As someone who used to lift and absolutely loved it, I wanted to try to explain the difference between lifting and yoga.
Lifting is awesome and I used to absolutely love it. I also found it somewhat meditative. It was my unwind time. I miss it. What I didn't get from lifting is the diversity that yoga brings in terms of strengthening far more muscles, while also giving you flexibility.
I'm trying to think of a pose I can give you, but I worry that if you just dive in and try it you could injure yourself. The good yoga routines will start you off very slowly with breath, then some light stretching, then sun salutations, and then into the harder poses. It is those harder poses that give you this kind of "diversity of strength" I'm describing.
An example of a pose that isn't that hard to do, but strengthens muscles that lifting rarely works is half moon pose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ardha_chandrasana
Yoga is usually a flow, and a well designed flow will alternate between exerting muscles and then stretching those same muscles that you were exerting while exerting the ones you were stretching. That way you get strength and flexibility.
I don't have a gym near me anymore (I live on a small island) but I suspect that the combination of yoga and a killer lifting routine could do unbelievable things for your strength, flexibility and overall aesthetics, while helping you lift way heavier while avoiding injury. Just a thought. Best of luck!!
Hard to get into a debate about this because lifting does an amazing job of exercising just about everything. It just does it in a very different way with, I've found, higher risk of injury.
While yoga-as-meditation seems to have a long in India:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoga#History
Yoga-as-exercise was a much more recent phenomenon started by Westerners:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoga_as_exercise
> Goldberg is the author of The Goddess Pose: The Audacious Life of Indra Devi, the Woman Who Helped Bring Yoga to the West. Her book traces the modern Western practice of yoga to a Russian woman named Indra Devi, who was born in 1899 with the birth name Eugenia Peterson.
* https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2015/06/01/4112024...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indra_Devi
Regardless, if it gets people off the couch, then to a certain extent who cares which is "better": the perfect is the enemy of the good.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatha_yoga
lol
I would argue that if building strength, clarity, and focus is someone's main goal then this could be just as easily achieved by regular routine exercise like a calisthenics or bodyweight program with a healthy diet to boot. At least this way you can realise the benefits much quicker than a year or two.
I can't speak to the rewarding 'zen' nature of Yoga. After close to a decade of full-time weightlifting though, perhaps it has conditioned me into treating it as a sort of routine, mental therapy.