Weightlifting is an extremely strenuous workout for the body. If you are a person who wants to maximize his/her weightlifting training, consider adding yoga to the general workout routine.
Yoga is an excellent relaxation technique that provides a balance of mind, body, and soul. Having a weightlifting routine and a consistent yoga practice can have a profound effect on your physical fitness efforts. It is definitely one of the best things you can do to enhance your fitness routine.
There are endless ways how yoga can improve your weightlifting routine, so, let’s get started right away…
1. Improve strength and mobility
Yoga is a strength-based practice. It excels at using your body weight to make you stronger and increase muscle tone. Unlike weight training regimes that isolate movements, yoga is a whole-body workout.
Yoga poses are meant to stretch your antagonist’s muscles and thus improve your range of motion so that during the workout, your increased mobility will allow you to improve your form during weightlifting exercises.
If you practice with the proper form, you’ll get stronger and be able to lift a higher level of weights since our paired muscles i.e., the agonist and antagonist muscles no more compete against each other during strength training.
2. Increases flexibility
Yoga offers muscle tone and endurance through its slow-moving poses that force the body to hold positions for extended periods of time. This will not only help you lift weights during your strength training sessions, but it extends to everyday life as well.
Weightlifters doing yoga can help improve or rebuild flexibility, which in turn can increase the range of motion needed for lower squats or higher to support a comprehensive muscle-building program. Yoga calls for stretch training which contributes to muscle growth.
A 2020 study published in the Journal of Clinical Physiology and Functional Imaging showed that stretching between active muscle contractions increases muscle growth. Some yoga postures are also able to correct joint or muscle problems caused due to weightlifting injuries.
3. Corrects posture
By adding weights to a yoga practice, you are stimulating the muscles by increasing their time under tension. This combination builds lean muscles and tones the body strengthens the bones, and improves posture.
A consistent weightlifting routine can cause tight muscles that may reduce your range of motion and leave you feeling sore. These side effects of weightlifting can be avoided with consistent yoga practice. Chest and shoulder opening postures combined with core strengthening poses and exercises in yoga are key to improving posture.
4. Reduces risk of injury
If your workout consists of weightlifting only, you may be putting your body at risk of injury. Muscle imbalances are one of the most common causes of injuries in weightlifting.
Now, we should be well aware of the fact that yoga increases blood flow and help train muscles to draw in more oxygen, which can lead to better and more efficient performances, ultimately increasing overall strength and preventing chances of dislocations and muscle tears.
It is one of the benefits of yoga for weightlifters that include restoring tired muscles to offer a calming counterbalance to high-intensity strength training.
5. Minimizes soreness
Doing yoga after training can assist in relieving muscle tension and prevent soreness and help return your body to its resting state. Muscle cells accumulate lactic acid from heavy-weight training.
Yoga draws oxygen into muscles, flushing out the lactic acid in overworked muscles. Yoga stimulates blood flow in the muscles, preventing any DOMS (delayed onset muscle soreness) that you may experience, helping them perform better and more efficiently.
6. Improved Muscle Appearance
Weightlifting helps build and retain muscle mass, giving you a toned body by building up muscle mass and yoga helps to enhance this toned look by giving your body a leaner and more athletic appearance.
Weightlifting plus yoga combination not only helps to have a more prominent muscle appearance but also provides a metabolism boost, which helps in losing weight, increasing bone density, and helps to maintain joint flexibility. After an intense strength workout, your muscles may have built up lactic acid and adhesions, or knots.
Yoga is the perfect way to break up that lactic acid build-up while blending out the knots through the process of rehabilitation.
7. Improved brain performance
Yoga can help replenish energy levels, reduce anxiety and stress, and neutralize toxicity caused by some muscle-building supplements. The benefits of yoga for weightlifters can improve the performance of the mind and the body, including both concentration and balance, and promote active recovery.
Research by academics at Australia’s Sydney University found that cognitive brain function can improve exponentially as a result of weight training. Along with this, yoga can help you keep calm and composed during an entire exercise workout. In yoga, when done right, even if you’re doing challenging poses which cause you to sweat, you feel completely relaxed at the end. This helps get rid of unwanted stress.
The learned controlled aggression can also help in doing and holding challenging yoga poses with ease.
8. Yogic nutrition with weightlifting
During weightlifting workouts, a person is used to consuming high-protein-packed foods. Besides this, if you follow a yogic diet, it would be beneficial for you to a great extent.
A typical yogic diet comprises alkaline foods, good fats, which are one of three main energy sources apart from proteins, minimize acidity in the body and improve blood circulation and strengthen the heart. Foods rich in Omega-3 fatty acids are easy to digest and provide extra energy for going through your weightlifting program.
Try to reduce extra carbs on processed sugars and add herbs like ashwagandha, Boswellia, coriander, and ginger. These act as immune boosters and possess antibacterial and anti-inflammatory characteristics.
9. Maximizes performance
In combination with weightlifting methods, yoga is an additional way to increase endurance and strength, improve complete body posture, and achieve balance and flexibility. It helps maximize physical performance by training the body for flexibility and agility at the same time as building specific muscle groups, while the meditative side of yoga contributes to your inner stability and mental balance.
Pain from weightlifting or injuries may also be eliminated if practiced yoga simultaneously. Both mental and physical strength can be improved when we combine training programs with yoga.
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