Is yoga good exercise?
It’s a fun little paradox: You can get strong from doing yoga asana (the postures and movements of yoga), but you don’t have to have physical strength to do yoga.
You can be sedentary, weak, or impaired by pain, illness, or injury, and still do yoga.
Not because people have adapted and modified the yoga practice for your disability or chronic illness. Not because you’ll gain strength through doing adapted yoga practices and one day be able to do sun salutations and warrior flows with everybody else. But because yoga was never about being physically strong in the first place.
Yoga and exercise are not the same thing.
What yoga has to offer, deeper awareness and knowledge of yourself, can be gained without moving your body at all.
Yes, moving your body does help. That’s probably why so many people over the centuries created movement practices as part of yoga asana.
Let’s say it this way: The body is a tool for doing yoga. How we use that tool is always going to depend on our age, lifestyle, physical capacity, energy capacity, household responsibilities, and so much more.
Is yoga good exercise?
No, because there isn’t a physical something to strive for or achieve in yoga. Not stamina, not the strength to do handstands. not flexibility, not even the currently popular “functional movement.”
No one denies movement is important for our bodies. By all mean, move your body. Get outside. Challenge yourself (if you want). Join a team sport. Become a competitive athlete. Dance the night away at a club. Go backpacking in the wilderness. Go swimming. Play on the swings at the park. Stroll around the block.
And do your yoga practice alongside that.
How do I know these things?
I know because a wise and experienced teacher taught me, as her teachers taught her.
I also know because I’ve lived it.
For a lot of reasons I won’t share here, I’m at the least physically fit I’ve been in the twenty years I’ve been practicing yoga, and my practice has never been deeper, richer, more full of possibility than it is at this moment.
Yes, I am doing things to get myself to the level of fitness I want and need. Some of my yoga practices help with that -.
But those two things, my body’s ability to move, lift, bend, etc. and my yoga practice of deeply connecting with myself, aren’t tied to each other.
I’m not special in this way.
This is yoga’s true potential for everyone.