Which Is Best – Yoga Or Strength Training
So which is it – yoga or resistance training? The two practices seem to indicate different paths to completely different destinations in terms of physique and functional ability. The yogi is the skinny guy or gal who can twist him or herself into a pretzel while calmly and annoyingly chanting AUM! The weight lifter is the meathead who spends too much time in the gym developing big muscles that may look good but are largely inflexible and non-functional.
Thankfully these two opinions are gross and inaccurate generalizations.
I personally think the research shows a combination of yoga posture practice and strength training is the best thing you can do for your body, aside from proper nutrition of course. This is not really a new concept. Health clubs all around the world have regular yoga classes in addition to their free weights and nautilus machines. We learned a few years ago in the book Real Men Do Yoga, that even football players can get a lot out of supplementing their heavy lifting with some rigorous posture practice.
But how well have yoga and strength training really been integrated in popular training regimes? Not too well in my opinion. The two practices remain separate things to do on separate days for separate purposes. Read on to find why recent discoveries indicate this should change.
Biotensegrity represents a new way of looking at the organization of the human body. It’s based on the architectural principles of tensegrity structures, which are essentially free-standing structures made with discontinuous compressive struts, held together in gravity by a continuous network of tension lines. In the human body, the bones are the compressive struts and the myofascial network make up the tension lines. While this idea is still largely up for debate, early research seems to support it.
Tom Myers has shown through a series of compelling dissections that global tension lines (he calls these lines Anatomy Trains) indeed run throughout the body. Dr. Stephen Levin proved during arthroscopic surgery that our bones never actually touch each other (not under normal circumstances, as least). Furthermore, research by Donald Ingber at Boston Children’s Hospital has shown how even at the cellular level biological systems behave in a way consistent with tensegrity structures.
Based on this evidence, it seems to me that the overall health of the physical body, at least in terms of comfortable, efficient movement, boils down to the maintenance of tensional integrity. I say this because the word tensegrity itself is a contraction of the phrase, “tensional integrity.” This indicates to me a full integration of strength training and yoga posture practice is essential for maintaining a body that can move with strength and grace in any situation.
Resistance training, whether by picking up dumbbells, barbells, or even your own bodyweight, takes care of the tensional part, while yoga practice takes care of the integrity part.
Strength training builds muscle tissue, which naturally erodes as we age. The more muscle tissue we have, the more calories we burn day in and day out, which means it\’s easier for us to maintain a healthy body composition. And by God, lean muscle tissue just looks good.
The active stretching of hatha yoga posture practice reduces myofascial density, which encourages cell division and thereby the generation of new muscle tissue. Posture practice also strengthens your golgi tendon organs, which means you can handle greater degrees of tension before your nervous system shuts your muscles down. Finally, yoga practice balances the various tension lines of the body, which reduces the global effects of injury, chronic strain, and the like.
If you’re interested in creative ways to integrate yoga posture practice with strength training in your own practice, jump over to my blog at BrickhouseBodymind.com. Thanks for reading!
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