Many have questioned whether yoga can be considered exercise, but a new study published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology suggests that it is. In fact, yoga is considered cardiovascular exercise, for those who have doubted it for years.

The health benefits of yoga, aside from it building flexibility and strength in muscles, include lowering of heart risk factors such as high blood pressure and cholesterol, according to BBC News.

Professor Myriam Hunink from Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam reportedly set out to investigate the effect that yoga has on heart health and has found that the benefits of yoga include lower risk of obesity, high blood pressure and raised cholesterol.

“These results indicate that yoga is potentially very useful and in my view worth pursuing as a risk improvement practice,” stated Professor Hunink.

For the study, the authors reportedly analyzed 32 randomized, controlled trials and found that yoga helped participants reap these health benefits compared to a control group that did no exercise at all, according to the Huffington Post. Despite the new health benefits of yoga that have surfaced, yoga was reportedly not shown to improve measures related to diabetes.

When pitched against other types of exercise, such as brisk walking or jogging, yoga reportedly was no better or worse based on the same measures of heart risk.

“The benefits could be due to working the muscles and breathing, which can bring more oxygen into the body, leading to lower blood pressure,” Maureen Talbot, senior cardiac nurse at the British Heart Foundation.

Talbot added, “A larger study is recommended though to assess the effects of yoga more fully.”