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Can yoga make you fit?                             
 
Svelte celebrities swear by it, but some experts say yoga does little to
improve your fitness and reduce your weight.
 
So many of the beautiful people swear by it, their lean, toned bodies a testament to its transforming powers, so it’s a wonder that we’ve not all been seduced by yoga. Yet despite the obvious physical perfection of Gwyneth, Christy and Madonna, there are some who still don’t understand the bendy attraction of this ancient exercise form.
 
The good news, as they might see it, is that a study by the American Council on Exercise (ACE) suggests that yoga offers little in terms of physical benefits. While it may provide other, less tangible benefits, the average class fails to raise the heart rate significantly and burns fewer calories than walking at a very slow pace. Even the more dynamic form of yoga is effectively no better than a light aerobic workout.
As Dr Susan Shirreffs, an exercise physiologist at the University of Loughborough, explains: “If people
think that yoga is all they need to do to lose weight and get fit, they are mistaken. It will probably
improve their flexibility, but not much more.”
 
An estimated 1.5 million people in the UK regularly practise yoga, mainly the hatha form. In the ACE study, some of the women were assigned a thrice-weekly, 55- minute hatha yoga class while the rest were banned from doing any form of what the researchers called “intentional exercise”.
 
Each of the yoga sessions began with five minutes of relaxation and yoga breathing (pranayama), followed by ten minutes of warm-up exercises, 35 minutes of yoga postures, or asanas, and five minutes of relaxation. But, during the eight-week study, they burned an average of only 144 calories each per class, about the same amount they would expend in a 55-minute stroll.
 
Not that yoga was without any benefits. Professor John Porcari, of the exercise and sport science department at Wisconsin University and lead author of the ACE study, says that the women in the yoga group experienced a 13 per cent improvement in flexibility compared with pre-study measurements, with significant gains in shoulder and trunk flexibility. They also gained in strength and were able to perform six more press-ups and 14 more sit-ups at the end of the study. On average, they could also balance on one leg for 17 seconds longer than they managed before the trial started. One might expect more dynamic forms of yoga to offer greater physical benefits. Certainly power yoga, in which participants move more rapidly through hatha poses, was found to burn more calories (237 calories in 55 minutes) and to boost heart rates to 62 per cent of maximum, but on average this compares to only a light aerobic workout.
 
Furthermore, more dynamic forms of yoga also lessen the benefits gained in flexibility and relaxation, Professor Porcari says. By moving quickly, you do not get the same muscle and tissue stretch as you would in slower poses. Dr Cedric Bryant, chief exercise physiologist for ACE, says that yoga should be performed in addition to regular cardiovascular activities such as running. “Yoga is designed to relax the body and help to improve musculoskeletal fitness,” he says. “If you attempt to incorporate calorie-burning elements in a yoga session you may compromise the essential purpose and beneficial effects of the practice.”
 
Yoga first arrived in the West more than 100 years ago, but didn’t become fashionable in the UK until the mid-1960s when the British Wheel of Yoga was formed. With gyms yet to become established, yoga classes began to spring up in church halls around the country, says Arun Gattani, a spokesperson for the British Wheel of Yoga. But the energetic form practised today bears little resemblance to original yoga developed in India more than 5,000 years ago when the goal was solely meditation and contemplation, rather than lengthening limbs and downsizing your bottom.
 
It was to help yogis sit still for long periods while meditating that the more physical form of yoga, hatha, emerged. Once it became apparent that there were added health benefits of working so extensively with the body and mind, the ancient yogis studied the movement of nature and animals to develop the traditional postures, or asanas. Although these basic moves are still used today, they have been developed into dozens of variations. Today’s yogis can try anything from Bikram yoga, practised in a room heated to 43C (109F) to Iyenga (which uses straps and supports) and the latest gym offering, yogalates (a fusion of yoga and Pilates).
 
Earlier this year, it was reported that regular yoga helped to prevent middle-aged spread (specifically, the 1lb a year that most people gain between the ages of 45 and 55). However, the findings were based on self-reported behaviour and no questions were asked about other forms of exercise that the subjects may have been doing.
 
Gattani dismisses the ACE findings: “The whole point of yoga is that it represents a unity of body and mind. It is not all about the physical effects you get from doing hatha yoga and for that reason you can’t compare yoga directly with any other activity.”
 
He adds that beginners in hatha yoga cannot expect significant aerobic improvements “because it takes time to master individual asanas” before intensity can be increased.
 
People need to make sure that “their expected benefits of yoga need are in line with reality,” Professor Porcari says. “They often try to make yoga into this all-encompassing thing and morph it into programmes that will hit every aspect of fitness,” he adds. “But it was never designed to be that way.”


 

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