Benefits of Hot Yoga for Athletes

By, Brett Bauer

If you spend a lot of time weight training, you need to spend time stretching. By weight lifting you are constantly tightening the muscles. A great way of deep stretching is hot yoga which also has many additional benefits.

First and foremost a main benefit is increasing flexibility. The heat will allow you to reach different levels of flexibility by being in a warm environment. Having an increased range of flexibility will also help with injury prevention.

By doing different types of exercising and stretching such as yoga, it makes you use muscles you are not used to using with your normal activity. This will help build strength, with a focus on the spine.

Hot yoga is also cardiovascular where one 90 minute class could burn up to 1,000 calories. Your heart rate will increase with many of the poses that you are holding and stretching your muscles in. The way you stretch and compress your internal glands and organs stimulates your metabolism so you are burning calories quickly. Besides being a great calorie burning way to stretch, it is also low impact.

While you stretch and sweat, you are also detoxing your body by sweating from the heat. The postures are a great way to detox your muscles, organs, and glands. Also with detoxing the body, you are also healing the body. The heat, stretching, and postures can help heal any old injuries.

Finally with any form of exercise, you need to have some kind of endurance and stamina. With the deep breathing that is in involved combined with the heat, this will help you in your other forms of training.

There are many other styles of yoga you can try besides hot yoga. Here are some of the more popular styles:

Ashtanga

It’s a rigorous style of yoga that follows a specific sequence of postures and is similar to Vinyasa yoga. Ashtanga always performs the exact same poses in the exact same order.

Bikram

In a Bikram class, you will sweat heavily and you work your way through a series of 26 poses.

Hatha

It generally means that you will get a gentle introduction to the most basic yoga postures. You probably won’t work up a sweat in a hatha yoga class, but you should end up leaving class feeling longer, looser, and more relaxed.

Restorative

Restorative classes use bolsters, blankets, and blocks to prop students in passive poses so that the body can experience the benefits of a pose without having to exert any effort.

Vinyasa

Vinyasa classes are known for their fluid, movement-intensive practices. Vinyasa teachers choreograph their classes to transition from pose to pose, and often play music.

No matter the style of yoga, they all will give you great benefits once incorporated to your exercise routine.