Should Yoga Be A Workout?

Have you ever seen Dharma Mittra's 908 yoga poses poster? If you haven't...what am I doing? This is the internet...hang on, I'll get one...



So, there's Dharma Mittra doing a LOT of yoga.

Now if you started to categorize the poses in the poster, into easy effort to maintain, and hard effort to maintain, you'll get a lot more hards than easys.

What's this mean? Just that on the whole, yoga is physically hard.

So, the whole of yoga is best described as physically hard, because there are far more hard poses, than easy ones.

Now there are subsets, that have easy poses in them, like Restorative, Bikram, Vinyasa (when was the last time you did a Kapinjalasana in a viny class? Freakin' never! So, yeah, vinyasa is only a subset of yoga).

So, YES, on the whole, yoga is physically demanding.

Now, a workout is hard, and yoga is hard. Therefore, yoga IS a workout.

Whether, yoga is anything more than a workout is beyond the scope of this post. Why...because the whole point of the post, is to argue that yoga is a workout.

Job done, J.