If you’re thinking of combining yoga and strength training, you should consider your goals accordingly. When training to increase your muscle mass, an additional load may retard recovery and have a negative impact on your progress. However, if your goal is to keep your body toned, then yoga can become an excellent complement to strength training sessions.
A careful and prudent approach to yoga exercises will help increase your body’s flexibility, as well as relieve accumulated muscle and emotional tension during and after workouts, which stimulates a quick recovery.
In order to avoid injury, it’s important to set a proper training schedule. In yoga, the basis of classes is the performance of asanas (poses) using the static method of stretching. To increase your elasticity, it’s important to be able to relax and release tension after training.
Benefits of Yoga for Strength Training
Yoga can be a fantastic supplement to your strength training programs since it provides a variety of advantages that will make you feel powerful, supple, and focused.
Some of the primary advantages of yoga for strength training are:
- Improved suppleness and plasticity. Stretching and holding positions will improve your range of motion, making it simpler to do strength training activities with perfect technique. As a result, you can lower your risk of injury and increase your overall performance in the gym;
- Improved your balance and stability. Let alone your general physical fitness, which is important for completing exercises that require maintaining a strong and solid core;
- You can strengthen and tone your core muscles while improving your performance in squats, deadlifts, overhead presses, and similar exercises;
- Mental aspect. Yoga is a fantastic way to reduce stress and anxiety, as well as improve your mental focus, which is crucial for pushing through tough workouts and staying motivated. Through deep breathing and meditation, you’ll learn how to control your body and put your mind at rest when needed.
Moreover, by focusing on meditation and relaxation, which are core yoga elements, you will be able to put your mind, body, and soul in harmony. This way, you will also get the most out of your strength training sessions and get fully engaged by simply “going with the flow”.
Benefits of Strength Training for Yoga
One of the primary advantages of strength training for yoga is that it may help:
- Build your lean muscle mass, which improves your overall strength and stability. Working on your upper, lower, and core muscles will help you easily hold yoga poses with more stability. This will enable you to develop your practice and attain desired outcomes;
- Increase your joint mobility and bone density. This, in turn, can help deal with osteoporosis, arthritis, and other comparable disorders. Moreover, strength training causes you to burn more calories throughout the day, which is good for your metabolism. Finally, you will be able to get into yoga poses more easily and increase your overall performance on the mat;
- Enhance confidence and improve your body image. You’ll be able to improve your general quality of life and approach your yoga practice with greater confidence and self-assurance if you feel strong and powerful in your body.
Strength training also allows you to stay independent as you’re getting older. Consequently, even if you train for thirty minutes two times a week, you will still be able to counteract losing your lean muscle mass, which is simply amazing!
How Do You Combine Strength Training and Yoga?
If possible, it’s better to schedule your yoga and strength training on separate days. This would be a wise decision. However, you could still do some yoga as a stretching post-strength workout.
When you go deep into asanas, after having reached maximum relaxation, the muscle tone drops and stays lowered for a certain period of time, and the ligaments remain stretched. If during this period, you start doing strength exercises that require maximum effort, the risk of injury increases several times over.
Intensive physical warm-ups may cause microtrauma, which will manifest itself later, as this effect accumulates. And if your training is not performed correctly, it can last for several months. As a result, the range of motion will be limited, you can experience pain, and the recovery period will increase.
The fact is that weight training requires different physical and mental work than yoga. At the gym, sometimes you have to grit your teeth to do all your required repetitions. Even if you breathe properly, it’s still very different from yoga.
In yoga terms, strength training can be called a “fiery” practice that is dominated by the energy of fire, necessary for exercises that we do in the gym. Also, during such training, we often concentrate on a particular muscle, then switch to the next one, and do some stretching afterward. That’s why after working out at the gym, it often happens that we have this feeling as if our body is hot and swollen but also disjointed.
If you do yoga after a strength training session, you’re likely to find it very difficult to get in the right condition, i.e., not hyper-energetic and abrupt but also not sluggish. It’s somewhere in the middle, where the energy flows smoothly and under control; it’s about purity, strength, and tranquility.
Perks of Practicing Both Yoga and Strength Training
Experienced yoga instructors know how important it is to distribute the load without pushing your body to the limit. If your plans include combining yoga with strength training, follow these next recommendations:
- Follow the schedule. It’s better to do yoga and other types of strength training on different days, i.e., it is necessary to allocate separate time for the purposeful development of flexibility;
- Take a full rest. Muscle recovery requires a certain amount of time. The duration of a strength training session is 1 hour (on average), and yoga classes take the same amount of time. And there should be a break of at least 6 hours between them. That’s why it’s best to attend on different days. For example, you can devote three days a week to yoga and two days to power training. In this case, you will have two days to rest;
- Consult with a coach. Training in the gym can be of varying degrees of intensity, some want to keep themselves in shape, and others want to achieve certain results. Yoga classes have their own peculiarities, taking into account the program and type. The surest solution is to get advice from a yoga coach on how to properly incorporate strength training into your schedule;
- Mind the sequence of classes. If you can’t allocate separate days for yoga and strength training, then you should pay attention to the state of health after training. As a rule, after yoga classes, one feels energized and relaxed, and physically tired after strength training. If this is the case, it’s better to attend your yoga classes in the morning and the gym in the evening. Alternatively, if you feel invigorated after strength workouts and relaxed after yoga classes, you can visit the gym in the morning and do yoga in the evening;
- Don’t stretch too much. Before a sports or health training, you should not stretch to the maximum possible amplitude of movements; you don’t want to go beyond the limit of your flexibility;
- Don’t forget to relax. Immediately after the training session, it’s advisable to perform a number of asanas for relaxation and removal of accumulated tension. These can be asanas performed on the floor: forward bends, twists, deflections, and inverted asanas. But it’s also necessary to perform them gradually, as due to the fatigue and an intensive warm-up, it’s easy to “overdo it” without noticing the signals coming from your body;
- Combine correctly. If you decide to combine spiritual practices with strength exercises on the same day, then start your workout after yoga. Weight training requires more physical work than performing asanas.
At the gym, you often have to put in the effort to complete the right number of reps. When you come to a yoga class after a weight training session, you will find it extremely difficult to achieve the desired static state – not too energetic, but not too relaxed either.
There are people who prefer strength training to yoga classes. However, in this case, it’s worth understanding that such a combination will only stretch, and the practice itself will not give the expected result.
In case you are engaged in a serious asanas practice every day, you should learn to dose the load, allocating days when you practice in a supportive mode and days when you achieve the maximum possible amplitude of movements. You can also alternate your asana sets and perform asanas for the lower back and legs on one day and do bends and arm exercises on another.
All in all, if you have a good rest and keep the sequence of exercises, you can also combine yoga and strength training without any harm to your health and achieve certain results in each of them.
What Type of Yoga Is Best for Strength Training?
Hatha yoga, with a proper and careful approach, can help increase the flexibility of the whole body that can be used in different sports: martial arts, dances, gymnastics, etc. It can also help cope with the accumulated muscle and emotional tension, which will contribute to the timely recovery and improvement of results.
In this regard, it’s necessary to know how to schedule your training sessions correctly to avoid the possible risk of injury.
The fact is that in classic hatha yoga, the main method of training is the performance of asanas – traditional yoga poses associated with bending, twisting, flexion, and other movements and the subsequent fixation of the body in the achieved positions. That is, the static method of stretching is mostly used.
During the class, you should try to hold each pose for 5 to 10 breaths, paying special attention to stability and building strength.
Hatha is suitable for beginners and experienced practitioners. You will build the basics of breath and body awareness necessary for all other styles. The practice is suitable for:
- Improving sleep;
- Relieving stress;
- Increasing mindfulness.
This is a great opportunity to relax, calm the body and mind down, and improve technique in basic poses.
In addition, this method is often more effective than other methods of developing flexibility if performed correctly, regularly, and attentively against a background of relaxation. However, it is extremely important to correctly integrate Asana practice into your personal training schedule. Otherwise, there’s a great risk of various injuries: sprains of muscles and ligaments, dislocation of vertebrae, etc.
The fact is that the progress in flexibility development is to a large extent connected with the ability to relax, control muscle tone, understand and “eliminate” tensions accumulated in the body as a result of training and daily activities.
After a sufficiently deep entry into asanas, if relaxation is successful, muscle tone drops and remains lowered for a certain (individual for each person) time, and ligaments and muscles remain somewhat stretched. If during this period, you try to perform exercises that imply quick activation of muscles and maximal effort (ballistic and jumping exercises, lifting weights, etc.), there’s a great risk of injury.
Pro Tip: Power yoga is also quite popular among athletes as it helps them align muscle imbalances. A distinctive feature of such yoga is the high intensity and concentration of asanas. The workout resembles a dynamic dance, where there’s no clear sequence of asanas, but the emphasis is on their frequency. Such fast-paced cardiovascular workouts are suitable for those who are confident in their physical fitness.
Summary
Someone will definitely agree that it’s so nice to do some stretching after a strength training session. Indeed, it can be quite pleasant. Alas, it’s more likely to end up in stretching, without actually doing yoga.
However, you can still do certain yoga exercises, e.g., thread the needle or prayer stretch, as a way to cool off and relax your muscles after an intensive workout.
On the other hand, if you go to the gym to do some weight lifting after yoga, you may be surprised by the wonderful effect it will have on your workout. You may suddenly begin to breathe and control your movements better, as well as keep your mind calm and focused. You will simply put less effort than before to do the same exercise.
An effective combination of yoga and strength training depends on the right regimen and schedule. It is made taking into account your age, sex, health, physical condition, and the type of strain with which the practice of asanas is combined.
If you rest fully and observe the sequence of classes, it’s possible to combine yoga and strength training without detriment to health and at best to achieve certain results in each of them.