Oof. Watch out for anything with 'zen' in it. There's a lot of bull around yoga classes and yoga people. If you just do yoga, breathe and focus on the breath, you are meditating. Simple as that. The rest is just branding and bullshit, to be avoided.
As someone who used to lift and absolutely loved it, I wanted to try to explain the difference between lifting and yoga.
Lifting is awesome and I used to absolutely love it. I also found it somewhat meditative. It was my unwind time. I miss it. What I didn't get from lifting is the diversity that yoga brings in terms of strengthening far more muscles, while also giving you flexibility.
I'm trying to think of a pose I can give you, but I worry that if you just dive in and try it you could injure yourself. The good yoga routines will start you off very slowly with breath, then some light stretching, then sun salutations, and then into the harder poses. It is those harder poses that give you this kind of "diversity of strength" I'm describing.
Yoga is usually a flow, and a well designed flow will alternate between exerting muscles and then stretching those same muscles that you were exerting while exerting the ones you were stretching. That way you get strength and flexibility.
I don't have a gym near me anymore (I live on a small island) but I suspect that the combination of yoga and a killer lifting routine could do unbelievable things for your strength, flexibility and overall aesthetics, while helping you lift way heavier while avoiding injury. Just a thought. Best of luck!!
I have a slight preference towards Pilates and Barre over Yoga (I worry that some Yoga teachers value historical flows over safety/efficacy of movements) but absolutely agree that the combination with lifting is fantastic.
But I see no reason why you can't implement some of the benefits of a lifting routine on your small island, with resistance bands, a pulley with something heavy attached, and a pullup-branch on a tree... No substitute for a barbell but got me through lock-downs.
How come you don't do both yoga and strength training, just like other people do both sports and strength training? Is it not possible to get a bar and a rack to the island?
Good point. I'll consider that. I've actually considered just getting a deadlift mat with bar and weights. I found deadlifts to be by far the most effective lift of them all. Huge return on smallest time investment.
So it depends on your physiology, but a lot of people develop asymmetrically (carrying kids on one side, etc) or have a skeletal issue like scoliosis that causes that. Lifting - and by lifting I mean the big important movements like squats, deadlifts, OHP and benchpresses - works both sides of your body at the same time. Yoga breaks it up into one side at a time, which I've found has caused my body to become a lot more symmetrical. Yoga also includes a lot of strength movements that also improve flexibility, which lifting does not.
Hard to get into a debate about this because lifting does an amazing job of exercising just about everything. It just does it in a very different way with, I've found, higher risk of injury.
As someone who used to lift and absolutely loved it, I wanted to try to explain the difference between lifting and yoga.
Lifting is awesome and I used to absolutely love it. I also found it somewhat meditative. It was my unwind time. I miss it. What I didn't get from lifting is the diversity that yoga brings in terms of strengthening far more muscles, while also giving you flexibility.
I'm trying to think of a pose I can give you, but I worry that if you just dive in and try it you could injure yourself. The good yoga routines will start you off very slowly with breath, then some light stretching, then sun salutations, and then into the harder poses. It is those harder poses that give you this kind of "diversity of strength" I'm describing.
An example of a pose that isn't that hard to do, but strengthens muscles that lifting rarely works is half moon pose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ardha_chandrasana
Yoga is usually a flow, and a well designed flow will alternate between exerting muscles and then stretching those same muscles that you were exerting while exerting the ones you were stretching. That way you get strength and flexibility.
I don't have a gym near me anymore (I live on a small island) but I suspect that the combination of yoga and a killer lifting routine could do unbelievable things for your strength, flexibility and overall aesthetics, while helping you lift way heavier while avoiding injury. Just a thought. Best of luck!!