Sanskrit Lunges
A closer look at “yoga fitness”.
A magnifying glass would make a mediocre shovel. Combing your hair with chopsticks would be terribly inconvenient, and a coffee mug is an unreliable door stop at best. While you could use these objects this way if you wanted, they’ll only really shine when you put them to their intended purpose. Same goes for yoga and the fitness industry.
“Yoga fitness” is using asana to workout. Asana refers to all the poses we do in class, and represents an important eighth of the yoga practice. There’s no denying that asana can give you a helluva workout, but using yoga just for that may be inefficient.
Firstly, there are lots of other exercises that can help you achieve your fitness goals faster. For example, running and cycling might give you better cardio. You have higher chances of learning to handstand in calisthenics or gymnastics classes, and a gym would be your best bet for more gains.
Of course, a good yoga teacher will learn from other modalities to cover asana’s blind spots. But even then you may not get the most intense workout of your life because asana has never prioritized “sweating buckets”.
Secondly, asana has so much more to offer than just fitness alone. In fact, all eight limbs of yoga (including asana) can be seen as practices for self-awareness. The yamas and niyamas, for instance, cultivate relationship awareness, both in terms of how we relate to others and ourselves. Pranayama works with breath awareness. Pratyahara involves sensory awareness. Dharana and dhyana bring awareness to subtlest layers of the mind, and samadhi is essentially soul awareness.
Within this system, asana’s focus is body awareness. As a yoga practice then, the potential for self-awareness is what differentiates asana from other physical exercises. If we use asana for fitness alone, we miss out on it’s USP, it’s unique selling point.
I’ll be the first to say again that fitness and asana are not mutually exclusive. One may very well get fit while connecting with the body through asana, but this is a happy side effect only. When we use asana for awareness, we are using it for it’s intended purpose, and the practice begins to take on a certain radiance. When we practice asana just to workout, we shortchange ourselves and overlook it’s USP. Then all we’re doing is lunges with sanskrit names.