Believe it or not, Yoga can be easily incorporated into strength training which possess lots of added benefits!
The purpose of strength training varies from people to people. Majority if them, want to keep their body in a good working condition. What if i tell you, you can enhance this by incorporating yoga with your strength training routine. But, why is that so important to you? How you can achieve that? You will get all the answers here. Keep reading.
When, we listen to these two terms, Yoga and Strength Traning, we feel, they are so opposite, right? However, in reality, they are not! Both of them can help building your physique, and improving mobility. Moreover, both of them can reduce bone loss. So, these two are not different, while they can compliment each other.
Undoubtedly, Yoga is one of the best forms of building your core strength, body awareness, as well as muscle activation. Meanwhile, all these things are crucial for strength training including weight lifting.
Earlier, people used to believe that yoga can never help in building muscle, but, few research studies have confirmed that yoga can build strong body muscles. The best part about yoga is you can utilise a very little space to build strong muscular and flexible body. Some of the strength-building yoga steps are Tree Pose, Warrior Pose, Horse Pose, Boat Pose, Side Plank, and Handstand.
Before any strength training, you need to prepare your body. Nobody can start strength training immediately. For this warm up, you may incorporate yoga. Few yoga steps focus on active mobility. This helps in muscle activation reducing risks of injury. Some of the yoga steps to help you in this: tree pose, plank, cobra pose and high lunge. Focus on yoga with short hold time. Don't continue beyond 10 seconds. As you will be transitioning into strength training immediately, short hold time is crucial. Don't focus on passive streching only.
If you don't prefer yoga before strength training, you can implement this after finishing this. Post strength training, you need to cool down your body. This is an important step to reduce injury. It also helps reducing heart rate. Usually, professional cyclists ride stationary bike to cool down after a schedule. Similarly, yoga can act as a cool down mechanism for your body. It's all about coming out of intense zone to relaxed mode. Here, you can focus on passive streching such as yin yoga. So, you can heal your muscles and relax your body through yoga.
Till now, you must have understood the importance of pairing strength training and yoga. Depending on your schedule you can smartly incorporate yoga. Let's consider you do strength training on alternate days, you can fill those days of no work out as yoga days. If you are doing strength training throughout the day, plan your day like this: dedicate morning for strength training, afternoon for yoga and evening for strength training.
Broadly, the combination of yoga and strength training develops lean muscles while strengthening the bones and improving posture as well as core strength. It is also believed to increases flexibility, which reduces the risk of getting injured.
