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You can easily use yoga exercises to help achieve weight loss. Many yoga postures, asanas, and breathing exercises help achieve weight loss through the burning up of extra calories. Here is a list.
Sun salutations - Do 24 Sun salutation exercises a day at the rate of 4 rounds a minute. These are beneficial for the lungs and the accompanying chanting of mantras helps relax your mind at the same time.
Pranayama - This is a very effective technique and helps you in energy management. Bhasrika, Kapalbhati, and fast breathing exercises help achieve an excellent weight loss effect on fat people. It results in mainly improved lung function. This improvement in turn helps in increased oxygen intake. Increased oxygen reaching the fat cells means more calories are burned there. This in turn helps you in weight loss by reducing the fat deposits.
Yogic postures for legs and arms - Certain poses that are part of yoga exercises help you to especially reduce weight. These include the celibacy pose, squat pose, the dog pose, the swinging lotus pose, the hero pose, the tree pose, and the bridge pose in which you have your face down or up.
Ashtanga yoga - This is one of the most vigorous forms of yoga exercises with important weight loss advantages. These and vinyasa yoga exercises have been especially redesigned for western practitioners in the form of what are known as power yoga exercises. These exercises help you burn up your calories faster through increased rate of heart and blood circulation system functioning.
You need to perform power yoga exercises for 90 minutes at least 3 to 5 times per week to result in substantial weight loss. The main principle behind power yoga is strength. After this comes flexibility. This means that unless you have the requisite strength in your shoulder muscles, moving on to the advanced inversion poses to gain flexibility is not possible.
Arm balances and warrior series poses are the chief exercises in power yoga. The warrior series poses (virbhadrasanas) help in toning up all the major muscle groups in the back, legs, shoulders, and arms. They are also helpful in toning the muscles of the hips.
There are three stages of warrior hip exercises, namely 1, 2, and 3. In warrior1, you square your hips forward and keep them in that position evenly. Visualizing your hips as the headlights on a car helps achieve the pose comfortably.
Moving from warrior1 you transpose sideways into the warrior2, keeping your hips centered and level. Balance is the chief feature of the pose. Remember, you need to neither lean too far forward nor too far back. After this you move on to the warrior3 pose. In this you need to stand on one leg with the other raised and focus on the external rotation of the raised leg hip.
The key to weight loss through yoga is concurrent diet control and electrolyte balance. Unless you exercise control on your diet, the weight lost through yoga will be regained and you will be back to square one.
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