Can Hot Yoga Make You Lose Weight?
Hot yoga is not for the faint of heart. Classes lasting 60 to 90 minutes in rooms as hot as 105 degrees Fahrenheit are no easy feat. You’ll build muscle, you’ll gain flexibility, you’ll sweat and chances are good that you’ll lose weight. But weight loss and calories burned in hot yoga depend on many factors, only some of which are within your control.
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The type of hot yoga you practice, how hard you work during the class, how many calories you consume and other lifestyle factors play a role in whether you’ll lose weight and just how much weight you’ll lose.
Weight-Loss Basics
First things first: Weight loss and fat loss are two different things. Weight loss refers to a number on the scale; fat loss means losing adipose tissue. You might lose fat mass but gain muscle mass and actually see your weight increase.
Sweating a lot during a workout can lead to water loss, and you might see that reflected on the scale immediately afterwards. But as you rehydrate those pounds will come back.
To lose body fat, you have to burn more calories than you take in through your diet on a regular basis. Lowering your calorie intake and increasing your activity level typically results in fat loss. The more calories you cut out of your diet and burn through exercise, the bigger the deficit and the more fat you’ll shed.
Types of Hot Yoga
When many people think of hot yoga, they think of Bikram yoga, a style of yoga created in the 1970s by Bikram Choudhury. In classes of 90 minutes, students perform a series of 26 postures in a room heated to 105 degrees Fahrenheit. The classes are intense, and Bikram himself refers to the classrooms as “torture chambers.”
But there are many other types of hot yoga. Any type of yoga performed in a heated room could be called “hot” yoga. However, not all these types will elicit the same calorie burn necessary for fat loss.
Baptiste power yoga performed in 90-degree rooms and other types of power yoga practiced in heated rooms keep the body moving throughout the duration of the class and include challenging postures and sequences that get the heart rate up. You’ll burn a significant number of calories in these heated classes. But other classes performed in heated rooms, such as yin or restorative yoga, do not get your heart rate up enough to burn the calories that will result in fat loss.
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