Yoga or Gym? (Page 4)

Sadly men feel entitled to approach women whether or not they look "lost." Gym or not, the fact is that men automatically feel superior to women, and "stronger," and somehow better versed in all things fitness. It's not just fitness, it's also cars. One middle aged guy once asked me if I would like him to parallel park my car. I am great at parallel parking, and it's just insulting and rude. It's not "helpful." I don't look lost, but I think women who have smaller frames or who are a bit more on the petite side are especially targetted by these losers. It happens all the time. So most gyms are just not comfortable or inviting spaces for women, generally. Women's gyms don't have all the equipment usually. I'm not saying yoga studios are great spaces. They're mostly full of white yuppies or granola hippies. But at least you don't have creepy "high testosterone" guys trying to pick up women. I figure most guys who practice yoga embrace a different notion of fitness/strength and they don't generally come across in that macho way.

@freethinker. Handstands require a lot of strength, which is why beginners can't do them. If it was just about balance, everyone could learn how to do it. You need to develop, over a long time, enough core and arm strength to be able to do it. Like I said, whether or not one opts for power yoga depends on the goals. Strength training doesn't mean you have to progressively keep building bigger muscles. It's one view of fitness. I think it's something that is seen as very "tough" and "masculine," but actually doesn't equate to strength.

Strength is also stamina and muscular endurance, which you develop in power yoga. You progressively learn to hold difficult postures for longer, or do more complex variations of postures. You engage all your muscles. You don't need to do one-hour plank for that. Throughout an hour, you will continuously engage almost all those muscles in various poses, except for when you pause. In power yoga, there are usually no pauses. With free weights or weight-training machines, you don't use most of your muscles. Because you use your whole body, power yoga requires that you use small muscles in your body. I often have soreness in muscles that I didn't even know I had. That's because those are the muscles I use the least in everyday life or in sports - like my obliques or small gluteal muscles. Hamstrings, gluteus maximus, triceps, biceps, and abs are easy to use and build. But there are a lot of other muscles too that can't really be targetted through weights.

As for weight loss, I have very mixed opinions on that. Weight loss isn't and shouldn't always be a fitness goal. Those with excess weight may want to lose some weight, and that's fine, but you don't need to have a totally lean body to be fit. I think the notion that thin=healthy is really problematic and not supported by medical data either. Most medical data show that level of physical activity and stress influence propensity to get disease, not just body weight or waist size.

You can lose weight through yoga, but that's not the objective. The objective is to inhabit your body differently. My biggest challenge is how to practice more humility and bodily acceptance, and that's one of the things that attracted me to yoga. Because I am less than avg height, was very thin for a long time (in addition to having asmall voice), I was directly and indirectly bullied. Bullying doesn't just mean when someone picks on you. It can be when people look at you and think you "need help" or you must not be very smart because of how you look or sound, etc. and I learned to retaliate by being as "tough" and as preemptively "aggressive" as possible to people, and that's when I started lifting weights to try to add more bulk to my frame, wearing heels regularly and so on. I just realized that wasn't working for me. I needed to stop thinking of my body as diminutive to really get over some of that stuff.

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