You need two kinds of weights if you want to incorporate weight resistance into your yoga workouts: hand weights to hold and ankle weights to strap to your ankles. Most sporting goods and athletic stores carry these weights, and you may be able to find them in the sporting goods sections of department stores. (The appendix lists online stores where you can purchase yogawith-weights supplies.)
The following sections explain everything you need to know about choosing and using weights, including what size weights you need, the ins and outs of shopping for weights, and a handful of weight accessories that may be useful to you.
Investing in weights of different sizes
We recommend having three sizes of hand and ankle weights at your disposal for your yoga-with weights workouts: a pair of 1-pound weights, a pair of 3- pound weights, and a pair of 5-pound weights. Always start with the lightest hand or ankle weights and work your way up. This allows you to start from your comfort zone and work your way into the weight that gives you the most fulfilling workout. If you start with the heaviest weight, you run the risk or straining yourself and pulling a muscle.
You may wonder why we don’t instruct you to lift weights heavier than 5 pounds. Especially if you’re a jock who’s been pumping iron in the gym for years, isn’t 5 pounds kind of light? You’ll discover when you start doing the exercises that 5-pound weights — in addition to the yoga poses — give you a very solid workout. Even if you’re an expert weightlifter, the combination of yoga poses and hand weights will test your strength and balancing abilities in new ways that make you sweat and really feel it deep in your muscles.
The yoga-with-weights workout refines and lengthens muscles; it isn’t intended to build the bulky body of a Charles Atlas. Yoga with weights creates a leaner, longer, stronger body. The 1-, 3-, or 5-pound weights you use in the exercises stretch your muscles, release tension in your muscles, and engage the muscles in the deep core of your body that you use for balance and stability.
Not many forms of exercise engage your deep-core balancing muscles. The added resistance from the weights forces your deep-core muscles to spring into action. Lifting weights heavier than 5 pounds may make you too top- or bottom-heavy and upset the balance and distribution of your body weight.
You would no longer focus on balancing or engaging your core muscles; you would exercise your arms or legs in traditional weightlifting fashion.
In the exercise descriptions in this book, we don’t tell you which of the three weights to use. The amount of resistance you want is up to you. Experiment with the different weights, and choose the size that gives you the best workout.
Knowing which size weight to use
How do you know which size weight (1-, 3-, or 5-pound) to use in a particular exercise? The size is ultimately up to you, but if you find yourself straining as you do an exercise, consider using a lighter weight.
Here are some telltale signs that you should switch to a lighter weight:
Grunting. Emitting a grunt, a grumble, or a groan in the middle of an exercise means you’re straining too much.
Holding your breath. We instruct you when to inhale and exhale when necessary, and we always instruct you to breathe slowly and consciously. If you start holding your breath, it’s a sure sign that you’re straining to do the exercise.
Shaking or cramping muscles. If your arm, for example, starts shaking or cramping in the middle of an exercise, you’re working a particular muscle in your arm too hard. The object of yoga with weights is to engage many muscles at once, not a particular muscle or muscle group.
Tiring quickly. This tells you that you’re overambitious where the heaviness of the weights is concerned.
Throwing your body. If you find yourself lunging or throwing your body to lift a weight, you’re relying on your momentum to lift rather than your muscles. You’ve lost your core stability.
Knowing if the weights you’re lifting are too light is easy. If you’re not working hard enough, switch from 1 to 3 pounds or from 3 to 5 pounds. Don’t be afraid to experiment. Keep different size weights at your side and test the different weights until you find the pair that engages you the best in an exercise. You may find yourself using different weights for different exercises. The surest way to know whether your choice of weights is the right one is to see how you feel after a workout. If your body feels weak and shaky, you
need lighter weights; likewise, if you’re too sore the next day, you need lighter weights. If you finish a workout with the feeling of “comfortable discomfort” — a feeling that you’ve met the challenge and given yourself a good workout — you know that your choice in weights was the right one.
Most people exercise with 1- and 3-pound weights. Especially with the ankle weights, 5 pounds can seem like 5 tons when you’re in the middle of a workout.
However, we don’t want to discourage you from using these weights, especially if you’re tall or big.
Shopping for hand and ankle weights
Hand weights
Sometimes hand weights are sold in sets, and you may be able to find a 1-, 3-, and 5-pound combination. Hand weights are often priced by the pound, with 1 pound costing about $1.50. A 3-pound hand weight, for example, should cost about $4.50.
Recently, a new kind of glove-style hand weight has appeared on store shelves. You can slip your hand into these weights, which gives you an advantage because you don’t have to grasp the weight as you lift it, and you can stretch out the fingers of your hand as you move through each exercise.
Glove-style weights give you the opportunity to stretch and lift at the same time, and you may even get more of a stretch without the hindrance of carrying or gripping the weights and balancing at the same time. (Look in the appendix for advice for finding glove-style weights on the Internet.)
You have other options if you want to stick to hand-held weights. Weightlifters are accustomed to wearing special fingerless grip gloves that secure the weights in their hands and prevent calluses. If you like grip gloves, by all means use them in yoga-with-weights exercises; just be sure to air out the gloves when you’re finished using them.
Never drop a hand weight. When you’re done with it, place it carefully on the floor where no one can step on it. And keep weights away from children. You can buy special weight racks for storing weights on the cheap.
Ankle weights
We recommend keeping 1-, 3- and 5-pound ankle weights on hand as you perform the exercises in this book. At most, wear 5-pound ankle weights when you do an exercise. The weights should range in price from $15 to $25 a pair. Changing ankle weights is considerably more trouble than changing hand weights, so you may want to find ankle weights that strap on and off with ease. Ankle weights with Velcro closures are the easiest to get on and off. You can also try to find ankle weights that come with little pockets for inserting metal slugs of different sizes (see the appendix for information about buying these ankle weights). These pocket-pouch ankle weights make it easy to change weight sizes because you don’t have to unstrap the weights and put on a different pair.
Filed in: Aerobic Exercise » Weighing Your Hand- and Ankle-Weight Options