Yoga Or Gym – Which Is Better For Reducing Belly Fat?

Belly fat is the most common thing that office women care about and that’s the reason why they keep searching for trending diet methods, the latest workouts, and such.

When I was still 70kg (I’m only 169cm tall) and wanted to be slimmer, especially to reduce my waistline size, one of the questions that I asked myself is whether I should choose gyms or yoga to reach my goal. I know this is also the thing that many people are still wondering about.

Everybody seems to take the side of going to the gym in reducing belly fat rather than yoga because yoga might be only good for body posture and body flexibility. Is it a rumor or a fact?

I, on the other hand, feel heading to a gym is quite stressful cause I’m not the person who can endure the pain. Therefore, I usually hit the gym one day and skip the session for several days due to muscle pain.

So, yoga or gym, which is better for reducing belly fat?

After two years of sticking with the gym and almost a year of practicing yoga, my conclusion and answer to this question are: IT DEPENDS.

To lose your body fats, or your belly fats to be more specific, there is only one theory that you should keep your body active.

Which methods you will choose to stick with to complete your target of losing belly fat will rely mostly on your persistence and your keenness on the method, whether it is a slow start like yoga or a high-impact like a gym.

So hereafter are some advantages and disadvantages between yoga and gym that you might need to consider before getting into any kind in the long run:

What can yoga offer you?

1. With yoga, we can expect and pursue a more balanced and healthy lifestyle with the increase of body and mind relations,s and our awareness of a better diet is also raised time after time.
2. Increase flexibility, tone your body and strengthen your muscle, and increase your pain tolerance, but still, keep your body lean and fit.
3. No need for any equipment just some space around the house or anywhere to practice some asanas, which is quite convenient and brings you no hesitance to do it.
4. Yoga doesn’t increase your hunger so you can control your input calories better than post-gym sessions.
5. After the yoga, you will feel energetic and fresh, relaxing and connecting with your mind, body, and soul
6. Yoga is a little bit harder to target some specific or wanted parts of your body but to enhance the body in total to make it fitter and leaner
7. Several yoga asanas also help to increase heart rate just as the cardio session does, like Ashtanga, Sun Salutations, and so on.

How about the gym workout?

1. With the gym workout, we should have some equipment to practice and less motivation to do it just at home
2. You can find a lot of excuses for your absence from the gym due to weather, distance, travel time, etc.
3. After a gym workout, you may feel tired and have to deal with sore body parts, and may lead to several days skip due to the pain
4. A gym session may increase your hunger and easily make you overeat
5. A gym workout usually works for your physical benefits and rarely offers mental stimulation
6. Gym workouts offer a lot of cardio exercises that help to burn fat fast; moreover, you can choose some parts of your body to target during the workout sessions.
7. After overcoming the pains and challenges during hard workout sessions, you may increase your mental strength and confidence afterward thanks to this small achievement.

Both have equal importance, and if done properly, you all can reap the benefits from both gym workouts and yoga.

However, which one can help benefit you the most depends totally on your goal. If you want to build up muscle mass, then you should be up to the strength training sessions.

If you, on the other hand, seek a lean body with flexibility or want to cure your unbalanced posture or backache, neckache, etc then you know that yoga will be your answer.

Based on the clear points of advantages and drawbacks of each method, you can even flexibly mix up the two by dividing two or three days at the gym and the rest days for yoga classes or counter-wise, even adjusting the ratio week by week, based on your own taste. The most important thing is that you should continually do it without stopping or skipping then it can help you the best.

Therefore, just as I mentioned above, any of these methods can bring you enough motivation to keep doing and keep going forward to reach your goal of reaching a better body shape and staying confident.