat Ridge Lead Instructor, 200-hour RYT
(As seen in West Highland Living Magazine)
When you think about ways to get stronger, I’m willing to bet, practicing yoga isn’t the first thing that comes to mind.
The benefits to yoga are seemingly endless, and in addition to providing juicy stretches, can help you reach your strength training goals and give you a great workout.
In fact, yoga is a beautiful way to cap off a high-intensity workout and help you maximise your sweat session.
- Yoga helps build, strengthen and tone your muscles
Yoga is essentially a series of bodyweight exercises beautifully woven together. In any given yoga flow, you’ll undoubtedly be lunging, squatting, doing push-ups, holding planks — and maybe even doing arm balances. Oftentimes, you’re holding these poses for longer times than you would in a traditional weight lifting session, causing what is known as mechanical damage.
Mechanical damage sounds like something you don’t want, right? Wrong. This is the process that causes microscopic tears in the muscle, which grow back bigger and stronger. The same thing happens when you lift weights.
Additionally, a lot of yoga poses are eccentric, which means the muscle is lengthening, and this is the part of movement that is thought to aid in muscle hypertrophy — or muscle growth. - Make yoga a continuation of your workout
If you follow-up your cardio and HiiT — high intensity interval training — workout with yoga, you can continue to burn calories on the mat. The combination of the bodyweight exercises and tempo of a yoga vinyasa flow, means your heart rate will stay elevated and you will continue to sweat.
Yoga will often feature poses that create the eccentric overload we talked about to help build muscle, as well as balancing postures that provide an extra challenge after a HiiT or cardio workout when your legs are already tired. This causes your muscles to work even harder for you, you’re still working out even once you’ve finished your sweaty spin session or put your weights down.
Some people have the misconception that when they step on to their yoga mat, after a HiiT workout it’s time to lie down and cool the body down. While you might want to take a nap right away, we need to keep our head above our hearts and arrive standing on your mat. Since the body is still warm, it is best to continue with strengthing and balancing poses for at least half of your time on the mat to maximize your workout before cooling the body down, with poses that help stretch the body and improve flexibility. - Yoga will help build flexibility and prevent muscle soreness
Our muscles are like rubber bands and the best time to stretch a rubber band isn’t when it’s cold, right?
Following a workout, your muscles are already nice and warm, so this is the best time to stretch them and help restore — and improve — their range of motion. The warmer the muscles are when they’re stretched, the less soreness they’ll experience later on.
Plus, if improving flexibility and range of motion is your goal, the best time to stretch is when your muscles are warm as it helps lengthen your muscles in a safe way.
The benefits of yoga are endless, but you can help tone and build muscle, burn calories and improve flexibility by adding it to the end of your workout. As an added bonus, you’re also strengthening your mind and body connection.
