Quick Response

Yes and no. Yes yoga can build muscle in individual who are extreme beginners and have no experience building muscle or moving on a consistent basis. No yoga doesn’t build muscle in a systematic continuous way like resistance training does.

How Is Muscle Built

In order to understand why yoga does and doesn't build muscle we first need to understand how muscle is built. Muscle is built through creating mechanical tension in the muscle, therefore stressing the muscle and body in that it responds through creating hypertrophy adaptations. Mechanical tension is created through accumulating high levels of fatigue, this is why typically for hypertrophy training (muscle growth) we use light weights and perform high numbers of repetitions.

High Levels of Fatigue = Mechanical Tension = Hypertrophy Adaptations

This is a very reductionist explanation of hypertrophy but helps us understand the key steps involved. If you would like to read more in-depth about hypertrophy mechanics this publication is an excellent review of the literature.

Yoga Does Not Meet These Demands

We understand that in order to create muscle mass we need to generate high levels of fatigue in order to generate mechanical tension. We can see that yoga is by far from an effective way to build muscle as it does not create high levels of fatigue. Yoga does not create high enough stimulus to systematically improve muscle mass.

So How Does Yoga Increase Muscle Mass?

In my quick response I noted that yoga can increase muscle mass. Which is counter intuitive given that I have just given detailed reasons for why yoga should not be used to gain muscle yet it is possible. For example there was a study done on adolescents who are overweight , tracking how their bodies responded to the practice of yoga. They gained muscle mass to a statistically significant point. This means yoga can increase muscle mass. However, this is only in very untrained, sedentary individuals. In individuals who are very untrained and sedentary almost any activity will help build some form of muscle mass, like hiking or playing tennis. Their bodies have been exposed to so little stress that it is easy for them to create some basic hypertrophy adaptations. This doesn’t by any means make yoga an effective activity for gaining muscle mass. This is especially true for individuals who are already active.

References