Yoga is usually sold on flexibility. When we read the comments on a WorkoutHealthy Facebook post asking whether yoga counts as a workout, that is not what people talked about.
They talked about strength. It came up more often than flexibility, endurance, or relaxation.
See the original Facebook post
The headline numbers
- 94% of commenters said yoga should count as a workout.
- 44% named strength as its main benefit, ahead of flexibility, endurance, and relaxation.
- 33% named Power Yoga and the same share named Vinyasa as the styles that work hardest as training.
- Hot Yoga and Ashtanga were the next most named styles.
How we collected this
This is a count of public comments on one WorkoutHealthy Facebook post published on May 29, 2024. Comments were sorted by whether the person considered yoga a workout, which benefit they named, and which style they mentioned. People who named more than one benefit were counted in each.
The usual limits apply. This is a self selected group answering a fitness page, and the total comment count was not recorded at the time. Read the percentages as the shape of one conversation rather than a measured population figure.
Anyone quoting these numbers should cite them that way.
Almost nobody argued it is not a workout
The 94% figure is the least surprising number here and still worth stating. The old framing of yoga as a warm up or a stretching class barely showed up.
What people described instead was muscular work. Holding a pose for a long time is time under tension, and several commenters said their bodies responded to it the way they respond to lifting.
One reader put it directly: “Yoga is a bodyweight workout. I see similar results from yoga as I do from lifting. There was a point in time I lost 25 pounds doing only yoga.”
Strength beat flexibility
This is the finding worth paying attention to, because it runs against how yoga is usually marketed.
The research is not as one sided as the comments, but it does support the direction. A 2024 controlled study found that regular yoga practice improved muscular strength and balance along with flexibility (Bhunia and Ray, 2024).
Several readers described the intensity in terms lifters recognize. One wrote: “Probably the hardest workout I’ve ever done. I can lift weights all day but a one hour yoga class once almost took me out.”
Flexibility and endurance still matter, just less
Flexibility did not disappear from the answers. It moved down the list.
Readers mostly described it as support for something else they do. As one wrote: “Yoga promotes strength, relaxation, flexibility. You can stretch out your body from the impacts of your other workouts. I love it and it helps with my horse riding activities.”
Endurance came up less often but did come up: “If you’ve done yoga, you’d know it raises your heart rate like cardio does.” A small pilot study has found measurable effects on exercise endurance, though the evidence there is thinner than the strength evidence (Kothari et al., 2023).
Core stability was the quiet answer
Core work showed up in a way that sounded less like a benefit and more like a mechanism. As one reader explained: “Holding positions helps strengthen stabilizer muscles, which keep you balanced.”
That is the part a bench and a barbell do not train directly, and it is probably why yoga keeps showing up in the routines of people who also lift.
Which styles readers counted
Not every style got named. Four did.
- Power Yoga. Fast paced, strength focused, closer to athletic training than to a traditional class.
- Vinyasa. Continuous movement tied to breathing, which raises the heart rate and keeps muscles loaded.
- Hot Yoga. Performed in a heated room, which adds cardiovascular demand.
- Ashtanga. A fixed and demanding sequence that builds strength and endurance through repetition.
What this does not show
It does not show that yoga replaces resistance training. Nobody in this thread compared the two under controlled conditions, and the people answering a yoga question on a fitness page are the people most likely to already practice it.
What it does show is that the flexibility framing is out of date with how practitioners describe their own experience.
For the research side of a related question, our piece on whether box jumps build muscle looks at what bodyweight and plyometric work can and cannot do for size.
Citing this
Journalists and bloggers are welcome to quote these figures with attribution to WorkoutHealthy, provided the methodology note above travels with them. The underlying thread is public and linked at the top of this article.
This analysis was originally published on workouthealthy.com in August 2024, written by Alexandra Carandang, and moved here in August 2026.
References
- WorkoutHealthy. (2024, May 29). Yoga as a Workout [Facebook post]. Facebook
- Bhunia, G. B., & Ray, U. S. (2024). Improvement in muscular strength, body flexibility and balance by yogasana and with reduced detraining effects by yoga breathing maneuvers: a non randomized controlled study. Journal of Ayurveda and Integrative Medicine, 15(1), 100815. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaim.2023.100815
- Kothari, R., Mittal, G., A, P., & Bokariya, P. (2023). Exploring the effect of yoga on exercise endurance as assessed by cardiorespiratory efficiency tests in exercise physiology laboratory: a pilot study. Cureus. https://doi.org/10.7759/cureus.38283
