Practicing yoga can leave you feeling all types of ways: fatigued in your muscles, a little bit breathless, and somehow simultaneously relaxed. By the time you roll up your mat, it’s only natural to wonder: Wait, what kind of workout was that?
Which boxes yoga checks depend largely on what style you do. Yoga itself is pretty broad—it actually encompasses eight different types of practice, ranging from those rooted in physical movement to mindfulness and meditation—but let’s focus on asana, or the postures we generally associate with classes and flows. No yoga practice is going to look exactly the same, but the overarching benefits of each type will stay pretty constant.
So let’s get into it: Does downward dog, bridge, and plank set you up for some serious strength? Or is it more about getting your heart pumping or your muscles loosening? We tapped the experts to help classify where yoga stands in your exercise routine.
It’s common to leave a flow with your muscles feeling just as spent as they do after a lifting workout. So yes, most specific styles of yoga—including those that have you moving through and holding lots of different postures, like vinyasa, power, hot yoga, ashtanga, hatha, kundalini, and iyengar—can help you get stronger. (More slow-paced styles, like yin and restorative yoga, wouldn’t qualify because they center on seated and reclined poses, which are more about being chill than challenging.