The average person burns around 180-380 calories per hour of doing yoga, depending on the type of yoga. Power Yoga is great for that. Yoga consists of many stretching poses held for a specific length of time before moving onto subsequent poses in the sequence. It helps to build muscle and uses your body weight as resistance. This prepares you for more vigorous exercise such as jogging, dancing, tennis and day-to-day activities. Yoga helps to improve your balance and flexibility as well as helps to keep you toned and trim with regular practice. Even though yoga doesn’t burn as many calories as aerobic exercise, except for some types of vigorous yoga, it offers many other benefits.
Can you lose weight by doing yoga? If weight loss is your goal, then the type of yoga you’re doing is important. You might want to look for a class that is combining poses that focus on the large muscle groups, in order to up the calorie burn. When practising yoga to lose weight, it’s important to eat a balanced diet, drink plenty of water and get enough sleep to rejuvenate your body.
Power Yoga involves faster movements, rather than holding the poses for a specific length of time. Therefore, this makes Power Yoga a good choice for people using yoga for weight loss. Sometimes it’s called “cardio yoga” as it offers cardiovascular benefits similar to aerobic exercise. It is a Westernised form of Ashtanga Yoga, which was designed as a free-form series of poses, and there is no set order like traditional Ashtanga Yoga. In Power Yoga, you move between Sun Salutation poses to warm your body up, followed by a series of standing or seated poses, and then the more difficulty inversions and backbends, before winding down.
Try the Power Yoga style with these poses:
Half Moon Pose ( Ardha Chandrasana ) – Shift the body weight to your right foot and lift your left leg up. Place your right hand on a block or floor directly underneath your shoulder. Try to stack your hips on top of each other and shoulders on top of each other. Keep lifting your left leg up.
Boat Pose ( Navasana ) – Lift your hands away from the floor and extend your arms forward. Keep the arms parallel to the floor with your palms up or down.
Camel Pose ( Ustrasana ) – Kneeling with your knees hip-width apart. Curl your toes under & lengthen your spine, expand your chest with an inhale. Slowly arch back & keeping your hips over your knees. Bring your hands on your ankles. Rest your neck in a neutral position.
Locust Pose ( Salabhasana ) – Lie on your belly on the floor, legs extended to the back with arms beside the body. Gently squeeze the buttocks together as you press the pubic bone toward the floor. Inhale as you lift the chest and legs off the floor.
I teach virtual live Power Yoga class on every Fridays, a strong flowing movement linked to the breath with my handpicked playlist! Check out the timetable at https://mixpose.com/skyflying_yoga
