Yoga Zone: Fat Burning

VN:F [1.9.13_1145]

Two 20-minute Yoga routines that focus on building heat and burning fat.

Advanced beginning Yoga enthusiasts. You need to be comfortable with the poses and familiar with good form.

While Yoga is not a cardio activity, it does offer fat burning benefits. A vigorous Yoga routine will burn calories and it helps build muscle, which definitely burns fat over time. So even if you do them back to back, these two 20-minute routines won’t give you the same breathless exhilaration that you’d get out of a three or four mile run, but they will help you achieve a stronger, leaner body nevertheless. These routines are based on Vinyasa and Flow Yoga more than they are Power Yoga. You won’t find any Sun Salutations here (in fact, if you have time you might want to do a few rounds of Sun Saluatations to warm up to these poses). Instead the instructor takes a selection of Yoga postures — Warrior, Half Moon, Triangle and others — and adds movement to them, Vinyasa-style. This is how the sessions build up heat. This approach, since it relies on quite a few lunge-type poses, is also a good challenge for the lower body. The two routines are quite different, and can be done separately or together for one 40-minute session. These workouts are best for advanced beginners — there isn’t enough time to guide a newbie through these poses, so you already need to know them. And these poses are practiced in a moderately challenging manner, so you already should have built up some strength. If you are time challenged, you will especially enjoy these Yoga sessions — you really feel like you got a good workout in 20 minutes!