Can yoga help you lose weight? Is it safe or accessible to every body?
You would expect a hot yoga flow class would be the best to burn calories and build cardio. The laying around breathing and stretching kind of yoga is good enough for relaxation, but it couldn't possibly help you firm up! Could it?
There are problems with the normal approach to fitness:
1. Weight loss has a lot more to do with diet than it does exercise. (http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/weight-loss/expert-answers/weight-loss/faq-20058292)
When you ramp up your activity level, your appetite naturally comes alive. The 300 calories that you just burned on your power walk for the last 45 minutes will be filled in with the muffin you next eat because you're hungry! Exercise is important to build muscle (which burns more calories than fat tissue), to maintain strength and to work all body systems, such as circulatory and endocrine. But the math just doesn't support using exercise alone as a weight loss strategy.
2. Many self improvement programs assume that you are imperfect now and must DO something to change yourself.
Psychologically, this can create a great deal of dissonance. The goal is always changing and is usually just beyond our reach. The business model of the fitness industry depends on us being unhappy with the current state of affairs. The stress of this dissonance can lead us to abandon our fitness program. At the very least, approaching exercise with this mindset can be a form of self aggression, increasing the risk of injury and adding stress hormones to our system.
3. Exercise feels like it is releasing stress but it is actually continuing the stress response.
The human animal is designed to exercise when there is a survival threat. No sabre toothed tiger chases you to the treadmill but your nervous system reacts as if there were one. The stress hormones that give you power to sprint or haul the kettle bell are now being utilized in the manner that they were designed to be. This is why exercise feels like it's relieving stress. The stress hormones that built all day at your desk or when you were struggling in traffic didn't get metabolized and that stress we feel differently. After your workout, there will probably be little time to rest so the body does not repair from the energy expended on the stressful events of your day.
4. Many fitness activities involve repetitive movements that can create joint misalignment and subsequent injury.
Walking the same route around your neighbourhood or following the same program on your elliptical machine results in the same muscles firing in the same ways for thousands of repetitions each session. We are encouraged to get moving, and that is vitally important, but varying the routine is even more vital. Rather than focusing on calories burned, we would be wise to look at the degree of different ranges of motion asked of our muscles. Cardiovascular health can be maintained in short bursts of intense activity for just a few minutes a day. Long sessions of steady state cardio exercise, such as on a treadmill or bicycle, is often not the most effective investment of your time (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/health-and-fitness/health-advisor/high-intensity-interval-training-is-it-really-the-holy-grail-of-exercise/article16891839/#dashboard/follows/)
Yoga can offer weight loss benefits by addressing some of these traditional weaknesses.
1. A more mindful lifestyle naturally and organically includes a more careful diet.
Slow yoga is an experience that encourages us to connect with our present moment. We sense how to move, how to breathe and what is happening internally. After experiencing that connection with our bodies, we are less likely to feed it unhealthy foods. And if we do choose to indulge, it is with awareness and in a greater context of healthy behaviours.
2. Yoga encourages self compassion and self awareness. It respects the individual experience.
Often class is conducted with dim lighting, even eyes closed, so the temptation to measure our performance is minimized. A gentle, or therapeutic, approach to yoga is a loving way to interact with your amazing body. Movements are routinely modified or even skipped altogether depending on what your body needed this practice. It is a unique experience for many of us to move our bodies slowly, comfortably and lovingly with no pushing or aggression.
3. Gentle, or therapeutic, yoga reminds our systems how to relax.
It's a high octane world we live in. The natural balance of sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system activation is skewed toward stress response (sympathetic activation). This is evidenced in our sleep, digestive, pain, concentration, disease and obesity issues (for a good read about the effect of stress on the body read "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers" by Robert Sapolsky). A recent study on behalf of the American Diabetes Association showed that restorative, gentle yoga reduced belly fat two and half times more effectively than other forms of exercise in the study. It seems counter intuitive that laying around, pretty much doing nothing, could help you lose weight. It is the stress hormones, that are inflammatory in nature, that contribute to the fat retention. Cortisol in particular has been cited in belly fat retention in many studies. Slow, gentle yoga (such as a restorative class) encourages the opposite type of hormonal activation that brings repair to the inflammatory responses of stress. (http://www.prevention.com/weight-loss/weight-loss-tips/surprising-way-gentle-yoga-can-help-you-lose-serious-weight)You could try the posture in the photo above for 20 minutes before bed or I like it as a transition from working to a relaxing evening at home. If you were able to add a longer practice, 1 to 1.5 hours, once or twice a week, you would likely see results.
4. Yoga builds strong joints.
A well constructed yoga class offers each joint of your body a full range of motion movement. In gentler forms of yoga, this is accomplished without any strain on the joint so those with pain or restrictions can still participate. If your class includes weight bearing poses, this often works the muscle eccentrically, which means the muscle is lengthening while working. In this way, the muscles stay flexible yet strong which means more fluid movement for you. If you are building a yogic weight loss program, including some more vigourous classes is recommended respecting your body at all times. Many of the hybrid yoga classes offered publicly move very quickly in very crowded rooms. The best instructor ever can only really monitor 10 - 15 students well at a time. The more physically challenging the practice, the greater risk of losing yoga benefits. The root of yoga is self compassion and self awareness. Jumping into a too physically oriented class unmindfully will set back weight loss.
The bottom line....
Move more. Move mindfully. Rest more. Invite love into your relationship with your body to bring healing and to ultimately live happily in the body we have now.
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