Anyone here do yoga? (mini-rant included)

I don't see much of a way to compare strength training with yoga. Strength training is...... strength training. It's pretty simple to describe and do. You do the exercises, and you gain muscular strength. It's a very coarse and narrow method of adding muscle to your body. That's not a bad thing at all. It's just a very tiny part of a path to overall health in life.

Yoga on the other hand, has so many facets. It's much more of a lifestyle than a simple means of physical exercise. There are physical exercises in yoga, but those exercises are a small part of an entire plan for wellness. Yoga grounds you, and acts as a guide along your path in life. There are both philosophical/religious and physical aspects to yoga. Combined together, they can help you to achieve far more than strength training ever will. You may not gain as much muscle mass as you would through strength training, but you'll gain a unique understanding of your mind and body. You'll learn what it truly is to breathe and to love and to eat mindfully. Yoga will encourage you to be a better person, and show you how to make better decisions in everyday life. It will add flexibility, balance and strength to your body. It will teach you how to eat properly. The benefits are sooooooo numerous.

One is a set of prescribed exercises. One is a lifestyle.

I've done yoga on and off since I started college (I'm a junior now), and my strength and flexibility always get better when I do it. I believe more advanced practitioners could easily use it as their sole form of strength training. But a lot of people here are just into lifting heavy and think everything else is wrong. I've seen people create entire topics dissing yoga and talking about how "easy" it is and how it does nothing. The advanced poses are nowhere NEAR easy. If you don't like yoga, that's fine, but to minimize the experience by saying its easy or stupid is insulting.

Anyway, I wonder if anyone on here besides me actually likes yoga and makes it a part of their routine? I plan on doing it all week to get back into the swing of things with exercise, and it'd be great to have friends on here who are into it, too.

I'm a yoga instructor and I see some good, bad and ugly on MFP from time to time on posts. It depends upon the style of yoga you take and the teacher you take from. They vary as widely as the opinions you see on the replies to your post. I think yoga is largely misunderstood.

You can get a very fit, strong and flexible body by doing yoga. A good place to start is going to an online site such as yogadownload.com or yogaglo.com. They have online classes ranging from 5 minutes to 90 minutes. By becoming a member of one of these sites, you can practice when you have time and dont have to rely on a studio schedule. Eventually you will want to take more classes in person to get the individual instruction you need for the Level 2 and 3 poses.

I encourage you to check out Light on Yoga by BKS Iyengar. It's not really a cover to cover read--more of a guidebook as you practice at home--super important and not to be underemphasized is alignment. You need good alignment to make sure you are not going to injure yourself!!! Anusara and Iyengar classes are good to learn about alignment.

Good Luck!