No gym? This ‘fat burning’ yoga routine builds full-body strength and only takes 30 minutes

Access a 30-minute yoga routine that slots perfectly into your day and builds full-body strength without jumping.

The class, led by Eleni Fit , is low-impact and no-repeat, meaning you won’t do the same exercises twice and you won't need to jump around. I recommend rolling out one of the best yoga mats for home practice and giving the routine a once-over watch to ensure none of the exercises are off the table for you.

If you’re pre or post-natal, working with an injury, or recovering from illness, be sure to clear a new exercise regime with the relevant qualified professional and stop immediately if you experience any pain or discomfort. Here it is.

Watch the 30-minute full-body yoga routine by Eleni Fit:

Those looking for a traditional yoga flow — this isn’t the routine for you. Rather than following a standard vinyasa or Hatha style class, Eleni veers toward a hybrid of Pilates principles, yoga and a low-impact strengthening workout.

“This 30-minute yoga workout targets your whole body! Perfect for strengthening and losing fat. Have fun!” says Eleni. But before you begin, I want to manage your expectations around fat burn.

When I was a yoga beginner , I quickly learned what yoga styles suited me best and how I like to practice; yin yoga is softer-paced and slow and includes deep holds, breathing exercises and stretches, while a dynamic vinyasa suits me better when I feel energetic and want to sweat and flow on my mat.

Whatever practice you enjoy, fat burn isn’t really the point of yoga, although faster, dynamic styles like Rocket, power and hot yoga are more likely to burn calories than yin. I recommend remembering your “why” as you step onto that mat — if it’s solely fat burn you’re looking for, another type of workout might suit you better, such as metabolic conditioning workouts or HIIT that raise your heart rate and tap into your body's energy systems like aerobic and anaerobic training .

The workout starts with a gentle warm-up, ends with a cool-down and works on a 40-second on and 10-second off workout format, so across 30 minutes, there's plenty of time to feel your muscles kicking up a burn.

Eleni estimates you’ll roughly burn 200-300kcal during the 30-minute session, but caveats this by stating: “The number of calories you burn will vary from person to person but this might serve as a guideline.”

It’s a tale as old as time — an instructor will stamp a calorie burn target on a workout, and we expect to hit it. But trust me, even the best fitness trackers on the market may throw up drastically different figures, so try not to get married to the numbers and focus on how the workout makes you feel instead.

Calorie burn is notoriously difficult to determine as it’s subjective to a person’s biology, activity levels and various other markers, including lifestyle, sleep hygiene and stress.

To get a real hold on the numbers, you’d need to calculate your basal metabolic rate (BMR), which is how many calories your body needs to get through the day, and total daily energy expenditure (TDEE), which refers to how many calories you burn daily.

You can do this yourself using an online calculator, but a sports clinic or doctor will be far more accurate. For that reason, whenever a client asks me how many calories they’re likely to burn during a session, my advice is to use any of the best fitness trackers or smartwatch as an estimate and focus attention on other tangible goals, like building strength, increasing lean muscle mass (which is also more metabolically active), or improving cardiovascular endurance.

Verdict

I want you to think about fat loss, calorie burn and metabolic flexibility as a bank account; your energy balance ultimately determines fat loss, which comes down to calories (energy) in versus out.

A standalone workout isn’t going to blitz fat, but accumulatively, increasing your overall activity levels can turn the balance in your favor, aiding fat loss. I recommend learning more about how to burn calories by switching up your daily routine to include more movement during the day on top of your workouts.

EPOC (Excess Post-Exercise Oxygen Consumption) is an oxygen debt, which means you’ll burn more calories post-workout to regain balance while elevating your metabolism short-term to do so. The higher the intensity of your workout, the greater the oxygen debt can become.

Fat burn credibility aside, this yoga workout is ideal if you want to drop deep into a mindful, low-impact stretching and strengthening routine set to chilled music — no weights, jumping around, or super high intensity required. What it does do is beautifully blend a full-body workout with a flowy yoga feel — perfect if you have a spare 30 minutes and want to feel grounded and worked from head to toe.

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