Weight Lifting and Yoga – Perfect Match – At first glance, it seems like yoga and weightlifting have absolutely nothing in common, but when we look beyond our usual stereotypes about the two, we can see how they complement each other.

Just as having stronger muscles helps you remain in one asana for longer time, the flexibility and endurance that come from yoga help you perform better in strenuous exercises. Check here health benefits of excercise.

Yoga also helps you to control and actually feel each muscle in your body, which can be very useful when it comes to weight lifting.

Weight lifting and Yoga – perfect match

If you’re interested how weightlifting and yoga make a match made in heaven, read on.

Combining Strength and Flexibility

Yoga uses one’s bodyweight, so there’s no progressive building of resistance through adding more weight. However, weight lifting will get you what you need in terms of building muscle.

It should be mentioned, though, that yoga taps into the muscles you didn’t even know you had and some of the muscle groups can be strengthened in a much more efficient way than with weight lifting.

This practice also teaches your body to be flexible and to adapt to different exercises, which can prevent many common weight lifting injuries. Check here – stop going excuses for not excercising 

Power, Speed and Endurance

Lifting weights explosively, while doing a full-body compound lifts at the gym activates the fast-twitch muscle fibers. This kind of training helps you develop and enhance speed and power, but there needs to be a yin for that yang. You also must perform that will help you activate the slow-twitch fibers.

Fortunately, yoga has just what you need. By holding poses for a prolonged time, you’re building endurance, which is the perfect complement for explosiveness.

Aggression and Serenity

A good strength training program is a progressive exercise regimen that will make you stronger after each workout session. Lifting heavier weights each time contributes to the development of controlled aggression, but what happens when you need to relax?

Many athletes complete their aggressive training session with some yoga. The world’s top tennis player, Novak Djokovic, says that yoga helps him relax the body and unwind the mind after training. And truly, yoga helps you get rid of stress – from both your mind and body.

Physical and Mental Training

In very specific and different ways, both of these activities are workouts for both the mind and the body. Strength training has a very different way of training the mind, though. It works by motivating you to go heavier, better and to always improve.

It requires focus and devotion – you must keep everything in mind, from the proper way to lift and not get hurt to high-performance gym clothes.

Unlike weightlifting, yoga gives you an entirely different approach to mind training. It soothes you, and helps you build self-confidence. But it also trains your body with endurance poses.

Building Muscles

Let’s face it, there can be no visually satisfying muscles without strength training. A yoga practitioner can provide some shape, but because of the lack of new challenges and increased weights (it uses body weight), it can’t give you the results you want. Still, yoga contributes to your overall ability to build muscles, by helping them repair and grow stronger.

So, we can’t be surprised by the fact that many bodybuilders, including the world famous Ben Pakulski, use yoga to enhance the effects of strength training.

Weight lifting has its own benefits other than building muscles, and those are boosting the metabolism, increasing the bone density and maintaining joint flexibility.

Both of these exercise types have their own unique perks, but when done together, they can surpass what’s normally expected of them.

However, if you’re inexperienced in one of the two, and want to start including it in your workout routine, consider consulting a professional to avoid injuries.