Badrinath Gella contrasts yoga asanas with conventional exercises: asanas engage all 600 muscle groups with balanced blood flow and conscious breathing, while exercises target specific muscles and often increase stress. Asanas aim for holistic growth across physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual dimensions.
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Namaste. Many people asked me, is asana and exercise same? I said no, because there is a lot of difference between asanas and exercises. In this video, I am going to share few differences between asanas and exercises. The first difference is like, in our body we have 600 different types of muscle groups, but usually in normal day life we don't use all the different types of muscle groups. In asanas, We do forward bending, backward bending, sideward bending, twisting. So we usually use all the different types of muscles, whereas in exercises we only use particular different types of muscles to build only that body parts. In asanas, like when— while you're doing asanas, when you are holding a position, you are allowing your blood to flow in that direction and also like helping the nutrient exchange, gases exchange. Whereas in exercises, it's the blood distributed unequally. In, uh, like in, in asanas, the weight distributed equally. And third one is asanas help you to bring the steadiness, firmness, and alertness as well as lightness in your body. Uh, exercises are not made for that, like not about bringing the lightness or firmness, like because the people who are performing exercises, they cannot able to bend forward or anything, so they cannot able to sit properly also on the floor. And asanas are done with an awareness, whereas in exercises we use earphones, we used to listen to the music and we perform the exercises. We don't mainly focus on connecting with our body and breath. And asanas help you to reduce the stress, whereas like exercises increases the stress sometimes. And also you like to do more, like to build muscles, like you do violent movements to your body. Sometimes and leads to injuries. And also, uh, like it's mainly about building muscles, right? So there is, uh, like you do aggressive movements, very, very aggressive, you become very aggressive. Whereas in asanas, like you should become calm, cool, and less stress. And in, in like, uh, also like reduce stress, anxiety, depression, and all those. And while in exercises we do aggressive movements. And third one is like, like last one is like, and asanas, it's about reaching the higher level of the goal, higher level of consciousness. Whereas in exercises, it's mainly about building the muscles and mainly about beauty, not about reaching the higher level. Uh, in asana, in asanas, we are like, we wanted to become better version of ourselves, like in physical level, in mental level, in emotional level, and spiritual level. Whereas in exercises, it's about becoming a better version in physical transformation, not in— there is no goal that like to become a mental level, spiritual level, and emotional level, right? So if you resonate with me, like when you are practicing asanas next time, like remember all these points so that you can go very deeper into asanas. You know the purpose of why you are performing asanas, and also you can feel better and also absorb the asanas. Holistic, uh, the benefits which asanas give you. Thank you.
