I am a healthy male in his mid-thirties, coming to yoga from running (marathon last year) and years of lifting weights, biking etc. I’ve always found gyms boring and am loving yoga. I’m wondering though, if I want to lose 15 to 20 pounds of fat to get back to what feels to me like my healthy weight , and gain flexibility and lean muscles, is yoga enough? If the answer is - do Ashtanga 5 times a week - I will do it. I’m curious what the experience is of people who’ve had a regular yoga practice for a while, and particularly those who left behind weights/cardio and solely rely on yoga for fitness. I’m NOT intersted in Bikram - tried it, I get it, but it lacks the spiritual and centering qualities that attract me to yoga. so I guess my question is, is yoga enough for me to get back in & maintain fitness - I already can see the spiritual benefits.
Man, there are so many layers of answer to this Jerry.
To me, yoga is not a weight loss system. I think there are far more efficient ways of losing weight. The formulas for such things are very simple. Your BMR, your activity level, the amount of calories you take in, and their distribution between protein fat, and carbohydrates come together into one equation. That’s weight loss.
Yoga (not asana, the poses we are all so familiar with) is not a fitness program. It is a toolbox for the growth of human beings and one of the tools is well being.
Personally I think there is value in some light, mindful weight training. Though I have not been to the gym in months. I’m a decade older than you, my perspective is different, and I do my asana practice, eat in the ways I’ve learned, and walk three miles three or four times each week. I often think more of my liver than my lats. More of my spleen than my supraspinatus, more of my nerves than my nasalis.
Sure, there are some people for whom a very yang (active) asana and pranayama practice, in conjunction with a pristine diet (and good genetics) yields lean muscle mass and low body fat. Though I’d wonder (aloud) if that is ALL they were doing. Perhaps you’d try it for yourself and let us all know what you find?
You can find spirituality in anything you do, even if there is none there to be found.
And no, yoga is not enough to reach the goals you listed.
Anyone able to run a marathon is my hero. I am sure that 15-20 pounds of fat are easiear to lose than preparing for and running a marathon.
Humm. If what feels fit to you is conditioned by your experience training for and running a marathon, I don’t expect you to get that from yoga alone. In fact, I (non-runner prejudice, here) feel that what it takes to train for a marathon is to ignore physical discomfort and push past the smart stopping points that yoga asks you to respect.
But I have confidence in good yoga to gradually show you something even healthier, so please try.
I took up yoga for my back problem on the advice of my osteopath and found that it has already begun to balance me, I am eating sensibly now in that I am not eating too much now that I can feel when I am full and also as a consequence of that, I have lost nearly half a stone of extra weight. I didn’t set out to lose weight, it just happened naturally.
Some reading I did suggests that yoga balances you and I think that when this starts happening, your body must automatically start adjusting itself, this seems true to me.
There should be enough in asana,particularly ashtanga,i think, to keep you fit, assuming there are no issues and you are healthy.
Yoga can be excellent for weight loss i think, if that is a priority.There are many folk who seem or express an interest in looking outside asana & yoga for wholeness or a complete fitness traning sytstem but there should’nt be mcuh need in theory, unless you were training for a marathon, in which case some running might be in order :@)
Can provide everything and more but this can depend on the individual and other factors, health issues etc, the capacity to do a very active yang practice,genes/dosha etc
Hi Jerry,
just see the Baba Ram Dev, who says about his own style Yoga, and shown the world that he can prove anything with YOGA, and the point as you raised about your wieght, its easy, natural and only the best way to loose(actually ur not only getting this benefit with YOGA, apart a good natural health with much comfortable in respect of all functionality of the BODY, MIND and even for DEVINE) as per my knowledge.
Pranayama can take out 100grams a day even with small kind of effort from original body for some stage, from grown body it works a lot, nothing can work as it is.
Be and fallow the in the best way.
once upon a time it was all I did and it was enough but now nothin I do seems enough so I do several diffrent workout together and its very tiring for me…
I’m curious what the experience is of people who’ve had a regular yoga practice for a while, and particularly those who left behind weights/cardio and solely rely on yoga for fitness.
I will only speak for myself. I’m a little older than you. Yoga is now all I do for the love of yoga, health… and for fitness. Yes, I have lost weight with yoga. And no, it wasn’t even anything as aggressive as power yoga/Ashtanga. Just regular lighter vinyasa mostly, 20-40 minutes a day. That amount is challenging for me. Perhaps you might need/enjoy more of a challenge with Ashtanga? Don’t eschew the occasional gentle session though, it has its benefits too.
Good healthy proper eating goes hand in hand with weight loss of course. Yoga helps keep you on track with that. You might find yourself less hungry (than when weight training and/or running) and naturally eating less than before, and feeling so good from yoga more eager to want to eat the right things too.
I say, if you’re loving yoga right now, it’s worth a try, do what you enjoy!
How do you define fitness? You are fit for what you train for. You practice yoga to be “fit” for yoga.
Some people eat junk food and do no exercise. They are “fit” for their lifestyle.
Yoga is a good way to stay fit. But you need to learn it properly and do it correctly as if you miss one step, you might end up damaging your body more.
There is no form of fitness in the world that will make you lose weight if you take in too many calories. A science and research group on Youtube called Kurzgesagt debunked this just recently with a study showing how tribal people in Africa who walk 10-20 miles a day burn the same amount of calories as people who sit in the office all day because your body is very good at adapting to any form of exercise you give it and becomes so efficient at it that that form of exercise stops burning a lot of extra calories over time. Some say diet is 80% of the game when it cones to weight loss, but after this study I would say it is actually 100%. Regardless of your training regimen your body burns somewhere around 2000 calories a day, so the notion that exercise will help you lose weight is a flat out myth. Start doing some research on different diets you can try and find one that works best for you. I know a lot of people feel if they can just find the right form of exercise then they can eat what they want, but sadly this is not the case. With regards to fitness aside from weight loss, Yoga is great because you can design your own sequences at home to fit your needs. I want to build a lot of muscle so I rotate muscle groups every day, much like a gym goer, so one day I may have a lot of arm strength poses, while the next day I will have a "leg day" and so on. I warm up with 10 minutes of regular warm ups (not yoga warm ups) before every yoga session, such as arm circles, butt kicks, and so forth, then do 10 strength asanas, holding each for a minute and resting in savasana for a minute in between, then I do 20 yoga stretches related to that muscle group, holding each for a minute with a minute of savasana in between, making each workout exactly one hour. On work days I don't do any strength asanas and only do stretches because factory work is really hard on my body, so I do strength poses only on my days off. Some people may object to that, but I did the research and muscle loss does not occur until around two weeks of no exercise, so so long as you target each muscle group once per week you should still see some progress with plenty of time to rest and recover between workouts. If you do not have a strenuous job or lifestyle like I do, then rotating every three days is fine, that is leg day on monday, arm day on tuesday, core/back on wednesday. That being said, you don't have to adopt my approach. I merely picked the one that works best for me. Find whatever style works best for you, make a home sequence/schedule for it that you can practice whenever you want, and tweak it however you want so it fits your needs. Some people like a lot of flow for example, whereas I love long hold times and long periods of rest so my muscles get the maximum benefit. So my adivce is to find what works for you and stick with it!
That is totally true. You need to understand that you cannot eat more and more and expect to lose your weight doing Yoga and exercises.