There's absolutely no way you can stress the nervous system and build muscle and bone density as efficiently as with lifting weights.
Calisthenics, which is what Yoga is, body weight exercises, can never achieve the same results. You can come close in a lot of ways, one legged squats etc, but ultimately, you cannot work your back and your core as effectively as with a 1.5x body weight dead lift.
Unless we're talking about the calisthenics we did in school gym class, circles with your arms, you can get pretty big and shredded with it. Calisthenics is basically gymnastics and gymnasts are much bigger than yogis.
Really nice handstands! I was also going to say you definitely can get very, very strong just doing calisthenics. Mike Tyson famously was doing pretty much all calisthenics until the 90s. Here's him fighting a 30-0 Spinks -- who reportedly didn't even want to leave his locker room for the fight he was so intimidated by Tyson -- training mainly calisthenics up until this point. I'd say Tyson was pretty strong. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuaFIRD7_5Y
No knock on weight lifting though, it's great. But for most people getting on a yoga mat and doing some calisthenics is a lot more approachable than learning how to use a gym properly for their bodies.
Serious Gymnasts also lift weights at specific points in their overall training. It’s faster and helps avoid bad habits to have the strength to do specific moves before attempting them. This is especially true after injury.
However spending hours a day doing gymnastics is plenty to maintain that level of physical strength and even slowly improve.
Most people are never going to come close to the level where it makes a difference.
For me I saw 10x better results with calisthenics than intermediate powerlifting because the amount of volume I could get in was much much higher on compound exercises.
It's only when you get to an advanced level of strength, where advanced calisthenics exercises don't quite cut it, and almost no one gets to that level.
Big lifts, typical of strength training, are also compound exercises. I don't see a way you can match the level of potential volume even at intermediate level without putting in much more time with calisthenics, for legs anyway. That is, sets x reps x weight. For pressing you can get more volume doing just push ups at intermediate, but you won't yield the same level of absolute strength, i.e. you wont just automatically be able to bench 200 lbs by virtue of push up volume. You can get the best of both worlds by doing "frequency method" push-ups as in linear programs like Greyskull.
You need to make calisthenics excercises progressively harder instead of endlessly increasing the volume, if you want to increase strength. The pinnacle are pushups on one arm, Bruce Lee demonstrated those on two fingers. The book Convict Conditioning contains progressions for several bodyweight excercises.
> There's absolutely no way you can stress the nervous system and build muscle and bone density as efficiently as with lifting weights.
I'm not sure about that - have you looked at the strength required for some of the exercises people do on gymnastics rings? Things like ring planches, maltese, victorian cross (once thought to be impossible) etc.
I don’t think either Calisthenics or Yoga people would agreed with you that they are the same. I mean even within different Yoga types there are huge differences.
Yeah, if you want to do calisthenics then the best thing to do is to follow a calisthenics routine. Some yoga routines have a decent amount of calisthenics in them, many don't. Also, progression is going to be much better with a good calisthenics routine - most yoga routines and classes have a very poor sense of progression.
Same goes for stretching as well. A good stretching routine is going to get you much more flexible faster than doing yoga. Yoga has stretching in it, but again, it's unfocused and tends to have a very poor sense of progression.
Yoga is probably more akin to a sport. You can keep fit by playing sports, depending on how much work you put into it. But if you're trying to build strength, cardio, or flexibility, you're going to get much better results with a routine that focuses on those.
This actually isn’t necessarily true, one of the reasons I loved Sivananda yoga was that the classes were near identical and you could see yourself getting better at the breath hold/shoulder stand/sun salutations/etc. as the course progressed.
