This YouTube video ("Healing Benefits Of Yoga For The Heart" by Niraj Naik, uploaded Sep 17, 2018) explains why yoga functions as an anaerobic exercise. The speaker describes how sustained muscle contractions during asanas limit blood inflow, forcing muscles to rely on stored oxygen (myoglobin) and high-energy phosphates (creatine phosphate, ATP). He argues that regular yoga increases these stores, improving muscle endurance so everyday tasks stress the heart less.
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Going back to yoga as an anaerobic exercise. So there's a misconception out there that yoga is aerobic or anaerobic. There's a confusion actually. So can you enlighten us to what it has to do? You know what, whenever a muscle contracts.
It squeezes the blood vessels entering it. So blood cannot enter if the muscle is in contraction. The blood can enter only when the muscle relaxes. If you see a physiology book, you will see this graph where the blood flow to a muscle increases as much as about 50 to 100 times during its relaxation than as compared with the contraction. So the muscle contracts, it squeezes the vessels, it relaxes the blood flows in. What we do in yoga is we just contract the muscles only once, stay there for long time. The blood is not able to enter.
And what the muscle has to use, the muscle has to use its stored oxygen in the form of myoglobin. So if today you are able to flex the arm maybe for 30 seconds, with repeated practice every day, every day, maybe after one month, you are able to flex the arm for.
More duration, maybe 40 seconds. So how could this occur? This occurred because during this time the muscles have learned to store more oxygen in the form of myoglobin. They may also store energy in the form of creatine phosphate. They may also store energy in the form of ATP. And all these three mechanisms could be working.
One has to undertake research, one has to do the muscle biopsy before and after a six month training period for yoga and see for themselves what changes occur in the muscle. But one thing is sure, that a person doing it on the first day will definitely increase the time duration, the stamina, the capacity. With persistent training, and to me it seems that it takes place because of the increase in myoglobin, increase in creatine phosphate and increase in the ATP concentration of the muscle. So basically you're training the muscle, but under contraction to become fitter, under lower oxygen, so it can survive, it can operate under lower oxygen. We are training the muscles to work without demanding more blood flow, right? So it's more, they work more efficiently. And that's how you're gonna. Even an untrained person climbs the stairs immediately, his breath will increase, immediately his heart will start pumping more blood. That is because his muscles, when they become active, they demand more blood. When a yogi climbs upstairs, his heart rate does not increase that much. To that extent, his respiration does not increase. Because of the yoga sana training, the muscles themselves have tremendous stored oxygen, stored myoglobin ATP, creatine phosphate and these day to day activities of climbing a flight of stairs, maybe a couple of flights, they are very trivial activities. They are small activities, not very major activities for a yogi. And so the day to day activities do not put a stress on the heart. There is an indirect effect of the asanas. If you are performing asanas every day, you are protecting the heart because it does not need to overwork any time of the day. That's interesting.
