Is Yoga Considered Strength Training?

If you were to ask a sweating, trembling new yoga student maintaining the Warrior II position through 10 exhalations whether yoga is strength training, you'll likely get a gasped, "Yes." You put your shoulders, core and quadriceps through their paces, particularly during a demanding power yoga session. Fitness specialists, however, note important limits to fully categorizing yoga as strength training.

Features

Certain yoga poses have obvious parallels to strength-training activities. Chaturanga, a lowering from the plank position to the cobra, resembles the descent portion of a push-up. This upper-arm strengthener can be viewed as one of most strength-demanding poses in yoga. Chair pose, or utkatasana, resembles a squat, meanwhile. While strength training would have you perform the squat for multiple repetitions, yoga requires you to hold the chair pose through breath cycles, New York-based personal trainer Al Kavadlo notes. Certified yoga teacher and physiology researcher Roger Cole, writing in "Yoga Journal" magazine, notes that the main yoga postures that provide resistance and build strength include Warrior I and Warrior II for the thighs and hips, Vasistha's pose for the shoulders and waist, chaturanga for the upper body and boat pose for the hip flexors and abdominals.

Analysis

Strength training entails repeated exercises that move the specific muscles in the same pattern against a resisting force. Yoga poses require you to lift and manipulate your own body weight in different positions and angles, note the authors of "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Yoga," who add that "after an intense yoga workout, you might feel like you've been lifting weights at the gym for an hour." Cole writes that yoga offers the benefit of combining strength work and stretching. While there are plenty of postures in which the arms or legs push toward a straight position against resistance, in the process strengthening extensor muscles such as the triceps and quadriceps, few postures can help strengthen flexors such as the biceps and hamstrings.

ACE Study

The American Council on Exercise reports on a 2005 study conducted by the University of Wisconsin that tested 34 previously sedentary women to examine effects of three hour-long hatha yoga classes per week. The 17 women who were assigned to the yoga group performed an average of six more push-ups and 14 more curl-ups following the study period. Poses useful to increased upper-body strength include the plank, the camel, half moon, boat and revolved triangle, because they require you to support your upper body, ACE reports.

Limits

Fitness authority Liz Neporent and her co-authors of "Weight Training for Dummies" ask rhetorically if yoga can replace weight training. Their answer: Probably not. Weight training maintains and builds bone density by working at higher resistance levels than you can achieve manipulating your body weight in yoga. This observations presumes a higher level of fitness, they note; if you are new to exercise, yoga, at least at the start, may give you all the resistance you can handle. As you get fitter, strength training becomes crucial, and thus yoga is complimentary to --- not a replacement for --- weight training, they write. "Yoga counts as stretching and recovery work," explains Eric Brown, a strength and conditioning coach in Bay Shore, New York. "To be blunt, if you consider yoga strength training, you need to get stronger."