Most Western yoga classes are just fancy aerobics.

Most people in the West completely misunderstand yoga and how it really works. 8 years ago, I traveled all the way to my motherland of India to meet an incredible superhuman yogi. He's in his 70s. He's also a medical doctor, so he wrote a book called The Medical Understanding of Yoga. In that, he explained yoga and the reason why it works and how you should do it properly according to the traditional sutras in a way It just blew my mind. I had to really go and learn from him directly. In most Western yoga classes, people are actually doing aerobics and they're constantly moving from one pose to the next. And when you're moving from one pose to the next like this, it's like riding a bike with stabilizers on because every time you move, you're contracting, relaxing the muscle, and the blood flow is constantly being supplied to the muscle. There's no positive stress being created. So the secret of yoga is the contraction, holding the pose to your maximum effort. It's like taking the stabilizers off your bike. You want to get really good at riding a bike on two wheels, you want to take the stabilizers off. So when you hold the muscle and you hold it to maximum contraction, to your maximum effort, whilst reducing the oxygen supply by holding your breath, you actually force the muscle to adapt and get stronger as it thinks it's running out of oxygen. And this state that's created, called intermittent hypoxia, makes the body produce more red blood cells, increases blood flow and energy reserves in your muscle. You increase the, the amount of myoglobin. Your mitochondria become more efficient and multiply in number. And this increases your fitness and stamina much more dramatically than if you were to do an aerobics class which is what yoga is generally practiced as.