Building muscle is without a doubt one of the best ways in order to get as well as remain healthy. When you develop muscle, not only are you improving your metabolism, but you are also making day-to-day tasks a little easier on yourself (like finally being able to open that peanut butter jar you always need to hand to your roommate). However, does this mean that lifting weights is the only way to go for building muscle? Does practising yoga build muscle?
When most individuals want to build muscle, they gravitate towards free weights as well as weight machines. After all, nothing promotes muscle growth quite like lifting weights. However, sometimes the most efficient tool for the job is your own body. That’s where yoga comes in. Yoga is a lot more than merely glorified stretching. When done correctly, certain yoga poses can target your muscles, torch your core as well as aid in functional strength gains.
Yoga For Muscle Building
Yoga builds up muscle just as your usual gym workout does. After all, it’s just a separate application of bodyweight exercises. From progressive overload right down to metabolic stress, a strong yoga practice will naturally engage these muscle building processes; however, we can optimise them through pose progressions, flow structure and intensity.
What Are The Benefits Of Building Muscle Through Yoga?
While yoga may not be the quickest way to pack on kilograms of muscle, it comes with its own benefits over hitting the gym (and has even been shown in studies to boost performance at the gym):
- Functional strength – Yoga has you moving as well as exerting through natural movements patterns. Building strength in functional ways as opposed to isolated movements that exist only in the gym.
- Balanced workouts – The majority of yoga positions are compound movements and sequences are designed in order to balance every movement with one which is equal and opposite.
- Maintain muscle health while building strength – We all know it’s good practice to stretch after a workout. Well, yoga has that covered the whole time.
- Increase flexibility together with muscle mass – With larger muscle mass normally comes lowered mobility and flexibility however not through a yoga practice.
- Low impact – Adding more as well as more weight to the bar at the gym will certainly take its toll on your joints in addition to tissues. Whereas yoga lets you build muscle in a low-impact environment.
Yoga Asanas For Muscle Building
Tree Pose
This single-leg asana helps the body to root through the ground as well as establish balance. It works all those little stabiliser muscles around the ankle, knee, and hip of the planted leg while providing the other leg a good groin stretch. In order to keep your body steady from beginning to end, your core need to remain engaged.
Warrior Three
The single-leg nature of warrior three necessitates balance and also engages your core. However, unlike tree pose, warrior three has a forward-leaning orientation. This asana puts even more weight on the standing leg and also works the whole backside of the body. Expect to develop strength and endurance in your calves, hamstrings, glutes, back as well as shoulders.
Bridge Pose
This pose necessitates that the body is squeezed through your legs, glutes, core as well as lower back. The Bridge Post is a great lower body strength building exercise. In addition to its muscle-building benefits, the bridge pose opens up your chest and shoulders, while also giving the spine and hip flexors a good stretch.
Contact Trifocus Fitness Academy
If you would like to become a yoga instructor, then you need to do our Yoga Instructor Course. Follow this link to find out more.