Site Search

Yoga For Weight Loss? You Must Be Kidding Me!

By Han Ayden

Yoga seems to be all the rage in women's fitness circles. Yoga centers have sprouted all around us and women are flocking to them in droves, believing it to be the best way for them to 'tone' up and lose weight. Marketed as a female-oriented exercise, yoga has become the alternative to women who are averse to weight training.

Fallacies surrounding weight training and the misconception that it is 'male domain', combined with socio-cultural conditioning of women taught to fear bulky-looking muscles, have boosted the prestige of yoga as the exercise of choice for women.

Well ladies, you have been conned! Yoga can't even begin to compare to physiological benefits that weight-training and cardiovascular exercises have to offer, neither in terms of calorie expenditure, metabolic expenditure nor in terms of body composition goals. Majority of the women I have trained over the years have expressed similar goals when asked what they want out of a training programme.

Fat loss is by far the number one priority, followed by a desire for a lean and hard physique. Apart form an improvement in appearance, many women also want increased strength as well as better posture and increased bone density. The campaign geared towards preventing osteoporosis has fostered greater awareness amongst women of the importance of maintaining strong and healthy bones in their youth.

However, many women are not informed enough to choose exercises that are oriented towards helping them achieve their lofty fitness goals. Yoga, unfortunately, falls short in its actual ability to achieve the aforementioned fitness goals.

In order to lose weight, one has to increase calorie expenditure as much as possible and as such, exercises that expend the most amounts of calories are often sought out. Yoga cannot possibly compare with the benefits of aerobic training when one considers the factor of calorie expenditure. Moreover, fat loss requires more than the expenditure of calories within a certain time frame. It also requires you to burn more calories throughout the day and weight-training helps you achieve this.

An increase in lean muscle mass from weight training enables you to burn more calories on a daily basis as muscle is metabolically active and hence, consumes more calories to maintain itself. Yoga offers minimal resistance training and is not intense enough to effect substantial changes in your body's metabolic systems in order to turn you into a fat-incinerating machine.

It does not offer the progressive increase in resistance that is needed in order to build and maintain strong bones. Progressive overload forces the body to adapt to increased strain it faces, creating stronger bones and muscles.

Weight training and cardio work trumps yoga in every aspect related to weight loss. Opt for an exercise programme that incorporates resistance training and cardio training as its main elements. You can throw in a couple of sessions of Yoga a week in order to increase overall activity, but it should not be the cornerstone of any fitness regime that has fat loss as a serious goal.

About the Author:

Han Ayden is a certified personal trainer and a body transformation specialist located in Singapore. His website is http://www.physiquemakeover.com