Surya Namaskar before weight training
The short answer
I ask every member to do Surya Namaskar before they touch a weight, and I have done that since 1999. Twelve positions, moving with the breath, taking about forty seconds a round and four minutes for five or six rounds. It raises body temperature, takes the spine, hips, shoulders and ankles through their full range while nothing is loaded, and settles the attention before a session rather than after it. Measured in a laboratory it costs roughly 3.8 kilocalories a minute, so it is real work rather than a formality. What the research supports is that yoga works about as well as other back exercise for long-standing back pain and reliably builds flexibility. What it does not support is any claim that it cures anything.
Written byBrijesh Joshi
Founder of S R Gym, Surat, coaching since 1999. President of the Strength Bodybuilding Association South Gujarat and a registered IBBFF judge. See credentials.
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This is the part of how we train here that surprises people most, and it is the part I am least willing to negotiate on. Before the first weight, twelve positions. I want to explain why, show you the sequence properly, and then be straight with you about what the research supports and what it does not.
Why it comes before the first weight
Think about who actually walks onto a gym floor in Surat at seven in the evening. Somebody who has spent nine or ten hours at a desk, in a showroom, or on a two-wheeler. Their hips have been folded the entire time. Their upper back has been rounded over a screen or a counter. Their shoulders have not been above their head all day, and their ankles have barely moved.
Now ask that body to squat, or to press a bar overhead. It will manage it. What it will do is find the range it needs by borrowing from somewhere that should not be giving it, usually the lower back. Do that for four hundred repetitions across a month and you have built a habit into the joint rather than into the muscle.
Five minutes of Surya Namaskar changes the body that arrives at the first set. The spine goes into extension and flexion. The hips open. The shoulders load overhead while carrying nothing but your own arms. The calves and hamstrings lengthen. Body temperature rises, which is the actual physiological point of a warm-up. And the breath is directed, which does something to attention that five minutes on a treadmill does not.
That last part matters more than people expect. Somebody who walks in distracted, still arguing with a customer in their head, trains badly and is the most likely person in the room to get hurt. Twelve positions with the breath is a way of arriving.
The twelve positions, in order
One round is twelve positions and takes about forty seconds at a moderate pace. The breath is half the practice: you inhale as the body opens and exhale as it folds. If you take nothing else from this page, take that.
- 01PranamasanaPrayer poseExhale
- 02Hasta UttanasanaRaised arms poseInhale
- 03PadahastasanaHand to foot poseExhale
- 04Ashwa SanchalanasanaEquestrian pose, right leg backInhale
- 05DandasanaStick or plank poseExhale
- 06Ashtanga NamaskaraSalute with eight partsHold
- 07BhujangasanaCobra poseInhale
- 08Adho Mukha SvanasanaDownward facing dogExhale
- 09Ashwa SanchalanasanaEquestrian pose, left leg forwardInhale
- 10PadahastasanaHand to foot poseExhale
- 11Hasta UttanasanaRaised arms poseInhale
- 12PranamasanaPrayer poseExhale
How to do it before a session
What I teach new members in their first fortnight is deliberately modest, because the mistake here is doing too much too soon and arriving at the weights already tired.
- Start with two rounds and add one a week. Five or six rounds, taking three or four minutes, is the working target for a warm-up.
- Moderate pace, not fast, not held. Before lifting you want the body warm and the joints moved, so keep it flowing. Save long held positions for after the session or a rest day.
- Alternate the leg. The leg that steps back in position four comes forward in position nine, so the next round starts on the other side. Round off an even number and both sides get equal work.
- Breathe as instructed rather than as convenient.Inhale as you open, exhale as you fold, and hold only in position six. Somebody holding their breath through the whole sequence is doing twelve stretches instead of one movement.
- Then two or three warm-up sets of your first lift.Surya Namaskar prepares the body generally. It does not replace warming up the specific movement you are about to load.
Pace changes what you get out of it, which is worth knowing. In one six-month study comparing slow practice against fast practice, the fast version behaved more like conditioning and built more muscular endurance, while the slow version shifted measures toward calm. That study was in schoolchildren and had no comparison group, so I treat it as a principle rather than a rule: fast before training, slow when you want to settle.
Before or after? Almost every page says after
If you search this question you will be told, more or less everywhere, to do your yoga after training rather than before. The reasoning offered is that stretching makes you weaker, so it has no business in a warm-up. I have been doing the opposite for twenty-seven years, so let me explain why I think the advice is wrong, and where it is right.
The concern is real and it has been measured. A 2024 meta-analysis pooling eighty-three studies and just over two thousand participants looked at exactly this. Overall, stretching inside a warm-up produced a small loss of maximal strength. The large decrement, the one all the advice is built on, appeared only where a single static stretch was held for sixty seconds or more per muscle. Jumping, sprinting and rate of force development were not significantly impaired at all. The authors wrote that a blanket prohibition on stretching within a dynamic warm-up is not supported by the evidence.
Read that against what we actually do. Surya Namaskar at a moderate pace is a flowing sequence in which no position is held for anything like a minute. It is a dynamic warm-up that happens to be several thousand years older than the term. The finding that worries people applies to lying on a mat holding one hamstring stretch for ninety seconds before you squat, and I would not ask you to do that either.
So the practical rule is about the kind of stretching rather than the timing. Flowing sequences before you lift. Long held positions afterwards or on another day. That is the whole of it, and it is why the usual advice and my practice are less far apart than they look.
I will also say what I get out of those ten minutes that has nothing to do with muscle. Watching somebody move through twelve positions tells me more about how they are that day than any question I could ask. A stiff shoulder, a knee that is being protected, a person who has slept badly. By the time they reach the first weight I already know what to change.
The calorie figure everyone gets wrong
This one is worth correcting in public, because the same wrong number appears on a great many of the pages that rank for this.
The measurement everyone is quoting comes from a 2004 study in the Indian Journal of Physiology and Pharmacology, which recorded the energy cost of Surya Namaskar during actual practice at about 13.9 kilocalories for one round lasting roughly three minutes and forty seconds. That is where the figure originates.
You will then find pages citing that same study and telling you twelve rounds burn four hundred calories or more. Thirteen point nine multiplied by twelve is a hundred and sixty-seven. The arithmetic is available to anybody who wants to do it, and it has apparently not been done.
A hundred and sixty-seven calories is a genuinely useful amount of movement for four or five minutes of work. It is roughly two rotli. It is not a fat-loss strategy on its own, and anyone selling it to you as one is either not checking or not telling. Fat loss comes fromthe whole week of eating and training, and Surya Namaskar earns its place at the start of a session for entirely different reasons.
What the research actually shows
I could fill this section with claims. A great many yoga pages do, and most of what they claim is not supported by anything you could hand to a doctor. I would rather tell you what is actually there, including the parts that are inconvenient for me.
Surya Namaskar is real physical work. Measured in a laboratory during actual practice, it costs about 3.8 kilocalories a minute, and oxygen demand in the hardest of the twelve positions is more than three times what it is in the easiest. That is a moderate-intensity effort. It is also a descriptive measurement in twenty-one young soldiers rather than a health finding, and I would not build a weight-loss promise on it.
The direct evidence on Surya Namaskar itself is thin. A 2026 systematic review pulled together fourteen studies and found links to better flexibility, fitness and body composition. The reviewers could not combine the results statistically because the studies varied too much, no study was rated at low risk of bias, and most were small and from India. Their own word was promising. Not proven, and I will use the same word they did.
The strength study everyone quotes needs its caveats.Seventy-nine students doing twenty-four rounds a day, six days a week for six months, improved their bench press, shoulder press, push-ups and sit-ups. There was no comparison group, so we cannot say the practice caused it. And twenty-four rounds daily is roughly five times what we do as a warm-up. Anyone quoting that study at you without those two sentences is selling something.
Yoga and back pain, honestly
This is the question I get asked most, usually by somebody in their thirties or forties whose lower back has been quietly bothering them for years. Here is what I can defend.
The Cochrane review is the most careful summary available: twenty-one trials and more than two thousand two hundred people. Against doing no exercise at all, yoga produced improvements in back pain and back function that were statistically real and, in the reviewers' own assessment, smaller than the change a patient would notice as clearly different. That is the honest headline, and it is not the one you will read elsewhere.
The more useful finding sits underneath it. When yoga was compared directly against other back-focused exercise, there was probably little or no difference between them. So yoga is not better than getting stronger, and getting stronger is not better than yoga. They are roughly equivalent, which is precisely why I ask you to do both rather than choose. The review's own conclusion was that the choice comes down to what is available and what a person will actually keep doing.
Two further things are worth knowing. The American College of Physicians, in its 2017 guideline, says doctors treating long-term low back pain should start with non-drug treatment, and it lists yoga among thirteen options alongside exercise and tai chi, with no one of them clearly ahead of the rest. And in a trial of three hundred and twenty adults, a structured twelve-week yoga programme did as well as physical therapy for pain and function, with fewer people still on painkillers a year later.
What none of that says is that yoga cures back pain, or that it fixes a disc, or that it treats sciatica. Every one of those studies was in non-specific low back pain, which means back pain without an identified structural cause. That is most back pain, and it is not all of it.
My own view, formed on a gym floor rather than in a journal, is that the combination does more than either part. The mobility work restores range that sitting has taken away, and progressive strengthening of the back, hips and trunk builds tolerance so that ordinary life stops provoking it. That is also whatthe back and posture training we run is built around.
Flexibility, and who gains most
The clearest evidence on yoga and flexibility is in older adults, where a review of randomised trials found meaningful improvements in lower-body flexibility and balance compared with not exercising. Compared against other forms of active exercise, the flexibility advantage roughly halved and rested on only three trials.
I read that as follows. Yoga is a reliable way to build and keep flexibility, and it is not the only way. What makes it the right choice for a gym warm-up is not superiority; it is that it takes four minutes, needs no equipment, moves everything you are about to load, and people will actually do it.
The group I see gain most are members over forty, and members who sit all day, which in Surat is a very large group. Thetraining we build for people over 40leans on this heavily, and so does the work withprofessionals training around a working day.
Fitting yoga and weights into one week
People worry these two things interfere with each other. In the way we run it, they do not, provided you put each in the right place.
- Moving sequences before lifting. Surya Namaskar at a moderate pace, four to six rounds, is a warm-up and belongs at the start.
- Long held stretches after lifting, or on a rest day.Holding a deep stretch for a minute before heavy squats can leave you feeling less stable under the bar. Afterwards, it is useful.
- A longer practice on one of your rest days. Twenty to thirty minutes on a Sunday does more for range of motion than adding rounds to your warm-up.
- Keep lifting through full range. Training through a complete range of motion is itself one of the better things you can do for flexibility. A deep squat, done properly, is mobility work that also builds muscle.
The whole approach this sits inside is set out onthe S R Gym method.
One member's account
Ashutosh Banerjee trains at the Adajan branch, from eight to nine in the morning, and started in February 2026. He is a marketing professional and an IIT Bombay graduate, which is to say he spends his working life at a desk. The first thing he does when he arrives is the twelve positions.
In September 2026 he told us he had gone three months without the neck and back pain he used to have, and he attributes a good part of that to the flexibility he has built through doing the sequence every day alongside his training.
I want to be careful about what that is and is not. It is one person's experience, given in his own words, and it is worth reading for that reason. It is not evidence that yoga reliably resolves neck and back pain, and I would not want anyone reading it that way. The research on yoga for neck pain in particular is thin: three trials and one hundred and eighty-eight people, all against usual care, with the reviewers themselves asking for better studies.
His full account is here, including what his training week looks like.
Where it can go wrong
I am not going to tell you this is risk-free, because the same Cochrane review that supports the practice also found that starting yoga produced a small rise in adverse events compared with doing nothing. Roughly four people in a hundred against one in a hundred, and the problem was almost always a temporary flare-up of back pain rather than a serious injury. Notably, yoga was no riskier than other forms of exercise.
That finding is exactly why the sequence is taught here rather than assumed. The positions people get wrong are predictable: collapsing into the lower back in the cobra instead of lengthening through it, letting the hips sag in the plank, forcing the heels down in the downward dog when the calves will not allow it yet, and rounding the back to reach the floor in the forward fold instead of bending the knees. Each of those turns a good position into a poor one, repeated twelve times a round.
So: learn it from somebody watching you, go to the range you have rather than the range in the photograph, and bend your knees. Anything that produces sharp pain, as opposed to the ordinary feeling of a stretch, should stop.
Practise along with him
Brijesh recorded these on his own channel in 2020. They are the closest you can get to being taught this without walking into the gym, and the long one is a complete session you can follow at home.
Yoga or gym: the importance of both
Why yoga and gym training are not alternatives, in Hindi. Seven minutes.
Twenty-five minutes of yoga
A complete twenty-five minute yoga session, recorded for World Yoga Day in 2020.
The research this page rests on
These are the sources this page rests on, with what each one actually found rather than a summary that flatters the argument. Where the evidence is weak, I have said so above and the reason is in these entries.
Yoga for chronic non-specific low back pain
Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, CD010671.pub3, 2022 · Systematic review and meta-analysis, 21 trials, 2,223 people
Against doing no exercise, yoga produced statistically real but small improvements in back pain and back function at three months, which the reviewers themselves described as below the threshold a patient would notice as a clear change. Against other back-focused exercise, there was probably little or no difference in function. The same review found a small rise in adverse events, mostly temporary aggravation of existing back pain.
Noninvasive treatments for acute, subacute, and chronic low back pain: a clinical practice guideline
Annals of Internal Medicine, American College of Physicians, 2017 · Clinical practice guideline
For long-standing low back pain, the guideline says clinicians should start with non-drug treatment, and lists yoga among thirteen options alongside exercise, tai chi and several others. It states plainly that no one of those options was shown to be clearly better than the rest, and the evidence behind the yoga entry specifically was graded low quality.
Yoga, physical therapy, or education for chronic low back pain
Annals of Internal Medicine, 167(2), Saper RB and colleagues, 2017 · Randomised noninferiority trial, 320 adults
A twelve-week structured yoga programme was found noninferior to physical therapy for pain and function in adults with non-specific chronic low back pain, and people in both groups were less likely to still be using painkillers a year later. Noninferior means it did not do worse by a set margin, which is a different and smaller claim than being better.
Effectiveness of virtual yoga for chronic low back pain
JAMA Network Open, 7(11), Tankha H and colleagues, 2024 · Randomised clinical trial, 140 adults
A twelve-week yoga programme reduced pain intensity and improved back function against a waiting-list group at both twelve and twenty-four weeks, with less painkiller use. The comparison group did nothing at all, so this shows yoga beats inactivity rather than that it beats other exercise, and only about a third of participants attended half the classes.
Stretching within a warm-up and subsequent performance: a multilevel meta-analysis
Journal of Sport and Health Science, Behm DG and colleagues, 2024 · Multilevel meta-analysis, 83 studies, 2,012 participants
Stretching in a warm-up produced only a small loss of maximal strength overall. The large decrement was confined to static stretches held for sixty seconds or more per muscle. Jumping, sprinting and rate of force development were not significantly impaired. The authors state plainly that a blanket prohibition on stretching inside a dynamic warm-up is not supported by the evidence.
Energy cost and cardiorespiratory changes during the practice of Surya Namaskar
Indian Journal of Physiology and Pharmacology, 48(2), Sinha B and colleagues, 2004 · Physiological measurement study, 21 men, no control group
Measured during actual practice, Surya Namaskar cost about 3.8 kilocalories a minute, with oxygen demand more than three times higher in the hardest of the twelve positions than in the easiest. This describes what the practice costs the body. It is not evidence of a health outcome, and the participants were young trained soldiers.
Multidimensional effects of Suryanamaskar on physical, physiological and psychological outcomes
Healthcare (Basel), 14(13), Choudhary S and colleagues, 2026 · Systematic review of 14 studies, no meta-analysis possible
The best synthesis available on Surya Namaskar specifically. It reports links to better flexibility, fitness and body composition, and the reviewers could not statistically combine the studies because they varied too much. No study was rated at low risk of bias, and most came from India with small samples. Their own verdict was promising rather than proven.
Asian Journal of Sports Medicine, 2(4), Bhutkar MV and colleagues, 2011 · Six-month before-and-after study, 79 students, no control group
Students doing twenty-four rounds a day, six days a week for six months improved upper body strength and push-up and sit-up endurance. There was no comparison group, so the improvement cannot be attributed to the practice with confidence, and the amount done is far beyond a morning warm-up.
A comparative study of slow and fast Suryanamaskar on physiological function
International Journal of Yoga, 4(2), Bhavanani AB and colleagues, 2011 · Comparative training study, 42 schoolchildren, no control group
Over six months, fast practice built more muscular endurance and behaved more like conditioning, while slow practice shifted measures toward calm. Participants were children aged twelve to sixteen and there was no non-exercising group, so this is useful as a principle about pace rather than as a health claim.
International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity, 16:33, Sivaramakrishnan D and colleagues, 2019 · Systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised trials
In older adults, yoga improved lower-body flexibility and balance compared with not exercising. Compared with other active exercise the flexibility advantage roughly halved and rested on only three trials. The evidence base here is in older adults and does not transfer automatically to a younger person lifting weights.
Surya Namaskar and training: common questions
- Should you do Surya Namaskar before or after a workout?
- Before, as your warm-up, at a moderate pace for four to six rounds. Most fitness pages say the opposite on the grounds that stretching weakens you, and a 2024 meta-analysis of 83 studies puts a precise limit on that concern: the large strength loss appeared only where a single static stretch was held for sixty seconds or more per muscle, jumping and sprinting were not significantly impaired, and the authors say a blanket ban on stretching inside a dynamic warm-up is not supported. A flowing sun salutation is not a sixty-second hold. Save long held stretches for after the session or a rest day.
- How many rounds of Surya Namaskar should I do before the gym?
- Four to six rounds, taking around three to four minutes. Start with two if you are new and add a round a week. A separate practice for its own sake can be longer, and there is no need for the very high volumes some studies used before you get the benefit of a good warm-up.
- How many calories does Surya Namaskar burn?
- About 13.9 kilocalories for one round of roughly three minutes forty seconds, measured during actual practice in a 2004 study in the Indian Journal of Physiology and Pharmacology. Twelve rounds is therefore around 167 calories, not the four hundred or more that several popular pages claim while citing that same study. It is a useful amount of movement for a few minutes of work and it is not a fat-loss strategy by itself.
- Does Surya Namaskar help with back pain?
- The honest answer is that yoga helps some people with long-standing, non-specific back pain, by about as much as other back exercise does, and that leading guidelines including the American College of Physicians list it among the first things to try before medication. It is not a cure and it has not been shown to be better than ordinary strengthening work. If your pain is severe, spreading down a leg, or came with numbness, weakness or any change in bladder or bowel control, that is a doctor's appointment rather than a yoga mat.
- Can I do yoga and weight training on the same day?
- Yes, and most members here do exactly that. Keep the moving, breathing sequence before the weights and any long held stretching for afterwards or for a rest day. The two are complementary: weights build strength through a range of motion, and yoga keeps that range available.
- Is Surya Namaskar enough on its own?
- For general movement and flexibility it is a good daily practice, and for somebody starting from nothing it will produce real change. For building meaningful strength or muscle it is not a substitute for progressive resistance training, and I would not tell you otherwise.
- Who teaches yoga at S R Gym?
- Brijesh Joshi teaches the sequence himself. He is a certified yoga trainer as well as a fitness trainer, and the twelve positions are taught to new members in their first fortnight so that the warm-up is done properly rather than approximated. Both branches, Adajan and Katargam. Call +91 98790 69960.
This page is general information written by a coach and a certified yoga trainer. It is not medical advice and cannot tell you anything about your own back. If you have pain that travels down a leg, any numbness or weakness, or any change in bladder or bowel control, see a doctor rather than starting an exercise routine.
Learn the twelve positions properly
They are taught to every new member in the first fortnight, at both branches, as part of an ordinary membership. Call +91 98790 69960.