How Yoga Can Help You Lose Weight

The practice of regular yoga has many health benefits. It makes you feel better about you and your body but more importantly, it makes you healthy and more confident. Yoga makes you more flexible and relieves the stresses of your muscles. It tones your muscles and reduces mental stress as well as physical stresses.

What yoga can and can’t do

Doing any type of yoga will increase strength, yes, but studies have been done that clearly show that yoga doesn’t increase your heart rate enough to lose weight. To lose weight, you need to eat healthy and burn calories along with yoga. Do exercises that regularly increase your heart rate. If weight loss is the main objective of yours, combine yoga with walking, running or any other aerobic exercise. Although weight loss can be simplified using the calorie in versus calorie burned equation, it takes much more to successfully change your habits so that healthier choices are second nature. Yoga practice encourages a healthier lifestyle and can help that.

Adding yoga with exercise

If you add yoga to an exercise routine that includes cardiovascular exercises to burn calories, you will see faster and longer-lasting weight loss results. Yoga helps improve your body, improve your self-image, and your feeling of well-being.

Reducing stress, and therefore eating stress, is another way that yoga can help you lose weight. By promoting a healthy lifestyle, consistent yoga practice increases the likelihood that you will maintain your weight loss. Perhaps most importantly, yoga’s focus on listening to your body first may be a welcome change for people who have had trouble losing weight in the past.

Burning calories through yoga

Although yoga is not traditionally considered an aerobic exercise, there are certain types of yoga that are more physically demanding than others. Active and intense yoga styles help burn more calories. This can help prevent weight gain.

Power yoga, ashtanga, and vinyasa are examples of more physical types of yoga. Vinyasa and power yoga are usually offered in the most popular yoga studios. These types of yoga allow you to move almost constantly, helping you burn calories.

The practice of yoga can also help you develop muscle tone and improve your metabolism. Although restorative yoga is not a particularly physical type of yoga, it does help you lose weight. Restorative yoga has been shown to be effective in helping overweight women lose weight, including abdominal fat, according to research. These results are particularly promising for people whose body weight can interfere with the most vigorous forms of yoga. A review of the 2013 study found that yoga is a promising way to help with behavior change, weight loss, and maintenance, burn calories, increase focus and reduce stress. These factors can help reduce food intake and raise awareness of the effects of overeating.

The steps you should take before getting into yoga

You should first educate yourself on the different types of yoga.

Vinyasa.
Ashtanga.
Iyengar.
Kundalini.
Bikram.
Jivamukti.
Yin/Restorative.

Just to name a few, each of the different varieties of yoga has its own focuses in terms of self-development. It’s important to know the difference between some of the common ones because they require you to dress differently.

Yoga is still pretty much dominated by women however many men (and more and more men nowadays) also like to do yoga. Since yoga puts emphasis on relaxation and proper breathing, dressing correctly is of great significance. Specifically designed yoga wear for women provides women with the option of choice, design, and variety for their yoga outfits just to add that extra bit of personality and style.