Differences Between Yoga and Aerobic Exercises – Benefits and Risk

Both aerobics and yoga relate to physical fitness. This exercise targets your body parts and soul to heal from within and outside. They enhance your appearance and way of thinking by creating positive sense.

Yoga

Yoga refers to spiritual training to the mind and body. It is originated in India since the Vedic period. You got a privileged position in Vedas. It was performed by early kings at their early age. Especially pre-kings were used to performing yoga as a part of their important physical education. Yoga has different exercises, which are called asanas. It provides external and internal resistance.

Yoga also includes meditation, which brings mental stability. It is a popular exercise to represent Indian tradition and culture from the ancient era. Yoga is performed by many religions, such as Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Christianism, and Islam. It is also done across the whole world. This exercise is practiced by Indians for many years. Its origin was discovered in the Rig Vedas.

Yoga belongs to the literature of Vedas, where it signifies the systematic and disciplinary way toward exercise. It focuses on all body parts.

In Yoga, you need to follow basic steps to reach the expert level of asana. These exercises are famous for their stiffness and firmness.

Yoga helps to make your body more flexible. The main exercise of yoga includes Surya Namaskar (Sun Salutation). It contains 12-exercises, which helps to enhance the body. It also creates mental stability by relaxing your mind.

What Yoga involves?

Yoga is a combination of pranayama, yoga asanas, and meditations. You can say yoga is not just exercise, but it is a lifestyle.

Yoga helps to assist in the weight loss process. Making your body flexible is the main benefit of yoga. It promotes lean muscles growth. Yoga may not burn more calories like aerobics, but it can be a good strength training for body weight. It adds pressure on your muscles to control and strengthen.

Yoga is more beneficial for the internal body from its therapeutic activity. The meditation methods of yoga help to relieve anxiety, stress, and tension. Meditation and yoga help to improve illnesses such as diabetes, blood pressure, and arthritis and develop your cognitive and memory functions. It also stimulates your bones, muscles, and ligaments.

Yogasana Names

• Tadasana (Mountain Pose)
• Vrikshasana (Tree Pose)
• Adho Mukho Svanasana (Downward-Facing Dog Pose)
• Trikonasana (Triangle Pose)
• Kursiasana (Chair Pose)
• Naukasana (Boat Pose)
• Bhujangasana (Cobra Pose)
• Paschimottanasana
• Child’s Pose
• Sukhasna

Aerobic exercise

It was initially introduced in America. The word aerobic refers to living in the air. It uses oxygen sufficiently to meet the demands of energy while doing exercise from aerobic metabolism. Aerobic workout can be done with high-intensity or low-intensity. These exercises are combined with strength and stretching training routines. You can do it with rhythmic aerobic workouts. You can also do it by using music in a group of friends. Aerobic exercises are best for healing illness.

These exercises also include everyday activities, which require to perform systematically and regularly to get the effective results of physical fitness.

If you keep a routine of aerobic exercise, then your body stays active and fresh. These exercises are specially performed to prevent cardiovascular issues. These excises require your body to move and lift with some velocity.

The aerobic exercises commonly performed to burn the calories and build strength and flexibility.

In aerobic exercises, your body requires to breathe fast to circulate fast blood in the entire body. The popular aerobic exercise includes Jumping rope, running, and high impact step aerobics.

Aerobic Exercise

• Skipping
• Jumping Jacks
• Stair Training
• Butt Kicks
• Mountain Climber
• Bear Crawls
• Burpees
• Squat Jacks
• Inchworm
• High Knees
• Donkey Kicks
• Corkscrew
• Flutter Kicks
• Skaters
• Plank Jacks
• Box Jumps
• Invisible Jump Rope
• Jumping Lunges
• Jump Forward Jogs
• Sprinters Sit-Ups

Comparison of Yoga and Aerobic:

Yoga

• Yoga is originally from India.
• It is a systematic and dedicated method.
• It may not burn fat.
• Yoga work on inner and external resistance.
• Yoga requires to do in poses and slow movement.
• It is performed to get stability.
• Yoga is performed in one place.
• There are no quick movements in yoga.

Aerobics

• Aerobics started in America
• These are exercises for physical fitness.
• It burns a lot of calories and body fat at huge levels.
• Aerobics focuses on external fitness.
• It has fast movements.
• It is performed to achieve your body physique.
• Aerobics require to perform with movements.
• The movements are fast and jerky.

Yoga Vs Aerobics

Variation

Aerobic exercises comprise of different types of various workout such as swimming, cycling, and walking. It helps to supply oxygen in the whole body.

In contrast, yoga provides deep meditation and relaxation of your body and mind. Yoga helps to stretch your arms, chest, and legs with shoulder shrugs and spinal turn.

Variance in Place

Yoga is performed on a single place with bare feet with using any equipment. In contrast, aerobic exercise needs space to do the workout with special equipment.

Form of Improvement

Aerobic is the support of physical fitness and protection to prevent heart disease. According to an American college, doing exercise every day 20-60 minutes improve physical fitness. Yoga helps to manage blood pressure and cholesterol levels in your blood because it involves slow-motion workout of the body.

Association of Intensity

Aerobics helps to strengthen your muscles to increase physical fitness. You need to raise your heart rate from 55 to 60% more. It will benefit cardiovascular fitness.

In contrast, yoga does not involve muscles strengthening, which mean there is no muscles function improvement.

Calorie burning

Yoga comprises of weight loss exercises to burn the calories in the following way.

• 356 calories every hour in people with185- pound
• 298 calories every hour in people with155- pound
• 240 calories every hour in people with125- pound

In contrast, aerobic exercise helps to burn calories at different levels like walking at 3.5 mph that burn some calories. Using stationary bicycling workout helps to burn

• 932 calories every hour in people with 185-pound
• 782 calories every hour in people with 155-pound
• 630 calories every hour in people with 125-pound

Benefits of Yoga

1.Improves your flexibility

 

Performing yoga helps your body to become flexible. You will feel hard to touch your toes in the starting, but don’t worry, and try to do a backbend. Doing it regularly, you will notice the flexibility. You will also feel no pain in those areas. That is not simple, tight muscles of hips cause to strain your knees joint because of improper alignment of shinbones and thigh.

Yoga helps to make your connective tissues and muscles flexible and improve posture.

2. Increases muscle strength

Strong muscles help you more than looking attractive. Yoga exercise helps to create muscle strength by preventing back pain and arthritis. It also helps to prevent falls in senior people. Building strength from yoga helps to balance with more flexibility. You can say it is an inexpensive strength gaining exercise.

3.Improve your posture

When you have a balanced posture, you will give less strain on your neck and it has good support from your back. Poor posture put more strain on your neck, back, and other joints and create pain. As you fall, your body gets compensate by straightening to normal inward flex in your lower back and neck. This condition creates a risk of arthritis and degeneration of the spine.

4.Prevents joint breakdown and cartilage

Every time you perform yoga, you make your joint to use their complete motion range. It helps to prevent arthritis degenerative and reduce disability by the press and soaking in cartilage that generally not in use.

Joint cartilage is similar like a sponge, it gets fresh nutrients only when its fluid gets pressed out and new fluid soaked up. Lack of nutrition, unnoticed cartilage areas can gradually wear out and get exposed to bone pad worn out.

5.Protects your spine

Spinal disks are responsible for absorbing vertebrae, which herniate and press the nerves in crave movement. It is the only way for them to get nutrients. Doing well-balanced yoga helps in forwarding bends, backbends, and twists to balance the spine disks supple.

6.Improve bone health

Yoga helps in weight-bearing exercise to strengthen your bone health and prevent osteoporosis. Most of the yoga posture requires lifting your body weight, such as upward and downward facing dog exercise. It helps to strengthen arm bone and prevent osteoporosis fracture.

7.Enhances your blood flow

Regularly doing yoga helps to enhance blood flow. Particularly, it relaxes your body and mind and increases blood flow in hand and feet. Yoga also promotes oxygen supply to cells and let them perform better functions.

You can perform poses such as handstand, headstand, and shoulder stand, which helps to increase venous blood from your pelvis, and legs to flow back to your heart, where it is pumped and get oxygenated freshly.

Yoga also supplies enough oxygen to tissues and helps create more platelets and prevent clots formation. Like that way, it promotes your heart health.

8.Drains lymph and raises immunity

When you stretch and contract muscles, it does the movement in organs and comes inward and outward as you do yoga poses. It promotes the lymph drainage, which is a viscous fluid full of immune cells. It helps the lymphatic system to fight against infection and kill cancerous cells. Yoga also removes toxic waste substances from cellular functions.

9.Raise heart rate

Like aerobic exercise, yoga also raises your heart rate when performing vigorously or Ashtanga classes. It helps to promote your heart rate and cardiovascular conditions. According to studies, yoga practice helps to reduce the resting heart rate and promote endurance by improving sufficient oxygen.

10.Lower blood pressure

People with high blood pressure can perform a moderate level of yoga. According to a study of hypertension issued in the British-medical-journal, The Lancet, the savasana posture can get effective benefits. It can reduce the higher level of blood pressure.

11.Improves adrenal glands

Yoga helps reduce your cortisol levels. Generally, the adrenal glands release cortisol for responding to the chronic situation and temporarily promote your immune function. If your cortisol level is high even after trauma, they can hazard the immune system. Short time boost of cortisol help to have long term memory.

Additionally, extra cortisol is linked with extreme depression, osteoporosis, high blood pressure, insulin resistance.

12.Makes you happier

Performing yoga helps to remove the sad feelings. Regular yoga practice relieves your depression and boosts serotonin levels by reducing monoamine oxidase and cortisol.

13.Healthy lifestyle

Yoga can be a part of your healthy lifestyle. It burns calories and also provides a spiritual boost to your soul. Adding yoga in your daily routine encourage you to have and a good lifestyle. You will get inspire and become health conscious.

14.Lowers blood sugar

Performing yoga helps to manage blood sugar and bad cholesterol and increase good cholesterol. Yoga can be a suitable exercise for a patient with diabetes. It helps to manage adrenaline and cortisol levels and encourage weight loss. Yoga improves insulin sensitivity and manages blood sugar levels. It lessens the risk of diabetes complication such as kidney failure, heart problems, and blindness.

15.Increase your focus

 

Yoga helps to increase your focusing ability. According to studies, performing yoga helps improve your reaction time, coordination, memory, and IQ scores. People who practice meditation have more problem solving and better recalling ability.

16.Relaxes your system

Yoga enhances your relaxing ability as you breathe slowly and focus on your presence. It helps to shift the nervous system balance to the parasympathetic nervous system.

Doing yoga helps to reduce heart rate and lower high blood pressure. It promotes the blood flow to reproductive organs and intestines.

17.Enhances your balance

Regular practice of yoga enhances proprioception, which is the ability to feel the movement of the body. People with bad posture can get help from yoga to improve the balance of dysfunctional movements. You can also improve knee joint problems and back pain. Having a better balance over the body helps to prevent the risk of falls. Yoga is suggested for aged people to practice at moderate levels.

18.Sustains your nervous system

Yoga expert learns to control their body in advanced ways, in which the nervous system can be controlled by meditation. Scientists have monitored yogis who trigger unusual heart rhythms and generate precise brain wave patterns from meditation methods, which increases the temperature of hands by 15 degrees. Doing this helps to improve blood flow to the lower body. Relaxing nervous system can help pregnant women to have sound sleep.

19.Releases limbs tension

Doing yoga can relieve fatigue, soreness, chronic tension from the shoulder, neck, arms, face, and wrist muscles.

20.Promote deep sleep

Stimulating your body is a good thing, but too much can affect the nervous system. Yoga is the best exercise to provide relief in modern life. Doing yoga like yoga Nidra, restorative asana, savasana, pranayama, and pratyahara stimulate the senses and let the nervous system relax and promote better sleep.

21.Promote immune functions

Pranayama and asana possibly help to promote immune function. The meditation also got strong support from science for the immune system. It provides effective benefits to raise antibodies levels and lower the aggressive response of immune functions from an autoimmune disease like psoriasis.

22.Promote lung functions

Yogis takes a few breaths of higher volume, which is more efficient and calming. Yoga helps to improve different functions of lung and increase the breath volume and exhalation. Yoga also boosts nose breathing, which helps to filter the air because dry and cold air is more prone to induce asthma attack in people with sensitivity. Regularly doing yoga makes your lungs muscles flexible and filter more oxygen to supply the entire body.

23.Prevents digestive problems

Doing yoga also prevent irritable bowel syndrome, ulcers, and constipation induced by stress. It theoretically reduces the colon cancer risk because moving the body in different directions promotes the transport of foods and waste excretion.

24.Create peace of mind

Yoga calms down the fluctuation of your mind. It slows down the frustration of mental loops, fear, anger, regret, and desire that induce stress. By providing peace of mind, it makes you manage high blood pressure, eczema, heart attacks. Staying peacefully also lets you make a proper decision and concentrate.

Gradually, you will learn to keep mind peace and live healthier and longer.

25.Improves your self-esteem

Many people suffer from low self-esteem. If you manage this negatively like taking the drug, overeat, too hard work, or too much sleep, then it will have poor effects on mental and physical health. Taking a positive approach and doing yoga helps to create a sense of sustained view. Doing yoga helps to learn different things about yourself. You will experience the feeling of empathy, gratitude, and forgiveness.

26.Eases your pain

Yoga also helps to ease your pain. Many studies say that meditation, asana, or a combination of two different exercise helps to lower pain in people with back pain, arthritis, fibromyalgia, and carpal tunnel syndrome. As you relieve the pain, your mood will automatically improve.

27.Promote inner strength

Doing yoga change your health completely. Regular practice of yoga helps to build inner strength. As you begin to do yoga, you will also follow a healthy eating diet in a better way. It will help you quit smoking, which you found difficult in your past years.

28.Connects with guidance

Connecting with a good yoga teacher create wonders for your health. You will be able to perform more than your guidance. Your yoga teacher advises posture changing like deep posture and backing off. It makes you relax and enhance your practice.

29.Keep you drug-free

If you take medicine for every small health problem, then it’s time for you to try yoga. Studies have shown that people with high blood pressure, asthma, type-2 diabetes can be managed by yoga. Still, your condition is serious than also yoga makes you have lesser medicines.

30.Soothe your sinuses

The yoga asana like pranayama and meditation helps to improve your sinus problem. Practice chanting with prolonging exhalation, which helps to shift the balance between nervous system. When you perform yoga in groups, then the chanting can be more effective for emotional and physical health.

Benefits of Aerobics

1.Promotes cardiovascular health

Aerobic exercise is suggested by American-Heat-Association and many doctors. It strengthens your heart muscles and promotes blood pumping. Having a healthy cardiovascular system helps to reduce high blood pressure. It also reduces bad cholesterol.

2.Lowers blood pressure

Performing aerobic exercise also helps to manage high blood pressure. It is because doing exercise reduce normalize the blood pressure.

3.Control blood sugar

Regular aerobic exercise helps to control insulin levels and reduce blood sugar while managing body weight.

4.Lessens asthma symptoms

Aerobic exercise can also benefit to asthma ailments. It reduces the severity and frequency of asthma attacks. Still, you can take the advice of your doctor before starting the exercise.

5.Reduces chronic pain

Aerobic exercise helps to reduce chronic back pain. You can choose low impact workouts, such as aqua aerobics, and swimming, which can help to relieve back muscles endurance and functions.

6.Promote sleep

If you are experiencing sleeping trouble at night, then try aerobic exercises. Regular performance of aerobic exercise works effectively for insomnia treatment.

7.Regulates weight

Regular aerobic exercise also helps to maintain a healthy weight. You can also try weight loss plan with a healthy diet and selected exercises.

8.Stimulates immune system

Aerobic exercise also helps to stimulate your immune system. Performing regular and moderate aerobic exercise promotes specific antibodies in your blood known as immunoglobulins. It helps to strengthen the immune system functions and cortisol levels.

9.Improves brain power

After the age of 30, the brain tissues start to decline slowly. According to a scientist, doing aerobic exercise helps to slow down brain tissue loss and promote cognitive performance.

10.Boosts mood

Moving and keeping your body make you boost your mood. Try it yourself when you do exercise your depression levels get reduced.

11.Lessening the risk of falls

As your age reach 65, your risk of falls raises. Fall may cause to raise your bone injury and weaknesses. Doing normal aerobic workout make your bone more effective and prevent fall risk.

12.Safe for all ages

Aerobic exercise is suggested for all aged people, including kids. People with a chronic health condition may take advice from the doctor and plan accordingly for safety.

13.Affordable and convenient

For doing aerobic exercise, you will not require fancy equipment or expensive gym membership. You can have a routine of walking around or jogging with friends. Certain aerobic exercises you can do at home only.

What Should You Choose?

You can choose both yoga, and aerobics are the best exercises to perform for overall fitness. People with joint pain should be careful and avoid aerobics and try to do more yoga.

Similarly, if your goal is to lose weight, then you should do more aerobics. You can also follow an ideal exercise, including aerobics and yoga.

You can also take help from the trainer for the best suitable workout for your according to your fitness level.

What can be the risk of Yoga and Aerobics?

Risks of Yoga

Generally, yoga is a safe exercise for physical and mental health. But it can be risky at a certain level. You need to perform it under the guidance yoga expert to prevent injury. It may cause common injuries such as strains and sprains. It may not cause serious injuries. Here are ways to follow to prevent the risk of yoga.

• Take expert helps and follow instructions.
• A beginner can avoid extreme performances such as shoulder stands, headstands, forceful breathing and lotus position.
• Avoid hot yoga like Bikram yoga that causes overheating of body and dehydration.
• Pregnant women and age-old people should take the advice of a doctor before doing any practice of yoga.

Risks of Aerobic Exercise

Aerobic exercise is best for slimming and shaping your body, but you need to care with every move you do. Most of the time, healthy adults enjoy moderate-intensity exercise.

You should consider taking your doctor or expert advice in the following conditions to prevent risk.

• Previous injury
• Existing injury or pain
• Other health condition such as diabetes, heart problems.

Aerobics and yoga have more differences as yoga is one activity, and aerobics is an entire tube of workout to provide physical fitness more than the yoga. However, doing both yoga and aerobics helps to build strength and tone your body by burning calories.