The Art of Being Bendy Swole: Do You Yoga Bro?

Good morning friends,

I hope everyone is settling into the new year. It's not even the middle of the month yet, so you better not be slipping on your health and fitness goals already!!!!

So this post is going to be about fitness. Prior to this out had been all about nutrition - and with that basically just all about intermittent fasting. As a related side note, I'm well into this IF protocol experiment and so far it's going well. I can say that eating within the time alloted hours each day is actually really good for me psychologically. I don't have to be a slave to my food, eating every 2 hours etc. I just start eating at 10am and as long as my caloric intake is met by 6pm, I'm setting zero parameters beyond that. It's actually really satisfying. There have admittedly been 2 days where the hunger got to be rough after 6pm and this was my own fault as I did not effectively reach my caloric goal for the day. In these 2 cases, I allowed myself to eat after the end time to prevent an all our binge fest! And much to my shock and disappointment, eating after the end time did not make me turn into a Gremlin! Secretly, I was hoping it would!!!!

So to get back on focus here so this doesn't turn into another nutrition post, I'll digress for now. But will be doing a post soon on the IF protocol and how it is going.

With regards to today, step back for a second and close your eyes. Imagine 2 things while your eyes are closed. First picture a yoga studio while a class is in session. Imagine the atmosphere in the class. Think about the participants in this class. Focus your attention there. What does the average person in that class look like? Now that you have that in mind, imagine a heavyweight bodybuilder. His or her primary goal is symmetry in every aspect of the body. But the other primary focus is muscle hypertrophy or muscle size in other words.

When picturing both of these fitness themed trades, let's call them, at first glance they would seem to be conflicting forces of nature right? To effectively encourage hypertrophy of your muscles, it requires picking up lots of heavy shit and putting it back down then repeating and repeating again and then once you've done that, you repeat it some more.  The mentality that it takes for this sort of aggressive behavior seems absolutely counterintuitive to the zen like approach of sitting quietly and meditating then going through a series of stretches and movements known as a flow. Even that word is tranquil. It makes me think of waterfalls and nature and it calms me to think of that.

But what if I told you that you could combine the two approaches and it would encourage hypertrophy and even body fat reduction (which can be used as an optical illusion to make you seem even more buff than you actually are!!!).  Does that sound like something you'd be interested in?..... Good, let's dive into this than.

First a disclaimer, if hypertrophy isn't your goal this article could still give you some insight on how yoga can be beneficial for you just in general if enjoy lifting weights as well so feel free to keep reading!!!!

As I mentioned earlier, hypertrophy is simply the increase in cell size in a particular organ. In this case, we are talking about skeletal muscle as the organ. We all know how that aspect of training works. You lift heavy, eat lots of protein and lots of calories overall, get plenty of sleep to encourage overnight musculature repair and boom, you've got muscle growth. Of course, it's a very demanding overall practice to actually complete that pattern but that is the jist of how it works.

Now how exactly can sitting through a boring yoga class slowly moving from pose to pose help foster an environment of getting those gainz as the bros at my gym would say? Well there are a few areas in which adding this practice to your routine can help you get swole. We will begin with the area that seems most obvious, stretching out the muscles. Now this is an important factor for multiple reasons. Here let me explain......

First, injury prevention. Nothing can derail your quest in the gym faster than an injury. I know this fact to be true first hand as I have had a multitude of injuries over the years that stemmed primarily from not taking the appropriate steps to ensure my body was primed for the carnage that was about to take place. I'd simply go in, hit the weights and go home. Not taking any time to focus on pampering my muscles along the way and the repeated compounding of lifting session upon lifting session with no effort to lengthen those muscles I had just compressed with heavy weight did nothing to set me up for success. And for those sins I've begun to reap the rewards through various injuries. So had I simply added a yoga class or two to the mix each week along the way, I may have prevented some of the unnecessary pain I've since had to endure. Now I have to stress, yoga isn't the only means to the end in this situation to help prevent injury. Sports massage therapy is another way, active warmup before workouts and stretch cool downs including foam rolling etc are also effective strategies. As the old and gross saying goes,  "There is more than 1 way to skin a cat!" Although I'd really prefer not skinning any cats regardless of method. But that's just me! So in short, to allow your gains train to keep on rolling, injury free, implement some or all of the above and check your ego at the door to allow you to lift smart!

OK, great it can maybe help prevent injury but as I explained, there are other ways to do that so what else can encourage a person wanting to gain strength and size to go sit through a yoga class? How about myofascial release, a term you may have heard at some point recently? What exactly is the fascia? It's a dense webbing of tissue that covers our entire musculature system in the body. It's very durable and strong which is why we are able to move as freely as we do. But over time and without proper care, it can become a tangled mess causing muscles to fire incorrectly during certain movements or it can limit our range of motion. For example, in say an ass to grass squat, this requires an intense level of range of motion and it means that everything from the muscles in our neck all the way down to our ankles all need to work together to ensure proper form and alignment throughout the movement. One of the key components to ensure the team inside the body is all moving in the same direction towards the same goal is to have a well taken care of fascia. The method of holding said movements that are encouraged and completed during a yoga class are a very effective way to keep the fascia open, strong and ready to go. The more effective your fascia works the more weight you can potentially lift in the gym as well as the aforementioned range of motion which also plays a huge role in muscle growth. So boom, getting bendy in a yoga class can do wonders on the muscle growth goal in the weight room.

Are there any other aspects that yoga can help with regarding muscle growth? Absolutely, and it is probably one you had not thought about. Hormonal balance in the body. To encourage muscle growth, the body needs to be in alignment physically which is what we touched on above but just as important, our hormones need to be in alignment as well. There are a lot of things in play inside our bodies that can help or hinder our progress towards muscle hypertrophy and simply our overall health as well.

The major players in this internal dance of hormones are growth hormone hGH, cortisol, Testosterone and estrogen. This post is not going to go too deep down the rabbit hole with regards to these hormones. The major overview point is they are all important. There are some simple things to know though. Growth hormone and Testosterone are considered anabolic players which means they work in our metabolism to encourage growth and repair of cells as opposed to cortisol which is linked with the opposite effect known as catabolism which tears down our already built up cells or in other words it makes our bodies eat itself like a zombie would feast on brains. That is the high level of what those hormones do so as you can see, keeping cortisol in check to allow Testosterone and hGH to flourish in its role of encouraging cell growth is a good thing right?

One of the major functions in our bodies that tells cortisol to come out full force is stress. This is a term that can have various meanings. Day to day stress is something we all know very well. Screaming babies, deadlines at work, homework assignments that are due tomorrow that you haven't started yet or just sitting in gridlock traffic that's making you late to an appointment are all external stresses that encourage cortisol production in the body. There are also internal stressers as well. In fact one that we have talked about a lot today, lifting heavy at the gym. This causes muscle damage at the cellular level and the body doesn't know that the damage created is one we are doing on purpose so that intense grueling workout you just completed is actually causing internal stress which also can foster cortisol release rather than suppress it when you over train. So to help mitigate this, doing things to calm the mind and body both from the internal and external stresses can help do just that and suppress that zombie muscle eating hormone. That's where yoga comes into play!!!

We've already touched on how yoga can help the muscles themselves with gaining size, but it can also help calm the brain through intense breathing, the calming flow of the workout progression in a yoga class and the meditative aspects of it as well. At the end of almost every yoga class there is a time of complete meditation to calm the body in all aspects which can encourage cortisol balance in the body and thus allow you to reap the benefits of the other anabolic hormones in your body when you step into the battle field of the weight room.

Now, go forth bros and lady bros. Add a yoga class or 2 to the training mix each week and after a period of correction from the years of tangling abuse you've done to your body, you will start to notice drastic improvements in all the areas touched on in this post and subsequently your gains train will begin rolling down the tracks like a freight train!!!!!


Cheers!!!!!

Shawn