🪷 Does Yoga Actually Improve Physical Well-being?

A new randomized controlled trial tests how yoga and strength training compare when it comes to helping with real physical pain

When I first started a regular yoga practice, I noticed it producing convincing benefits for my own strength, mobility, and mental well-being. In fact, I was so convinced that I’ve stuck with it for over 10 years at this point and even became a certified yoga teacher last year.

However, just because the practice produces benefits for me doesn’t mean it produces benefits for most people. To make those kinds of claims, you actually need good scientific evidence. And to be honest, until recently, most of the studies I’ve found testing the effects of yoga have been poorly executed and published in journals nobody has ever heard of.

Recently though, the quality of studies has been growing—there are better control groups, randomized participants, and clearly defined outcome measures. I’ll highlight one of those studies here: a 2025 experiment testing the effects of regular, challenging yoga on physical pain caused by osteoarthritis.

🧪 What did the researchers do?

In a 2025 study published in JAMA Network Open, researchers recruited 117 adults aged 40 and older with clinically diagnosed knee osteoarthritis and randomly split them into two groups: a yoga group with 58 people and a strengthening exercise group with 59 people.

For the first 12 weeks, both groups attended two supervised sessions and one home-based session per week. From weeks 13 to 24, participants completed three unsupervised sessions per week at home.

The primary measure of interest for the researchers was knee pain intensity on a 0–100 visual scale before vs after the first 12 weeks, but they also tracked a range of important secondary outcomes up until 24 weeks, including:

• A widely used clinical osteoarthritis index for pain, stiffness, and daily function

• Walking speed and stair climbing performance

• Leg strength

• Depression symptoms

• Overall quality of life

Importantly, this test wasn’t comparing yoga to doing nothing, which often makes it very easy to find benefits for a researcher’s favorite intervention. It was yoga versus a well-established strengthening routine (e.g. weights, squats, step-ups), making it a true head-to-head test of two active treatments.

🔍 What did the research find?

After 12 weeks, both yoga and strength exercises produced meaningful reductions in knee pain with no significant difference between them in the primary outcome measure. If you’re looking for a 12-week physical activity to reduce joint pain, you could choose either yoga or weight training and you’d experience similar benefits.

There were some important differences emerging by the 24-week mark however in favor of the yoga practice:

• Greater improvements in pain, stiffness, and physical function

• Faster performance on a 40-meter walking test

• A modestly greater boost in quality of life

Participants also saw a significantly larger drop in depression symptoms compared with the strengthening group at 12 weeks, though the advantage faded by week 24.

Both programs were generally safe with only mild adverse events reported at similar rates for the two groups. Interestingly, people were slightly more consistent with home practice in the yoga group at 24 weeks, suggesting that yoga may be a more enjoyable or sustainable activity on average over the long term.

Both traditional strengthening exercises and strength-based yoga practices systematically challenge muscle groups around the body, improving their capacity, stability, and reliability. Yoga typically includes an additional focus on flexibility, range of motion, balance, breath regulation, and mindfulness. So the yoga cocktail may reduce pain not only through biomechanics but also by changing how people manage stress and pain sensitivity.

Of course, it’s likely that yoga will be disadvantaged against traditional strengthening exercises when it comes to other types of physical objective. For people who want to bulk up or increase the maximal weight their body can handle, weight training is likely to be unbeatable. And if your highest priority is cardio performance and aerobic capacity, activities like running and swimming will likely outperform both strengthening exercises and yoga.

But if you dislike gyms, prefer at-home workouts, or want to prioritize overall physical and mental well-being with your limited exercise time, yoga is an excellent option.

⭐️ Takeaway tips

#1. Use it or lose it

• The “use it or lose it” principle applies across the human body: inactive pathways in the brain get pruned away, unused muscles get deprioritized by the brain, and unstimulated bones get weaker. Stay active with some kind of regular physical exercise that challenges your whole body and tells your brain that you fully intend to use all of your torso and limbs.

#2. Adherence is essential, so do what you enjoy

• The study showed that yoga and strengthening exercises were equally effective for pain after 12 weeks. The best program is the one you can stick with, since poor adherence to any routine will produce no benefits at all. If calm attention and balanced, full-body movements feel more inviting than reps and sets, yoga is a good choice based on the evidence. If you enjoy the rush of lifting progressively heavier weights when you hit the gym, stick to that. If you have time for both and also like to throw in a cardio workout occasionally, then good for you.

#3. Consider yoga for general physical and mental well-being

• One of the great things about yoga is that it’s a wide-ranging practice (you can avoid its more spiritual or mystical elements if you prefer). Most people think of it as holding a downward dog, but it’s actually just as much about breathing, attention, and mindfulness as it is about physical movement. There are also different types of yoga practice to choose between: you could opt for more relaxed and gentle types of yoga (e.g. yin yoga) or more strength-intensive styles (e.g. ashtanga). Adopting a strength-intensive style of yoga will keep your body comprehensively challenged: bearing weight in difficult poses, deeply stretching, controlling breathing, focusing attention, etc. If you only have time for one regular physical exercise in your life, yoga is a good bet.

“Yoga does not ask you to be more than you are. But it does ask you to be all that you are.”

~ Bryan Kest

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