People work out for two reasons (which aren't mutually exclusive): to lose weight and to stay in shape which improves long-term health. You have to exercise very hard in order to see results in terms of losing weight; if all you want is to stay in shape, on the other hand, an equivalent of 30 minutes of cardio a day is more than enough. People who don't have to lose weight are therefore content with lighter exercise. If you could lose weight doing yoga, you would see people trying to do just that (as you do in regular gyms). The fact that you don't most likely means that you can't, and yoga is therefore chosen only by people who don't have to work out very hard.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Yoga people
I've never taken a yoga class but I see tons people coming in and out of them all the time. Not once did I see a yoga class taker who would be overweight or anywhere close to that. Those of my friends who take yoga classes themselves tell me that this observation holds as well inside one as it does outside. If it's true in general, a likely conclusion is that yoga is much less effective in reducing weight than regular exercise (cardio plus lifting weights).
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Maybe, assuming Yoga is their only exercise and they don't lose weight by a restricted caloric intake.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure, but that's a good point. I always thought of yoga as combining elements of aerobic exercise and strength training because the body weight is used in slower poses. But I'm not a yoga goer myself, so I don't really know.
ReplyDeleteTwo ideas: 1)I'm sure there are some gyms where overweight people don't go at similar infrequency as their yoga counterparts--which leads me to believe that yoga folks represent a similar self-selecting group (with regional variations), and it isn't yoga per se that selects them out of the general population. The basis of this might be a simple: People who exercise around other people are more comfortable with similar body-typed people.
ReplyDelete2) as a follow up idea, perhaps certain types of exercise correlate to different body types--rowing folks are different than yoga folks (bigger/huskier).
oh and pure speculation: 3) yoga goers place yoga as more central to their general lifestyle than non-yoga goers do their exercise of choice, and the general life style of yoga goers is more inclined to produce normal weighted people (normal here seeming strange and aloof, since the new normal is slightly overweight).
For 2, yes, I mean that, but then, I also mean when a sport crafts your body. Maybe you got into cycling because of strong legs, but now your legs are tree trunks and your upper body is skimpy. Etc.
ReplyDeleteWell, I'm arguing that yoga is about people with a certain body type selecting into it rather than it crafting people's bodies into that type. If it were the latter, then every once in a while we should seen yoga consumers who do not have this particular body type (for example those who have just started doing yoga and didn't have time to have their bodies crafted just yet).
ReplyDeleteIf someone told me that playing basketball makes people taller, I'd say 'Then how come we don't see any short people playing it?'
Fair, to which I could only say that there's some primary threshold for height/weight that one must achieve before attempting basketball/yoga to feel like that basically conform.
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