A lot of people that practice yoga believe that it doesn’t go well with strength training so they believe that a person should focus on one and not both. However, this belief is totally wrong because although yoga on its own has a way of strengthening the body equally, it is best to combine it with physical training. But we get to the benefits of combining yoga and strength training; it’s necessary to point out the benefits of yoga.
Yoga Benefits
Flexibility: There are so many different yoga poses, and they all work by stretching the muscles. This helps to reduce stiffness, to reduce tiredness and to improve mobility.
Better Breathing: When doing yoga, your breathing technique might change to help get into the yoga pose. Paying attention to your breathing is very necessary for yoga, and it helps one relax.
Increased strength: There are a lot of yoga poses that help to build your strength because they are really physical. The plank pose, downward dog, Hatha, standing poses, and the chair pose help to strengthen all parts of the body.
Body awareness: Yoga helps to make you more aware of your posture. A lot of people slouch without knowing, but yoga makes you more aware of your posture.
Reduce blood pressure: Yoga helps to slow the heart rate, which helps to reduce blood pressure. It also helps to improve the immune system.
Now that we know some benefits of yoga, the next thing will be to know some benefits of strength training before combining them both.
Strength Training Benefits
Improve Metabolism: Strength training helps to quicken metabolism, and this also protects you from obesity and all the unhealthy conditions that follow.
Boosts physical performance: People that are physically inactive find it so tiring to go about their daily activities. A person that works out can easily get around and get the basic things done in no time because of the lightness that comes after strength training.
Boosts mental health: Successful strength training helps to improve one’s self-esteem. Strength training gives you stamina and control. It can solve common mental issues like depression, low self-esteem, and anxiety. Strength training includes body weight, dumbbell, kettlebell, and resistance bands.
Looking at some of the benefits of yoga and strength training, we can see that they have similar benefits and some other benefits that will go well together. Now that they’ve been pointed out, we will now see the reasons why yoga and strength training should be practiced together.
Benefits The Mind Body And Soul
One of the main aims of strength training is that it helps keep the body fit, and it also benefits the mind. Yoga helps so much in making a person calm and collected. It connects you to your should while you are in particular pose and being conscious of how you breathe. Combining yoga and strength training helps to satisfy your physical and mental need.
Increases Endurance
In yoga, you will need to hold poses for a while and in strength training; lifting weights correctly also helps in making you endure longer. In the muscles, there are fast-twitch muscle fibers and slow-twitch muscle fibers. The fast-twitch muscle fiber is when activated helps you develop speed and a lot of power. The slow-twitch muscle fiber when activated improves endurance, and they can be activated during yoga and strength training respectively. So yoga and strength training can complement each other.
Helps In Repairing Damaged Tissues
Most times after strength training, there are usually some damages to the muscular tissues which heal after some days. Sometimes it could take a week or more, but it is believed that faster flow of body fluids help to quicken the repair process. Now, yoga works on the mind, and it also produces a lot of sweat because most yoga classes take place in heated areas. The more you sweat, the thirstier you become, and the more liquid you take in, the more you urinate. So this process is necessary for and helpful for strength training.
Helps Build Brain Power
When carrying out strength training, most times we focus on one particular part of the body. For example; butt workout, shoulder workout, abs workout, leg workout and many more. This is usually because the intensity is too much to be done for every part of the body at once. When one is in a very intense place lifting weights or other heavy objects, it’s quite hard to focus on improving brain power.
Yoga, on the other hand, helps to explore the body with different postures. Mentally, it enables you to be more aware of our mind and your environment. Yoga encourages self-love and acceptance so, building our muscles and accepting yourself is really good. When performing any physical activity when working out, you become calmer and able to perform more.
Improves Alignment
Yoga improves body alignment, and this is very essential in strength training. Yoga poses helps create more awareness of your structure and efficiency. Certain poses like the downward dog, upward dog, and standing pose all help to increase strength in different portions of the body. Strength training and yoga done together increases a needful communication between the mind and the body. This improves your accuracy and enhances lifting postures. Yoga focuses a lot on proper alignment, and this helps to strengthen the muscles. When you have a good posture, your body movement becomes more in sync, and it’ll most definitely enhance workout activities.
Improved Flexibility
Yoga focuses on loosening the muscles with poses that do just that. Holding the poses for a while helps to stretch your muscle tissues which by making them relax and get used to it. It loosens muscles that have been tightened, and these tightened muscles trap lactic acid which is meant to be released after an intense workout. When this lactic acid builds up, it isn’t healthy for your muscles at all. This is very necessary for strength training because it reduces muscle pull. It also makes the muscles to be relaxed enough to carry out any workout activity. Correct yoga can develop the whole body. In addition, check out this DIY dynamic stretching video series to increase mobility and flexibility.
Yoga and physical exercise complement each other so if you can factor the two together, you will have an amazing body and feel a thousand times better.A
