Following in line with the functional benefit, yoga generally strengthens across your entire body, Candace Harding, DPT, a physical therapist specializing in orthopedics and a registered yoga teacher in Arlington, tells SELF. That’s because a lot of classes engage large muscles in your legs, upper body, and core through moves like lunge variations, push-ups, and high plank holds.
But this doesn’t mean yoga smokes every single muscle you have. To challenge certain ones (like your lats, or your broadest back muscle, for example), you really need to pick up weights and pull them toward you, use resistance bands or cables, or do moves like chin-ups, inverted rows, and pull-ups that have you pulling the robust external load that is your bodyweight—all things you likely wouldn’t encounter in a yoga class.
Using this extra resistance is also important if your goal is to improve maximum strength and power, Fryer says, since yoga likely doesn’t deliver enough of a challenge to reap those gains. That’s because in yoga, you can’t make the stimulus heavier, since you’re limited to just using your bodyweight.
Final thing: How much yoga counts as strength training depends on how strong you are to begin with. “It makes a difference where someone’s coming from,” Dr. Harding explains. For example, if you’re brand new to exercise, you’ll probably get a lot of strength benefits from the practice, since moving around your bodyweight will automatically be pretty tough for you, whereas if you’re a regular gym-goer, you may not reap as many perks since you’ll already have a solid baseline level of strength. That said, even experienced weight lifters could see gains by adding yoga to their routine, since it taxes your muscles in a different way, Dr. Harding says—it involves putting your muscles under tension for a greater amount of time than what they’d do in the gym when moving heavier loads for shorter periods.