Can Hot Yoga Make Your Arms Smaller?

Yoga is effective in elongating and toning all parts of the body, including the arms. When yoga is done in a heated room, the added cardiovascular component burns calories and fat, revealing the arms' firm musculature over time. Hot yoga's various postures target all parts of the arm --- from the forearm to the triceps, biceps and shoulder muscles that frame the top of the arm. Yoga departs from the modern aesthetic that values bulging biceps. The look you're likely to achieve with a regular hot yoga practice is slender and trim.

Strength and Tone

Several hot yoga poses make use of the upper arm muscles, strengthening and defining them over time. Chaturanga, the four-limbed pose, for instance, is much like a pushup position except that the chest and hips are held about an inch from the floor, supported primarily by the upper arms and shoulders. Other arm-toning postures include cobra pose, upward dog, arm balances, handstand and upward bow. Bikram yoga, a style of hot yoga, makes use of only 26 postures, only a couple of which target the arms. Strengthening and toning alone will not make arms smaller, but firm arms do contribute to a healthy, lean look.

Fat Burning

If you've ever taken a hot yoga class, you know that it's a heart-pumping affair. The poses themselves don't appear aerobic, but the effect of heat on the body's thermo-regulating mechanism causes the heart to pump quickly, creating the same cardiovascular benefits you might experience during a jog.

In addition, each posture requires contraction of muscle groups, which burns calories. The average person will burn about 600 calories in a 90-minute hot yoga class, making it easy to create a caloric deficit and ultimately lose fat. Hot yoga might not make the muscles of your arms smaller, but it can help you trim layers of fat that hide those muscles.

Arm Lengthening

Hot yoga is just as suited to lengthening as strengthening arms. Eagle pose, for instance, stretches the triceps, if slightly. Bow pose lengthens the muscle of the forearms, and cow face pose stretches the muscles of the upper arm and shoulder area. Although lengthening muscles doesn't technically reduce their size by volume, longer muscles are narrower, thinner and smaller in appearance than tight, compact muscles.

Limitations

Hot yoga's greatest advantage, when it comes to reducing arm size specifically, lies in its muscle-lengthening and calorie-burning power. Until you reach an advanced level of practice, and depending on the style, hot yoga classes tend not to do much to tighten the biceps, for instance. Still, different instructors will, of course, focus on different strengthening exercises. If you are interested in targeting your arms, don't be afraid to let your instructor know. And keep practicing. The well-tuned hot yoga body will feature slender, toned limbs.