Spending time at the gym with a personal trainer is the best way to lose weight and build muscle, but it’s best to vary your exercise to keep it interesting. One form of exercise, yoga, provides flexibility and serenity while boosting weight loss. The reason for that is a bit elusive. It doesn’t burn as many calories as traditional workouts. In most cases, it’s less intense. Even though it doesn’t burn as many calories per hour, it still burns more calories than binge-watching Netflix. Most yoga provides restoration, although some are more grueling like Bikram yoga which burns between 477 and 594 calories an hour.
It may be the mindfulness of yoga that does the trick.
People often report they start to lose weight when they begin yoga and aren’t even trying. A lot of yoga practices focus on mindfulness, which may be the reason. Living in the moment can affect all areas of your life. It can make eating more mindful, where you eat slower, focusing on each bite, its flavor, and texture. That causes you to eat slower. Eating slower gives your stomach a chance to signal to your brain that it’s full before you overeat, so you eat less.
It awakens you to the needs of your body.
Living in the moment and listening to your body plays a big role in how you eat and your activity level. When you’re more self-aware, you’re less likely to eat junk and more likely to listen to what food your body needs. You’ll feel the exhilaration of exercise and start to look forward to going to the gym. Instinctively, you know that exercise is healthy and good for the body. It helps you differentiate between real hunger and emotional eating or eating out of habit. All those things make weight loss easier.
Some yoga is far more active and burns a lot of calories.
Power yoga, Ashtanga yoga, or hot yoga burn more calories, while other types of yoga are more restorative. Some provide a good way to boost flexibility, which helps prevent muscle strain when doing strength training or cardiovascular exercises. Yoga does improve muscle tone, which can improve metabolism.
- The breathing exercises and meditation of yoga offer stress relief and help manage daily stress. Stress increases cortisol and belly fat. One study showed that obese women lost weight when doing a milder form of yoga. Much of that weight loss was belly fat.
- Yoga is a good change-of-pace exercise that can provide recovery after an intense workout. It increases circulation but doesn’t require the intensity of other forms of exercise.
- Yoga sessions are often longer than most types of workouts. A HIIT—-high intensity interval training—workout may only last a half hour, while a yoga session may be as long as 90 minutes.
- The stress reduction from yoga can improve digestion, lower blood pressure, slow heart rate, reduce cortisol levels, and help eliminate abdominal fat. If weight loss is your goal, you also need a healthy diet.
For more information, contact us today at LIV Fitness