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"the idea that you can achieve any kind of serious strength gain through high repetition circuit training is, frankly, a joke." I guess the joke's on all the e
by timr 14y ago
"the idea that you can achieve any kind of serious strength gain through high repetition circuit training is, frankly, a joke."
I guess the joke's on all the extremely fit, strong people who do yoga, then.
(I've personally gained strength and muscle mass doing yoga, and when I looked at this routine, I saw most of the poses in a basic vinyasa class. Seven minutes is perhaps a bit aggressive, but the exercises do work. The notion that you can only get intensity with weights is the obviously silly one. All you really need for a good workout is your body, and maybe a mat.)
- enraged_camel 14y agoI'm sorry to tell you that you are terribly misinformed. Athletes get stronger with yoga, because improved flexibility helps them to do compound exercises with better form, and that allows them to activate the correct muscle groups for better leverage. In other words, they have the same muscle mass - they can just activate those muscles more effectively. This is most likely what happened to you, unless you were so unfit when you began yoga that even simple poses worked the hell out of your muscles.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- timr 14y agoIt's a bummer to be terribly misinformed, but I'll take my own muscle mass gains as a consolation prize. We can't have everything, I guess.
- enraged_camel 14y agoIt's good that you got stronger (for the reasons I explained). But unless you are doing some hardcore yoga, it is extremely unlikely that you actually gained muscle mass. (As proof, you can look at any long-term yoga instructor who wasn't muscular to begin with.)
- timr 14y agoOr, you know...as proof, I can use the gains I've measured in my own body. No, that can't be it...
- enraged_camel 14y agoI addressed this in my original post: "unless you were so unfit when you began yoga that even simple poses worked the hell out of your muscles."
- timr 14y agoI was not unfit when I began yoga.
- enraged_camel 14y agoOkay, so let's get down to specifics. Two questions: 1. How did you measure your lean muscle mass? 2. How did you conclude that it increased due to yoga and not something else?
- jacques_chester 14y agoWhich are? Genuinely curious.
- jacques_chester 14y agoI don't see people using yoga alone to win powerlifting contests or Olympic medals in weightlifting. That makes me suspect that perhaps yoga's ability to elicit strength adaptations is limited by leverage and bodyweight. Edit: I agree with you that weights are not the only way to elicit adaptation. But they're easy to scale up in small increments and a lot of the movements don't require much in the way of skill acquisition.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- JPKab 14y agoI have no doubt that you have gained significant strength doing yoga. It should be noted that the poses in yoga do involve holding bodyweight, and the increasing complexity and difficulty of the various poses involves progressively more bodyweight resistance per muscle group. There is no question that intensity can be achieved without weights. I believe what the gentleman was referring to is the science of building significant strength increases over a fit level of baseline strength. The science on this one is very much settled, courtesy of the not very ethical, but scientifically valid, studies from the Soviet Union in the height of the Cold War. The science is this: Lower # of reps at 80 - 90% of a weight you can only lift once builds strength most effieciently. As you progress up the curve to higher reps at 60%, you are still building strength, but not as efficiently, and you are moving more towards increasing endurance. Endurance, of course, is most efficiently gained with high # of reps at low percentages. However, this will typically be at the expense of raw strength. Note: For people who are not at all fit, with atrophied muscles, strength will be gained very easily from almost any use of their muscles, high reps or not.
- jacques_chester 14y agoWhile the responses to different sorts of training (as in intensity/volume tradeoffs) is considered well-settled, there's still a lot of controversy about the actual physiology, the most efficient programming and so forth.
- Dewie 14y agoI guess when someone can do five reps of one armed push ups, five reps of pistol squats and five reps of pull ups (one arm?) then they can say "well, maybe time to drop this scheme and hit the weights"#. But the vast majority of people don't come close to this, so it is completely and utterly absurd for the grandparent to dismiss anything other than barbells for strength training. #Admittedly it's hard to find a replacement for something like olympic barbells when it comes to exercises such as the deadlift. And of course weights have their benefits with the easier progression, etc etc...
- awj 14y ago> I guess the joke's on all the extremely fit, strong people who do yoga, then. Yoga isn't the same thing as high repetition circuit training. Strength gains from yoga are caused by the increasing resistance found in more difficult poses. Out of all the people you've seen become extremely fit and strong, how many stayed in beginner classes doing the easiest poses the whole time?
- timr 14y agoThe primary difference between class levels is not the poses. You get a few fancy new ones as you gain flexibility, but those are icing on the cake. Probably 90% of what you do in any given class is the same. The primary differences between a beginner class and an advanced class are the frequency (repetition), rest time and hold times used. Advanced classes will easily work 2-3x more asanas into an hour than beginner classes.