Yoga with Body Building: The Perfect Fitness Formula

Body building concentrates mainly on enhancing the physical appearance, whilst Yoga targets and boosts your mental being consisting of the body, mind and soul. Bodybuilding showcases the beauty of physical strength and fitness, while Yoga signifies mental peace and balance. Let’s look at how we can sync both of these to achieve a complete and total fitness workout.

Yoga is a holistic approach of uniting one’s body, mind, and spirit. It teaches you how to balance the body and mind through “Asanas,” meaning good posture in the language of Sanskrit, which is an old Indo Aryan ancient language. Asanas is the process in which your body learns how to be still for long periods of time, helping you to achieve a well improved balanced of the body thereby giving you the ability to be extremely flexible yet healthy and strong.

Body building is the art of expanding and enlarging the body muscles using very vigorous and strenuous methods of exercises. When speaking about body building, we imagine body building as just big tough body builders pumping their muscles with all types of heavy equipment. However, that is just one side of body building. Any exercise or activity that requires a sheer amount of exertion to the body in order to build muscle is classified as body building. For example, gymnasts, rugby players and athletes undergo vigorous body building transformations, where excessive amounts of stamina, mental endurance and energy are required to achieve a bulk of muscles and fitness levels. These cause the body to experience an incredible amount of mental stress and exertion.

To relieve this stress and revamp your energy back, you need to add a dose of Yoga to your fitness recipe. It relieves the strains incurred, relaxes torn up muscles, and heals damaged tissues quickly. Not only that, practising yoga regularly helps to cultivate endurance and strength to the muscles, improves the concentration and provides a perfect body balance. One thing that body building cannot do and Yoga can is giving the body full flexibility and total resistance to pain and discomfort.

Yoga Vs Body-building

Every individual has a different body build, which is why their preferences for exercises are also different. The table below shows the comparison made by the most popular fitness regime and it shows Yoga against Body-building to make clear which is best for fitness.

Most people who are looking for the perfect fitness solution for their life often question and wonder whether body building and Yoga can be done together. The answer is a simple yes; they can be done together and should be done together. The combination of Yoga and body building is the best way to stay fully fit and super healthy.

Yoga keeps your body parts in line and prevents distortion of the body whilst body building requires you to exert a forceful and progressive stress to your body, risking not only your health but your life as well. Yogic postures (or “yogasana” as it’s commonly known in English) can correct specific problems pertaining to particular joints or muscles that are heavily attacked from too much strenuous exercising from body building.

It is important to note that body building on its own is dangerous and ultimately not worth it as you have to rely on heavy force (and unnecessary medication) constantly to maintain the muscles in the body. Introducing Yoga to your body building or heavy fitness regime guarantees super health and relieves you from a whole lot of problems incurred from body building alone. The biggest disadvantage of body building is that it is not for everybody. Even if you’re fit, you can still ruin your body from doing too much exercising, which is why it’s essential to add Yoga to your routine.

One of the biggest benefits of Yoga is that it is applicable to any age group, especially for elderly people. For many older people, going to the gym and lifting heavy dumbbells is not an option and not a feasible idea. For them, small stretches and simple exercises are more suitable. Moreover, Yoga helps them to do that easily. Yoga also increases the level of the feel-good hormone GABA, which is thought to be the factor responsible for reducing anxiety and stress.

• Body building significantly reduces the amount of oxygen flowing to your muscles and joints. Yoga aids the smooth flow of oxygen to every part of the body.
• Body building disrupts blood circulation causing a lot of blood clots. With different Yoga postures, blood circulation becomes evenly distributed throughout the body.
• Body building inflames internal organs causing major medical problems (especially to lungs and kidneys). Yoga helps to keep internal organs in line and improves optimum performance.
• Body building causes massive fluid evaporation lowering your level of body fluids. Yoga increases fluid lubrication of joints and tendons.
• Stiffness in the body, which most body-builders experience, hinders the full range of motion. Yoga produces full motion of arms and joints, improving flexibility and vitality.
• Yoga helps you harness your energy levels by improving the metabolism of the body to retain and assimilate essential nutrients. Body building exhausts your energy levels and it’s often very difficult and painful for the body to rejuvenate.
• Yoga, when done consistently, can enhance your muscle strength. Body building when done too much can destroy your muscle cells.

Ever since body building entered into the sports category, fierce competition has forced many competitors to resort to extreme measures of torturing their bodies. It has caused more injuries, stiffness to their body, resulting in losing muscle agility and flexibility, making them appear more like a robot than a human being. Some have even succumbed to death. To regain that lost flexibility, body builders need to combine body building with Yoga. The more the flexibilities you have in your muscles, the greater you are protected from injuries and fatalities.

Several clinical researches have been conducted in the last twenty years and they studied the relationship between body building and Yoga. It concluded that Yoga was the most beneficial method of relieving aches and pains from body building as well as chronic migraines, lower back injuries, pregnancy aches and rheumatoid arthritis.

Bottom line is if you want to indulge in body building, make sure that you don’t overdo it and always add Yoga to your routine for the best and optimum long term results.