Yoga is undoubtedly one of the biggest health crazes to have come about over the past few years and has been shown to be one of the best ways for many people to help increase their flexibility and mobility.
However is only doing yoga enough for you to stay in shape?
To answer this question, we must first ask ourselves another question: What shape do you want to be in?
This is all down to personal preference and if you got into shape doing yoga and are happy with your current level of fitness, then yes! Doing yoga might be enough for you.
The interesting thing with ‘staying in shape' is that it is always changing. You are always going up or down, putting on weight, losing weight - Your body and fitness levels never stay the same.
That is why it is so important to realise where you are on your fitness journey. If you are perhaps just starting out, then yoga may be a great introduction to fitness. However if you are looking to lose weight, develop muscle toning, or have perhaps been doing yoga for a long period of time and find it less challenging than you used to, other types of training may be more beneficial to you.
The main limitation of yoga is that it becomes increasingly difficult to overload your body, or force it to adapt without increasing the time period spent doing each session, which many of us don't have the time to spare!
When we talk about staying ‘in shape’ this refers to a whole host of fitness qualities. This could include your fitness, strength, conditioning and mobility. Yoga may be exceptional at the latter, but is less efficient at developing the others. Whilst other exercises such as resistance training will focus on strength, so will force your body to adapt, build muscle and burn fat.
Because there are so many different fitness qualities out there, at The DVCC we include as many as possible into every session. Each session begins with our Primal 10, a series of stretches designed to warm your body up and prepare you for training, the Modified Lactic Training then aims to build your strength, The Signature Metabolic Finisher raises your heart rates to increase cardiovascular fitness, and finally the Mobilisation Matrix promotes mobility in a similar way to a yoga session. All of these qualities then all work together, giving you an overall better approach to your general fitness.
As we age, we naturally lose muscle at a rate of 3-5% per year, so our aim should always be to always maintain or prevent as little muscle loss as possible. Muscle gain is the best solution to help lead a longer, healthier life and yoga might be just one solution in helping along this journey.
