October 24, 2024, 11:48 am | Read time: 4 minutes
Yoga to burn calories? Even though we do yoga primarily for our inner well-being, there are a few asanas that really heat us up. FITBOOK author and certified yoga teacher Nina Ponath explains three asanas that will help you burn the most calories during your yoga practice.
Engaging in sports to burn calories? If you want to do this, you’ll probably first think of cardio training such as swimming, jogging, or cycling – and yes, strength training too. Yoga, however, might not be the first thing that comes to mind. In fairness, yoga isn’t just a sport; it’s a spiritual practice. The physical exercises, known as asanas, can be quite strenuous but are primarily intended to do something to us on a spiritual level. Nevertheless, yoga exercises also burn calories. Depending on the type of yoga, your body weight, and height, you can burn between 150 (hatha yoga) and 300 calories (demanding vinyasa yoga with handstands, etc.) per yoga session. These three asanas are particularly promising.
Overview
You can burn the most calories with these yoga exercises
1. Sun salutation (Surya Namaskar)
Not a single asana, but an entire flow: the sun salutation is a dynamic flow of twelve yoga poses that work your whole body.
Execution
- Start in a standing position and breathe in deeply as you raise your arms above your head.
- As you exhale, bend forward and touch the floor with your hands.
- Jump or step back into plank, and lower your body into cobra.
- Press into downward-facing dog and hold this position for five breaths.
- Return to the standing position and repeat the sequence.
Calorie consumption
The sun salutation strengthens the muscles, increases the heart rate, and improves flexibility. Ten minutes of sun salutations burn up to 40 calories for me.
2. Warrior III (Virabhadrasana III)
This powerful balancing exercise trains your core, legs, and back.
How to perform
- Stand upright and lift one leg backward while tilting your upper body forward.
- Stretch your arms forward to maintain your balance.
- Hold this position for 20 to 30 seconds, and then switch sides.
Calorie consumption
Warrior III strengthens the leg muscles, improves balance, and increases endurance. This exercise can burn four calories per minute in an intense flow. It also trains the legs, which increases calorie consumption in the long term.
3. Chair (Utkatasana)
This exercise strengthens the legs like a squat and builds up heat in the body. The chair pose (Utkatasana), meaning ‘powerful’ or ‘fierce,’ builds endurance and integrates the strength of the legs, arms, and core while also providing a beneficial stretch to the torso muscles and spine.
Execution
- Place your feet hip-width apart.
- Now bend your legs and squat down slightly.
- The torso is stretched straight upwards, and the arms are raised above the head as an extension of the torso.
- Hold the position for 30 seconds and then come into Tadasana, an upright position.
Calorie consumption
Utkatasana acts like a deep squat and immediately engages the strength of your legs, back, and ankles. The asana aligns the life energy within and around you. It teaches you to find the ‘power seat’ in your pelvis, burning approximately 30 calories in ten minutes.
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Yoga can support strength training
To clarify: Compared to sports such as running, swimming, or strength training, yoga performs rather poorly in terms of calorie consumption. Nevertheless, yoga can indirectly do something for the body. On the one hand, challenging asanas strengthen the muscles, which leads to higher calorie consumption in the long term and is, therefore, an important key to losing weight.
A Chinese study from 2015 showed that regular yoga improved VO2 max, muscle strength, and the ability to perform push-ups even more significantly than light strength training. The lower back and hamstrings also benefited more from yoga than from strength training.1
In addition, the spiritual aspect and the focus on our inner self bring us closer to ourselves and our own needs. It’s quite possible that this will make it easier to keep the occasional emotional eating binge, snacking out of boredom, and an unhealthy lifestyle in check.