Beyond Zen: How Yoga Helps You Lose Fat
Calorie burned for calorie burned, yoga is not the most effective way to bring your body into that immediate caloric deficit commonly associated with weight loss. HIIT workouts, running, and spinning burn more calories off the hop than most yoga classes. This said, incorporating yoga into your exercise regime is one of the most powerful long-term strategies to support fat loss.
Here's why.
1. Yoga Balances Hormones
High intensity exercise is great for your mind and body. We of all people are not disputing that claim. However, too much high intensity exercise can cause your cortisol levels to rise and stay peaked, and over time keeping your stress hormone in the danger zone will cause your body to retain fat, especially aroound the midsection. This is due to overstimulation. If your body is constantly working to its limit, it thinks it is under attack and will begin to store fat to ensure survival. Incorporating yoga into your existing routine can do wonders to bring your body and brain back to balance so your metabolism can run more efficiently.
You can incorporate yoga into your rest days, or, if you prefer to use your rest day for active living (i.e. going for walks, cleaning the house, doing yard work, generally staying active but not doing any structured exercise) then swap out one of your higher intensity days for a yoga session.
Three or four high intensity sessions per week is enough to see significant lean gains. Sure, you can do more, but you’ll need to ensure you’re balancing out your system. Incorporate a little yoga after your sweat sesh. Even 5 minutes can work wonders to strengthen and align your body, reduce stress and increase feelings of well-being.
2. Yoga Helps You Avoid Plateaus
Workout variety is one of the keys to avoiding plateaus or busting through them if you find yourself on one. Fitness plateaus happen when your body and/or mind become bored with your current intensity or type of training, and as a result, your fat burning engines can stall. Yoga can provide a much-needed change of pace, offering up a different way to strengthen and challenge your body. Don't think just because you don't feel like you're going to puke by the end of a yoga session that you haven't worked hard: you've worked incredibly hard -- just in a different way.
3. Yoga Improves Athletic Performance
There's a reason top athletes do yoga. It has been shown to drastically increase athletic performance, helping you run faster, jump higher, get lower, push faster and get stronger. The result? Yoga can help you dig deeper during your higher intensity training, and this means you'll expend more energy and ultimately, burn more fat.
1 comment
I love yoga and respect it. Women wear some very slim fitting items to do yoga in that don’t hide a lot but maybe we don’t need to go as far as showing a woman in the lacey ( actually lace would cover up more than this outfit does) get up in a pose that I’m pretty sure is not yoga as the poster girl for the SweatFlix yoga program.
All this while trying to make a positive statement about yoga as a great form of exercise to complement any fitness regime.
I just want this to be a place where I feel like I don’t have to be assaulted with images of sultry sem-clad “Sheena of the jungle” sex symbols being displayed like that for a Yoga Ad? Seriously! I thought that was a little over-the-top and I really don’t want to receive these emails and this is where it’s going. There are so many beautiful images that could’ve been chosen with a little more test and a little more appropriate for the venue that I thought this wasI just don’t want the workout group I’ve joined, the Facebook Insiders group that I am a part of, and the Body Rock identity to be overdoing sexualizing working out. It’s been done enough.
This newsletter made me think I’m in the wrong place. So many of the workout team at BodyRock are in such amazing shape I’m already in awe. But let’s keep it real if we can OK? I’m just so tired of those images being splashed on the front of everything in the media via television the Internet magazines but please not at the place I cherish for my fitness connection too! There are so many serene beautiful amazing yoga poses with desert and ocean back drops that are so amazing and so beautiful wouldn’t one of those have sufficed just as well?
Look up Nicki Doane who has the most serene and beautiful countenance about her face and makes yoga look like something that she was born doing and believe me she was not wearing an outfit like that at any time during her practice and nor did she need to be to sell a DVD. So healthy and appealing and threw me off my high horse about the only way working out as real as if you’re pumping weights and I came to respect the amazing fitness level attainable through ashtanga yoga by watching a 5’0” yogi complete moves that I never in my wildest dreams could’ve imagined and who exhausted me in the first 10 min of my first Ahtanga yoga for beginners! Case closed! So please tell me we don’t have to be doing this to make fitness and yoga and appealing way to achieve fitness? I was so disappointed to see that …