Yoga is one of the best activities that can complement your workouts. The best thing about it is that it gives us both mental and physical benefits.
It can be a calming experience that we do after a workout, or it can be an activity that warms up our bodies before a workout.
But should you do yoga before or after workout?
The best way to do yoga is after a workout. But that depends why you’re doing it in the first place.
If you’re doing yoga for warming up, then it’s a great activity to do before the workout. If you do it as a relaxing sequence, then it makes more sense to do it after a workout.
What Are The Benefits of Yoga?
For people who regularly do workouts, yoga can be an incredibly helpful exercise. Here are some of the best benefits of yoga for those who do regular workouts.
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Stretches Your Muscles
That’s an important thing to do after a workout, as your muscles get tense after an intense workout. Also, a good stretching session after a workout is fantastic to decrease your sores the next day.
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Give You Flexibility
Regular workout will make you tense and your muscles incapable of stretching movements. That’s a completely normal thing. However, we must everything we can do alleviate that problem.
And yoga provides the perfect opportunity for that. This factor is one of the most common factors that people note as the main reason they do yoga.
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Eases Joint Pain and Aggravation
Yoga designed to stretch your joints and relax them. Repetitive workouts can be harmful to your joints, which is why we can “repair” our joints with yoga.
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Helps With Posture
Our spine can suffer during workouts, especially the lower back. Sciatica pain is common with regular gym-goers.
And some yoga poses are designed especially for alleviating those types of pain and improve our posture.
Rotator cuffs, lower back muscles and other muscles crucial for posture often get neglected during workouts. Yoga will have a beneficial effect on them.
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Protect You From Injuries
It does that by strengthening the internal muscles and our core, which get neglected with workouts.
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Improves Metabolic System and Cardiovascular Health
Both of these are proven benefits that many have noted before.
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Good For Mental
A good yoga session has several mental benefits. It relaxes your mind, helps you mediate, and feel more relaxed.
Yoga is practically a moving meditation, and it has several mental benefits. Mental clarity and better memory are often noted as benefits of yoga.
Should You Do Yoga Before or After Workout?
The main goals of yoga are to relax your body, stretch your muscles and joints, and ease your mind.
On the other hand, if you do want with slightly more challenging poses, it can transform itself into a little workout on its own. That’s when yoga can be great warming up activity before your workouts.
But you’ll get the biggest benefits of doing yoga after a workout, in our opinion. That’s because you’ll stretch your muscles and joints after an intense period of workout.
When you lift heavy weights or do challenging exercises, your muscles get tense, and your joints will be exhausted from all the heavy movements.
Another feature of yoga is that it puts your mind at ease and relaxes you, so it has a mellowing effect.
The thing with doing yoga before a workout is that it can potentially make you sleepy and mellow, which is not a good thing before a workout.
However, if you do it more intensely. it’s a great type of exercise to warm yourself up.
Some of The Best Yoga Poses For Before And After Workout
Yoga consists of a 5-10 minute warmup, a 20-50 minute core practice (asana), and a 5-10 minute period of cooldown or meditation. Here, we’ll discuss some of the best poses we can do during asana.
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Cat-Cow Pose
One of the most famous exercises for a very good reason. You’ll get a better degree of flexibility in your spine, but also strengthen and stretch your lower back muscles.
You can do it on all fours. It’s practically imitating how a cat and a cow position their back. For the cat pose, we stretch our lower back, while with the cow pose, we protract it.
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Standing Forward Bend
This pose is also often present as a stretching exercise. It’ll help you get more flexibility but also stretch your muscles effectively.
It stretches your leg muscles, especially the hamstrings. But you’ll also notice some flexion in your spine.
It’s a fairly simple, forward bend that’s quite straightforward. Don’t forget to breathe in and out, and try to reach as far as you can without bending your knees.
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Warrior 1
Some first-timers might find this pose challenging. It requires a lot of balance, but it’s incredibly beneficial for your back.
If you’re suffering from lower back problems, this exercise is a must. Here’s how to do it:
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Downward-Facing Dog
This exercise is also one of the most famous exercises of yoga. It stretches the entirely of your body, but more importantly, gets the blood flowing to your head and limbs. It’s a great relaxing pose where you can rest for a while.
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The Triangle Pose
Another crucial exercise for yoga is the triangle pose. It’s an important exercise to stretch your hips, hamstrings, leg muscles, back, and core.
Practically, it works the entirety of your body if done right. Try to dive as deep as you can with the stretch. The deeper you go, the better the stretch will be.
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The Child’s Pose
The child’s pose is one of the best yoga poses to relax your body and keep your mind at ease. It doesn’t require a lot of flexibility, but it can have a great effect on your mind after a tough workout.
The Bottom Line
So, should you do yoga before or after workout? That question you can only answer yourself, in the end. You’re looking at what you want from yoga.
If you want a good, stretching exercise for flexibility, then you can do it before or after. If you’re looking for a more intense exercise. It’s better to do it after as you’ll lose a lot of energy.
Considering everything, doing yoga after a workout is probably for the best. You’ll stretch your muscles and get great benefits without worrying about having energy for a workout.
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