You might think of yoga as a workout that boosts flexibility and helps you unwind after a busy day. Yoga is quite effective in meeting these objectives as it combines several components that help relieve stress—movement, controlled breathing, stretching, and meditation. Plus, if you do power yoga, you can boost muscle strength and endurance. Now that we know the obvious merits of a yoga workout, you might wonder what affect it has on heart health? Do people who do yoga, independent of other forms of exercise, have a lower risk of cardiovascular disease?
Yoga and Heart Health
Since yoga helps reduce stress, it’s not a stretch to say that it’s a heart-healthy practice, when you consider how stress impacts your body. Uncontrolled stress increases heart rate and blood pressure and triggers a spike in stress hormones that have a negative effect on heart health and function. However, yoga doesn’t boost aerobic capacity like high-intensity interval training and moderate-intensity cardio exercise does. Therefore, it won’t make your heart pump more efficiently in a classic sense. Yet, there is some evidence that practicing yoga lowers the risk of cardiovascular events such as heart attacks.
What a Study Shows about Yoga and Heart Health
A study presented at the American Heart Association conference looked at the effects of yoga on cardiovascular events. For the study, researchers divided 2,959 individuals who had had a heart attack into two groups. One group did 13 supervised yoga sessions followed by home yoga workouts while the other took part in educational sessions but did no yoga or other exercise. Results? After following the participants for 42 months, the rate of serious heart events was reduced by half in the group that did yoga. They also felt the quality of their life improved. Who wouldn’t want these benefits?
Types of Yoga and Heart Health
You might wonder whether one type of yoga is better for the health of your heart than others. Unfortunately, there are no studies comparing the forms of yoga and the differing effects they have on heart health. One of the most popular is Hatha yoga, the type most people think of when they hear the word yoga. Hatha is built around yoga poses called asanas and breathing exercises that have a calming effect. Therefore, it’s an excellent type of yoga for relieving stress. However, Hatha yoga doesn’t raise your heart rate enough to improve aerobic capacity or make your heart a more efficient pump. So, Hatha yoga isn’t an effective form of exercise for boosting cardiovascular endurance, efficiency, and stamina.
In contrast, ashtanga yoga, similar to Hatha yoga, emphasizes breath but leads you through an ashtanga series of movements at a faster pace relative to Hatha yoga. When you’re first starting out and you move through the movements quickly, it will increase your heart rate enough to theoretically offer some aerobic benefits. You can take it up a notch by doing power yoga, and even more intense sequence of movements designed to build muscle endurance.
Ashtanga and power yoga may sound like better alternatives to slow-paced Hatha yoga, but Hatha is one of the best types of yoga for calming your sympathetic nervous system and relieving stress. That’s good for your heart too! In fact, a study published in Evidence-Based Complement Alternative Medicine found that Hatha yoga can lower blood pressure an average of 3 to 6 mm Hg. For some people, that’s enough to cut back on blood pressure medications, although you should always check with your physician before doing this.
Another Indicator that Yoga is Heart Healthy
One marker of a healthy heart is greater heart rate variability, a measure of how much your heart rate varies from beat-to-beat. Studies show that greater variability is an indicator of heart health. When the time between heartbeats varies more, it means your nervous system can quickly respond to outside signals and communicate those signals to your heart, so your heart can respond appropriately. People who have cardiovascular disease often have low heart rate variability, whereas healthier hearts have greater variability between beats because their nervous system can react faster.
How does this relate to yoga? A study in the International Journal of Medical Engineering and Informatics showed that the practice of yoga increases heart rate variability. This suggests that yoga may improve how your brain and nervous system work as a team to control your heart rate. You want your heart to be able to respond quickly when the need arises, and greater variability suggests it’s up to the task. You can monitor your heart rate variability using fitness tracking devices, although it’s not clear how accurate they are. If your heart rate variability drops, it can be a sign that you’re overtraining when you work out Also, be aware that heart rate variability goes down with age.
The Bottom Line
Yoga is an excellent stress reliever for all age groups, but it’s also a heart-healthy activity. It’s still important to get cardiovascular exercise for heart health, but yoga is an alternative for people who have injuries or medical conditions that make it unsafe to do aerobic exercise. However, if you’re healthy, why not do both? Aerobic exercise and yoga enhance heart health in different ways, but they both have benefits. And don’t forget—any movement is better than being sedentary. Studies show too much time sitting is linked with greater mortality from all causes.
Yoga is also an effective recovery workout for a lighter day. Don’t make yoga your only form of exercise, you still need cardiovascular exercise and strength training but it does have health benefits and it may even lower your risk of heart disease or heart attack by calming your nervous system, enhancing heart rate variability, and lower blood pressure. If you enjoy yoga workouts, that’s even better!
References:
Family Practice News. March 2020. Vol. 50. No. 3.
Medscape.com Multispecialty. “Hatha Yoga Reduces Blood Pressure in Mildly Hypertensive Patients”
Evid Based Complement Alternat Med. 2013; 2013: 649836. Published online 2013 May 28. doi: 10.1155/2013/649836.
Heart.org. “Is yoga heart-healthy? It’s no stretch to see benefits, science suggests”
ScienceDaily.com. “Yoga boosts heart health, new research finds”
Ramesh Kumar Sunkaria, Vinod Kumar, and Suresh Chandra Saxena. A comparative study on spectral parameters of HRV in yogic and non-yogic practitioners. Int. J. Medical Engineering and Informatics, 2010, 2, 1, 1-14.
Related Articles By Cathe:
5 Risk Factors for Cardiovascular Disease that Exercise Can Improve
5 Tests That Best Predict Your Risk of Cardiovascular Disease
Could a High-Protein Diet Improve the Health of Your Heart?
Does Fish Oil Really Lower the Risk of Cardiovascular Disease?
5 Surprising Facts about Heart Disease You Probably Don’t Know
Yes Right Yoga cannot remove cardiovascular diseases. However it may help you release the stress from heart.