Whilst giving a talk to female students, I was asked if yoga was as effective as strength training sessions, in toning/ shaping for summer.
Perhaps; if you've never done any strength training before and your particular yoga such as Ashtanga, is challenging enough to make your muscles feel worked as you hold the asanas/ poses. For beginners, Pilates and Yoga certainly are effective toning tools, and novice exercisers do improve their strength. But as you get stronger, you’ll reach a point where to progress, your muscles definitely need harder work and the best way forward is with sensible and biomechanically designed weight training which produces increased strength without bulk.
The smart safety principle ‘It’s not about lifting weight; it’s about training your muscles’, signifies that with intelligent exercise prescription, moderate weights is all you’ll ever need. Bearing in mind that the person who originally coined the phrase, ‘No pain, no gain’ should have immediately been hung from the nearest tree, you’ll go forward using accurate and safe principles!
To get shapely and fit, building reasonable levels of muscle tissue is an essential part of the equation and this doesn’t mean becoming masculine in appearance. Typically, declining hormone and activity levels means a woman starts losing about half a pound of muscle a year during pre-menopausal years. That loss can leap to a pound a year, once she actually reaches menopause.
Muscle tissue burns approximately 18 times as many calories as fat, even when you’re not exercising, so as your muscle diminishes, your metabolism (i.e. your body's calorie-burning ability) drops. Doing nothing to stem this loss, means waking up on your 60th birthday to discover that you may well have lost up to half of your muscle and replaced it with twice as much fat!
At any age, intelligently applied moderate strength training can help turn that tide through elevating levels of human growth hormone and replacing lost muscle. Those rewards arrive quickly, with a woman who exercises all her major muscle groups twice a week, replacing 5 to 10 years' worth of metabolism-revving muscle in just a few months.
However, lets be clear that you certainly don’t need to go to a gymnasium/health club to do this, despite endless proclamations advocating it!
Using a set of light- moderate dumbbells and light ankle weights, whilst performing exercises that are specifically suitable for you, all your muscles can be worked very safely and effectively at home. Machines are fine, but humans were fit and healthy through moving weights around hundreds of years before health clubs and machines ever existed.
Exercising for strength twice a week will brings good results, but please get yourself tested beforehand by a professional who is qualified in Exercise Biomechanics to ensure your exercises are physically appropriate for your personal physiology. Gyms and health clubs do generally provide a worthwhile service to those who want to get fitter, but they are not by any means vital to that goal and the same standards to better, can easily be achieved at home.
