Let’s face it: yoga is an excellent exercise for both your mind and body. But sometimes, you get off a session wondering if you actually did a good workout.Active people always want to make the most out of their chosen workouts. However, not everyone knows that it is possible to incorporate two exercises and achieve the best results.
If you are looking for the most optimal results in getting fit while holistically improving your health, a team of experts behind lifestyle website Vivotion.com can give you the answer.
A spokesperson from Vivotion said: “Yoga and high-intensity interval training, or commonly known as HIIT, might be two different exercises. But when they are combined, they can produce positive results.”
“This pair of workouts does not only go great together in terms of exercise, but they also render a great outcome in a short amount of time. Whether you are an athlete, a yogi, or someone who wants to start getting fit through the best technique, you are on the right track with yoga + HIIT.”
Benefits of Combining Yoga with High-Intensity Interval Training
1. Strength and Flexibility
By doing so, you will be getting both the benefits of yoga’s stretching, proper breathing, and mindfulness; plus HIIT’s bodyweight exercises. It is an excellent way to make sure that aside from getting a full body workout to strengthen your bones and muscles, you also get to enhance your flexibility and mobility. Though yoga is a great strength builder, HIIT improves muscle power better. Combine the two, and you will have a higher peak level of strength and flexibility.
High-intensity routines will also help an avid yoga practitioner do some of the most challenging poses.
2. Higher Level of Endurance
When you do full-body compound lifts at the gym and other high-intensity workouts, you activate your fast-twitch muscle fibers. It will help you develop power and speed. The perfect combination of HIIT and yoga brings an optimal result in terms of endurance.
Yoga, on the other hand, activates your slow-twitch muscle fibers through the slow movements and poses that should be held for a certain amount of time.
Maintaining a good balance between these two types of muscle fibers develops optimal endurance that enables you to do more complex routines.
3. Energy and Positiveness
If you practice this workout combination, you will eventually experience positive energy after each session that will stay until the rest of the day. Integrating yoga with HIIT does not only improve physical strength, but it also enhances a person’s state of mind. Since high-intensity workouts require you to burn a lot of energy, the breathing, and mindfulness in yoga release the power you need to keep pushing forward.
4. Controlled Aggression and Increased Relaxation
Yoga, meanwhile, balances the process and relaxes your mind and muscles. Despite doing some challenging poses that make you sweat, you will get rid of unwanted stress afterward. An ideal strength-training program like HIIT typically makes use of progressive loading. It gets you psyched up before each workout so you can lift heavier weights each time, developing controlled aggression.
And while HIIT often leaves you drained and exhausted, yoga makes you feel relaxed. Combining it with your regular high-intensity routine makes you feel less fatigued while developing better breathing process.
5. Toned Muscles
Aside from this, HIIT boosts the metabolism that improves weight loss, bone density and flexibility of the joints. Strength training is an excellent workout for people who want to build more visually pleasing muscles. Yoga can also supplement the process by adding flexibility in the picture.
6. Improves Heart Health
Practicing high-intensity interval training speeds up your heart rate. Yoga then combined with HIIT, assists your heart rate as it slows down, maintaining your heart’s robust and optimal health.
7. Reduces Risks to Injury
Reduces Risks to InjuryPractising high-intensity interval training speeds up your heart rate. Yoga then combined with HIIT, assists your heart rate as it slows down, maintaining your heart’s robust and optimal health.
Yoga makes this dilemma more manageable for its range of poses that improve flexibility and muscle tone. Thus, combining yoga with HIIT makes challenging routines easier and safer to execute. If there is one thing most active people want to avoid, that is obtaining an injury. Despite the harm that some types of workout bring, the last thing we want is to get hurt while on one of our sessions.
8. Better Weight Loss Results
Most of us are aware that high-intensity interval training is one of the best ways to burn fats and calories. However, doing yoga at the same time makes you more mindful of the things you eat. It creates a mindset that will steer you closer to healthier foods. Through the excellent fat-burning system of HIIT and the positive mindset brought by yoga, you will be able to lose weight at a faster pace.
9. Better Sense of Balance
Also, the improved focus and mind and body coordination that yoga makes you speed up your HIIT workout with a better state of equilibrium. Yoga performed in combination with high-intensity interval training improves a person’s stability. Incorporating HIIT routines with yoga enables you to do lunges and butt kicks better.
How to Get Started
Since yoga and HIIT is an optimal workout combination, there are some essential things you should keep in mind before getting them into practice.
First and foremost, you have to know these types of workout. If you are new to both, the most ideal thing to do is establish a solid foundation in each of them before incorporating one in the other.
You can spend a couple of months mastering yoga and another period intended for high-intensity interval training.
Next, you will need to prepare yourself by doing full-body compound movements such as squats and deadlifts plus body weight exercises like pull-ups and dips. Doing so will develop a uniform physique without causing muscle imbalances and injuries.
Last, discover the best combination of the two that suits your bodies needs and capabilities. Though there are various tutorials and routines suggested on the internet, what worked for some may not work for you.
It is best to gradually implement one of the workouts to the other and see how your body will react to it. As you go on, you will definitely determine what suits you most — making you get the best of both worlds!
Author Bio: Isabel Speckman is a North Carolina-based freelance writer and work-from-home mother of three. In her 10 years as a professional writer, she’s worked in proposal management, grant writing, and content creation. Her writing skills may be confirmed independently. Personally, she’s passionate about teaching her family how to stay safe, secure and action-ready in the event of a disaster or emergency.
