Yoga plays an important role in living a healthy lifestyle. It has the power to regulate many bodily functions and helps in maintaining an optimum weight as well. Yoga and exercise can also enhance your mood along with a number of health benefits. You can even combine both yoga and cardiovascular exercises, also called cardio yoga. Cardio yoga is a famous style of activity that consolidates yoga with cardiovascular, or cardio, works out. A cardio exercise is any action that moves your body and lifts your pulse. We need to fuse cardio into our exercise schedules since it is extraordinary for your heart.
These exercises will expand your perseverance and reinforce your heart. This form of exercise has gained a lot of popularity among the individuals who believe in the power of yoga and are fitness enthusiasts. Cardio yoga can improve your endurance and inner self as well. You can take help or guidance from a fitness expert to add cardio exercise in your yoga routine. However, make sure you are taking proper sleep and healthy diet along with this working out schedule. Read further to know about the benefits and how to do cardio yoga.
Benefits of cardio yoga
Cardio yoga is now a wise option to reduce stress, improve sleeping cycle, enhance mental and emotional health, and relieve lower back and neck pain. However, you should be aware that more intense forms of yoga including cardio yoga can burn the same amount of calories as exercising at a moderate effort but fewer calories than jogging. Here are the main benefits of cardio yoga:
1. Weight loss
By doing cardio yoga, you can lose weight effectively and improve your BMI as well. However, only exercise will not contribute towards weight loss, but you will have to consume less calories. This intensive form of yoga can burn calories and aid weight loss. Performing cardio yoga atleast 5 times in a week for around 30-40 minutes can help you achieve your weight goal. You can keep your calorie intake and exercise time in balance by letting an expert monitor it.
2. Stress relief
Deep breathing and meditation will manage your stress and put your mind at ease. And, if you combine cardio workout with it, you can live a stress free life. Getting on a yoga plus cardio routine can help you calm your brain and distract it from any problems and tensions. There are various cardio yoga exercises that can help in relieving stress. You have to get active and keep your mind busy. Cardio yoga workouts can very quickly activate the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the branch of the nervous system for the functions of the body.
3. Improves strength
It takes a lot of strength to hold your body in a balanced pose along with the addition of cardiovascular exercise. Regular practice of cardio yoga can strengthen the muscles of your arms, back, legs, and core. You can perform various cardio yogasans daily to improve your core strength.
How to do cardio yoga?
Yoga mostly focuses on meditation and breathing techniques, while cardio is more about sweating it out with intense movement. Therefore, cardio yoga workout requires performing yogasans at a quicker pace and with continuous flow to open up more muscles and improve your cardiovascular, or circulatory, system.
There is no proper defined term used for cardio yoga, as experts and instructors mix and match movement sequences in their own way. You can separate yoga movements such as uttanasana, samasthiti and chaturanga dandasana with 30-second cardio activities such as jumping jacks, air squats, and stationary lunges to keep your body moving and heart rate elevated. This will bring you in a series or sequence of cardio yoga exercises.
These were the benefits and how you can perform cardio yoga. Basically, it is a more intense version of traditional yoga, which is generally not considered as cardio. It pairs up yoga and dynamic movements in different sequences to increase and manage elevated heart rate and burn calories. Cardio yoga is better than walking at a moderate pace but not more than running.
