The yoga group consisted of 24 women and 31 men, while the non yoga group consisted of 34 men and 15 women respectively (Table 1). There were no significant differ- ences in age or anthropometric parameters between the groups in terms of age and body weight, even when strat- ified for gender. The measured and predicted BMR of the subjects is shown in Table 2. Overall, there was significant decrease (15%) in the measured BMR of the yoga group when compared with the non yoga group (p < 0.000). When stratified by gender, the measured BMR of the yoga group was lower than the measured BMR in women (16%, p < 0.001) and men (12%, p < 0.001) of the non yoga group. The significant difference in BMR persisted even after adjustment for body weight by analysis of cov- ariance between the yoga group men and women (Table 3), and the difference between yoga and non-yoga groups was of the order of about 9 and 18% in men and women respectively. When differences were analyzed between genders within groups, women in the yoga group had a significantly lower BMR when compared to men after adjusting for body weight, but this gender difference was not observed in the non yoga group (Table 3). However, there was no significant difference between the non yoga group men and women after adjusting for body weight.

Table 4 shows a comparison of yoga and non yoga group stratified by gender in all the other measured respiratory parameters. In addition to the BMR difference in the yoga group described above (Table 2, 3), there was also a signif- icant decrease in other respiratory parameters between yoga and non yoga groups, such as in VO2, VCO2, respira- tory minute ventilation volume (VE, for men only) and breath flow rate (BF) (Table 4). There was no significant difference in heart rate (HR) between groups, however, there were small but significant differences in the RQ between the yoga and non yoga groups, although these differences were in different directions for men and women (Table 4).

Table 3: Gender wise comparison of BMR of yoga and non yoga groups along with their predicted values.

Mean ± 1 SD
** P < 0.001, yoga group compared with non yoga group
* P < 0.05, yoga group compared with non yoga group
‡ P < 0.001, BMR of subjects in each group compared with their predicted values
¶ Adjusted for body weight