A daily sun salutation, 30 days to perfect the crow pose or a month to the perfect headstand: Every January, social networks such as YouTube, Instagram and Co. are flooded with so-called yoga challenges. The participants hope that taking up regular yoga practice will help them lose weight, deal with everyday stress or even have a therapeutic effect against various diseases – hopes that are nourished by numerous studies.
Yoga is trendy: Depending on the statistics, between 250 and 300 million people around the world are said to be practicing the practice, which originated in India and is also finding more and more followers in this country. According to a representative survey by the Gesellschaft für Verbraucherforschung (GfK) in 2014, three percent of Germans regularly rolled out their mats, but in 2018 it was five percent or almost three and a half million people. These are the current figures that were collected on behalf of the Federal Association of Yoga Teachers (BDY) in Germany.
Two-thirds of those surveyed said they wanted to improve their physical health with yoga. Almost as many named improving their mental health as a goal. In fact, studies have been pointing to a variety of positive health effects for decades.
Is Yoga Good for Your Back?
For a long time, especially in western countries, yoga was primarily associated with the yoga postures, the so-called asanas: for example with the downward-facing dog, the cobra or the warrior. Depending on the type of yoga, the movement aspect is more or less pronounced.
For example, Ashtanga yoga or Bikram yoga practiced in a room with a temperature of around 40 degrees Celsius are considered to be more physically demanding, while Yin yoga focuses on balancing elements. An international research team wrote in 2022 that more physically strenuous forms of yoga in particular could have a similarly relieving effect on chronic back pain as conventional exercise therapies after a meta-analysis in the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews. However, the evidence from the studies is of low quality.
Does Yoga Help You Lose Weight?
In a German study, obese participants who practiced traditional hatha yoga regularly for 12 weeks reduced weight and waist circumference. “No participant started a calorie-restricted diet during the study period,” emphasize the authors in German Medical Journal International. This is surprising, since yoga can make you sweat, depending on how you practice it, but the intensity is usually not enough to burn a lot of calories. Nevertheless, the weight-reducing effect also occurred in another study with 60 overweight women, about the US scientists 2022 in the journal Plos One reported.
Does yoga strengthen the circulatory system?
Other studies have shown improved blood values and a strengthened immune system as well as positive effects on the heart and circulatory system. This is how one already accounted for in 2014 Europe Journal of Preventive Cardiology published meta-analysis that yoga the could have the same protective effect against cardiovascular diseases as regular endurance sports.
The result was recently confirmed by work by Canadian researchers: In the three-month study, 60 subjects with high blood pressure completed an exercise program. Half of the participants combined endurance sports with stretching exercises, the other half with yoga. “The aim of this pilot study was to determine whether adding yoga to regular exercise reduces cardiovascular risk,” said lead author Paul Poirier of Canada’s Laval University in Quebec, according to a statement.
Several studies have suggested that yoga interventions and exercise produce cardiovascular outcomes. However, they differed considerably in terms of the type, components, frequency, duration, and intensity of the yoga sessions studied.
Poirier is addressing a fundamental problem of yoga research: Many studies are difficult to compare due to the sometimes very different yoga practices, and the groups of test subjects are often very small. “We wanted to use a rigorous scientific approach to identify the cardiovascular risk factors where yoga is beneficial for at-risk patients and how it could be used in a prevention program, for example,” he said.
In fact, the health of both groups improved within the three-month study period: However, the upper systolic blood pressure and resting heart rate fell more significantly in the yoga practitioners than in the stretching group.
Do yoga and meditation help against stress and anxiety?
The scientists do not know exactly what the positive effects are based on – this limitation also characterizes other studies. However, it seems clear that the movement aspect of yoga alone is not sufficient to explain all the positive health effects. Instead, the breathing exercises and meditations common to many forms of yoga could also be important. In addition, there are philosophical, spiritual and life-ethical elements in the original form. Breathing techniques, in particular, may stimulate certain neurotransmitters in the brain, affecting the body’s stress levels. Effects on memory and emotions have also been demonstrated.
Even more widely researched have been the health benefits of meditation practice – independent of yoga practices. For example, the Pubmed biomedical publications database contains nearly 10,000 references to articles detailing how regular meditation affects the central nervous system, memory, mental health and the immune system.
Only recently reported US scientists in the journal JAMA Psychiatrythat the meditation program “Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction” for certain anxiety disorders can be just as successful as the antidepressant escitalopram, a Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor (SSRI). The same program has previously been linked to better pain regulation and migraine relief.
In particular, the yoga-typical combination of movement, breathing exercises and/or meditation seems to have a positive effect on certain clinical pictures such as chronic pain, mild and moderate depression or anxiety, at least as a supplementary therapeutic measure. But the overall health benefit is probably due to a combination of these factors, as a summary study led by Chemnitz University of Technology showed two years ago. In it, 19 meta-analyses were examined.
“Our results, which are largely consistent across the studies examined, show that the combination of different elements in yoga is better. In almost all cases, combined interventions were superior to simpler interventions,” says the main author from Chemnitz, Karin Matko. It is irrelevant whether it is high blood pressure, diabetes or depression: the combination of physical exercises with breathing techniques or meditation is particularly effective. However, there are exceptions: “In asthma, for example, yoga only works if it includes breathing exercises,” says Matko, who is a trained yoga teacher herself.
However, there is no scientifically sound answer as to which form of yoga is particularly advantageous and how long and how often it should be practiced in order to benefit health: While some studies observe different physical or psychological effects after a single yoga or meditation session, others only see it a lasting effect after many years of continuous training.
A fundamentally positive health effect seems to be out of the question – with two caveats: For one, people with glaucoma should avoid posingwho have their heads down because they increase intraocular pressure. On the other hand, a 2019 showed in the trade journal BMC Complementary Medicine and Therapies published study found an increased risk of injury among those which started completely without any introduction by a yoga teacher: So learning yoga based solely on YouTube videos doesn’t seem advisable.