It depends

These kinds of questions, can yoga help you do x? Can yoga help you stop y? They are so difficult to answer because yoga is such a broad discipline and we really don’t have good agreed upon terms. Usually, the answer is yes, if you’re doing the right kind of yoga for your particular interest. So, can yoga help you build muscle? It might. Yoga that involves a lot of lying down and passive stretching, probably not. But there are certainly other styles that can. So, let’s look at what we need in order to build muscle and then we can think about what a yoga practice that builds muscle might look like.

Three Keys to Muscle Growth

Muscular growth, or hypertrophy, happens when we have three things.

• Mechanical tension- the muscle fibers need to be put under tension caused by a physical load.
• Muscular damage - muscle fibers grow back bigger after they are damaged. 
• Metabolic stress - muscles need to be exercised until their glucose stores are exhausted.

The idea is that these will signal to the body that the muscles are not currently capable of dealing with the work being demanded of them and the body will adapt by making them bigger and stronger. So, in order to continue getting bigger, we need to continually find ways to challenge them. That means we also need a fourth element, progressive overload.

A Yoga Practice That Builds Muscle

Knowing that we can start to imagine what a yoga practice that builds muscle might look like.

• Mechanical tension means we need a yoga practice that includes poses which require more muscular strength than flexibility or balance. I’m looking at you lunges, chaturanga and bridge pose. If you’ve ever felt like strength was the limiting factor to whether or not you could do a pose, that’s probably a pose we want to include in our practice, or some version of that pose.
• We also need a yoga practice that damages the muscles. Basically that means we want dynamic poses, not static poses. Static poses emphasize isometric contractions, that is contracting a muscle without changing its length. We can build strength with isometric contractions. But they are much less effective at damaging muscle tissue than moving through a full range of motion. Specifically, we want a practice that focuses on slow eccentric contractions or slowly surrendering to gravity. So for example if you can imagine slowly lowering from plank to the floor, that would be an eccentric contraction, and is going to give us the most muscle damage.
• Finally we want a practice that introduces metabolic stress. We need to repeat poses enough to exhaust the energy stored in the muscles. If you’ve ever done a set of lunges or push-ups and the first one is easy but by number 10 or 20 or whatever it is your muscles are done, they’re tired, they feel swollen and pumped up. That’s metabolic stress. To that end, we want to find ways to increase the time our muscles spend working either by repeating movements or by doing them more slowly.

Two Problems with Building Muscle with Yoga

Progressive Overload

The first isn’t really a ‘problem’ but it is a challenge and that is the dilemma of progressive overload. If you’re new to fitness, probably any kind of yoga class, so long as it’s moderately active, is going to build some muscle, but at a certain point your muscle will develop enough that lunges and sun salutations aren’t going to cut it. The poses and practices from the ‘standard curriculum’ are no longer providing enough mechanical tension, muscle damage and metabolic stress to force an adaptation response in your body and how you go about solving this dilemma is going to determine the flavor of your yoga. As I see it there are at least three paths you can take.

1. You can seek out more advanced poses, specifically poses that increase the mechanical tension on your muscles. One armed and one legged variations are a good example of this. A regular squat isn't doing it for you, hey try doing it on one leg. All of sudden you’ve doubled the mechanical tension on your leg. This probably comes closest to preserving the ‘feel’ of a yoga practice, though it is most difficult and slowest. Learning new poses takes time and usually requires a more advanced level of flexibility and balance as well as strength. But if you like learning new poses this might be for you.
2. If that’s not for you, you can continue chasing metabolic stress by increasing the number of repetitions you do and slowing down how quickly you do them. We have good evidence that you can continue to stimulate hypertrophy with sets of up to 30 reps. So, for example if you don’t want to learn one arm variations you can still continue building your chest muscles with two armed push ups, just do more of them and do them slower… So long as it's hard, you still need to feel that pump in the muscles, this can work. This path is taking you down what might feel more like a yoga-bootcamp style of practice. But if you just want to work hard with a minimum amount of equipment and see results this could be for you.
3. And the last way around progressive overload as I see it is to start introducing props to your practice. If we can have blocks and straps and still maintain the spirit of yoga, I don’t see why we can’t also have plates and barbells. Of all the ways forward, this is probably the most efficient use of your time and energy. Though yoga people tend to struggle with this one the most since it means either going to a gym or investing in large, expensive equipment to keep at home.

Anyway, you don’t need to choose one path to the exclusion of the others. As you begin to graduate out of the standard yoga curriculum you’ll probably explore a combination of all of these and settle into a practice that works for you.

Finding Yoga Classes That Build Muscle

The second problem with yoga classes for muscle growth is that you’re probably not going to find them in a studio. At the beginning, anything is going to get you some results, but the truth is that there just are not a lot of classes that cover all the bases, mechanical tension, muscle damage, metabolic stress and make a point to include opportunities for progressive overload. Probably the closest thing you’re going to find is a vinyasa class. There’s usually an emphasis on range of motion and slow controlled movement, which is good. You might get some opportunities to practice more challenging poses that increase mechanical tension. But not usually a lot of sets repeating a movement until the muscles are exhausted. Plus, nobody really agrees on what vinyasa means anyway so it’s kind of hit or miss.

If you want to try an introductory version of a yoga class that will build muscle, check this out. You don’t need any equipment to get started, really not even a yoga mat and you can finish in about 20 minutes.