How Do We Get Stronger in Yoga?
(and should this be a focus of our yoga practice?)
In this coaching discussion for yoga teachers and teachers-in-training, we talk about how we get stronger through our yoga practice, and we’ll explore whether yoga is an effective practice for building strength, muscle mass, and overall fitness.
Watch the video below, or scroll down for the transcript notes and resources.
How Do We Get Stronger in Yoga?
(and should this be a focus of our yoga practice?)
Hello Yogis! Today we’ll talk about how we get stronger through the practice of yoga, the challenges and the benefits, and we’ll also explore whether muscular strength is a useful focus for our practice.
The aim of this discussion is to supplement your Anatomy and Physiology studies in your yoga teacher training and particularly focus on a few things that can get a little muddy when we are first learning yoga anatomy and physiology.
So, today we are going to touch on a few topics, including:
1. Some essential definitions
2. Key mechanisms of strengthening
3. Types of contractions
4. How we get stronger doing yoga
5. Should we be using yoga to build strength?
6. Pose study – is this pose making us stronger?
7. Common strengthening poses in Vinyasa Flow
8. Helpful resources
1. Definitions: Strength, endurance, power, stability
Strength:
- The ability of a muscle or group of muscles to exert force against resistance.
- In yoga strength is developed through exercises that ask us to lift or hold our body weight against the force of gravity – for example chaturanga, plank, boat, locust, powerful pose, which increase muscle mass and force production.
Power:
- The ability to exert force quickly, combining strength with speed.
- Power is trained with explosive movements. In the gym this might look like jump squats or burpees.
- In the general Vinyasa Flow class, we do this less often. However, in Ashtanga Vinyasa we do some movements like hopping or floating from the front to the back of the mat that do somewhat train for power.
Endurance:
- The ability of muscles to sustain repeated contractions or maintain a contraction for an extended period.
- In yoga we develop muscular endurance through high-repetition movements like Sun Salutations, and holding static positions like planks, warriors, side arm balance etc.
Stability:
- The ability to maintain control of our joint or body position and transmit load.
- In yoga we develop stability with movements like asymmetrical standing poses, balancing poses, core strengthening poses. These all help us to improve stability and control of our posture and alignment.
2. Key mechanisms of strengthening:
Overload
Think of it this way: your body only gets stronger, more flexible, or fitter by being asked to do something it can’t quite do yet. By safely challenging (or “overloading”) your body beyond its current abilities, you’re signaling that it needs to rise to a higher level of performance. This triggers the body’s natural processes to build strength, endurance, and flexibility. Essentially, when you push just a little past your limit, your body responds by getting better.
Progression
To make sure the overload is safe and effective, we need to apply it in a gradual way—this is where the principle of progression comes in. It’s about slowly and systematically increasing the challenge as your body gets stronger. Too much too soon can cause strain or injury, while too little won’t lead to improvement. By listening to your body and recognizing its current limits, you’ll know when it’s time to increase the intensity. Progression is all about moving forward at a pace that’s right for you.
Progressive Overload
Progressive overload can be really difficult in yoga – especially in the all-levels drop-in classes we most commonly see in the modern postural yoga world.
Think about how we have people of all different levels of fitness and levels of experience or exposure to yoga, all coming to the same class – how do we take these students on a systematic journey to progressively overload?
As yoga teachers one thing we can do is try to sequence in lots of options – regressions, progressions, props and versions (or use the bus stop teaching method) – and talk to our students about building a practice, about listening to their bodies and their breath, and making conscious choices about which challenges to explore on a given day.
Adaptation
This principle explains how your body gets used to the challenges you give it. Through progressive overload, your body adapts to the movements and workload over time. In yoga, when designing a sequence for students, it’s important to balance a range of movements so that students can adapt in a healthy way.
As the body adapts to a specific practice or intensity or duration of practice, it’s important to repeat that practice often enough for adaptation to happen. But, if you stick with the same routine for too long, your body may stop progressing—this is what we call hitting a plateau. So, we need to mix things up occasionally to keep the body (and brain) challenged. I talk about this a lot with balancing routine and variety, which supports healthy adaptation.
The Challenges in Yoga:
We progressively overload by gradually increasing the difficulty by adding more load, changing angles or adding repetitions or length of hold to challenge muscles.
This is easy to do when you are doing bicep curls. You start with 10-pound dumbbells and gradually add a few pounds at a time.
This is not so easy to do with yoga. We have limited ability to reduce or increase our body weight – for example knees down Chaturanga, and yoga is not a practice where we would often do a series of 8x repetitions in a row, other than Sun Salutations.
So, for new students who don’t have a regular movement practice, it’s challenging to effectively apply an appropriate starting point for progressive overload in a general yoga class, but we can try.
Adapting Movements for Progressive Overload
Think about a movement like Downward Dog. It’s a lot for a beginner. We can adapt this by doing wall Down Dogs, chair down dogs, Hands and Knees, by using bent knees, adding blocks, reducing the time in the pose. But, keep in mind that the difference in challenge between a wall down dog and a full floor down dog is significant – the overload is not really progressive.
Or think about a movement like Chaturanga. You are either holding almost your entire body weight or put your knees down for a small reduction of your body weight.
What could you do to further adjust Chaturanga to make it more accessible? Wall Chaturangas, elevated chaturangas (chair, bricks), mini-chaturangas. These are all important offerings to make our classes more accessible, but it’s still not quite the same quality of progressive overload that we could offer in other movement practices, like free-weights.
Take some time to think about how we can apply progressive overload in yoga with props, pose versions, and some creative planning. Planning includes not just offering options, but also making time for people to get up and get to the wall, or a chair, or to gather props.
Anticipating students needs and planning ahead for the options we’ll offer can allow us to better meet all the needs that our students may have in our class.
3. Types of Muscular Contractions
Understanding the types of muscular contractions can be really useful when we are exploring strengthening in yoga classes.
We have two main types of skeletal muscular contractions: isotonic and isometric contractions.
Isotonic contractions are muscular contractions where we are moving, where the length of the muscle changes as we are contracting. There are two types of isotonic contractions: concentric/shortening, and eccentric/lengthening.
Concentric (shortening) contractions:
When muscles shorten during contraction, like your quadriceps (thighs) when you push the ground away to stand from Utkatasana (Chair Pose).
Eccentric (lengthening) contractions:
When muscles lengthen under tension, as in slowly lowering down from Plank to Chaturanga. The muscle is lengthening and contracting, so you are building strength by controlling the descent against gravity.
Isometric contractions:
When a muscle contracts against a fixed resistance. Where the length of the muscle does not change as we are contracting. Like when we are holding a pose.
The challenges in yoga:
We only have so many options for concentric and eccentric contractions when we are working with our body weight.
Go back to our bicep curl example: we lift a weight, it’s a concentric shortening contraction. We lower the weight, it’s an eccentric shortening contraction. We hold the weight out halfway, it’s an isometric contraction.
We don’t often have these options for every muscle group in our yoga practice.
We also have the challenge of not having a lot of options for each kind of contraction, with load, against the force of gravity to balance, for example, pushing and pulling movements.
Take some time to think about where we might be using these contractions in our yoga poses:
Examples
Chaturanga Dandasana – eccentric contractions in chest and triceps when lowering from plank into chaturanga, then concentric when lifting back up from chaturanga to plank. Isometric when holding chaturanga or plank.
Warrior 1 – eccentric contractions of quadriceps when lowering down into Warrior 1, then concentric when pressing back up to standing. Isometric when we are holding Warrior 1
Can you take some time to think about some other examples of concentric/shortening and eccentric lengthening contractions in yoga?
4. How We Get Stronger Doing Yoga:
Like many body-weight-based movement practices, in yoga you use your own weight as resistance to build muscle, improve strength and endurance, and overall fitness.
To get stronger we need resistance, and in yoga that resistance comes from gravity.
The intensity of our movements can be adjusted somewhat in yoga by changing the position, angle, or range of motion – all of these impact load.
One of the benefits of yoga is that we are often engaging multiple muscle groups together with the aim to promote functional strength and improve body control and coordination through the neuromuscular system, so the ability of our brain and body to work together to control and coordinate our movements. These are all really important in yoga, fitness, sport, daily life, and active aging.
Consider skills like, transitioning from the floor to standing, we can take these movements for granted in our youth, but as we age or experience injuries, these become essential movements, and we can train for these movements in yoga, along with all the other important components like mindfulness, breath, meditation, and self-care.
5. Should we be using yoga to build strength?
Look, can we get stronger in yoga? Yes.
Is yoga a great place to focus on building muscle mass, strength, power, etc.? Not really. There is a limit to how much strength we can build in yoga – our body weight, and the movements that we use being two important factors.
And, perhaps more importantly, is that why your students are coming to your classes? People are coming to yoga because they want to move, but they want to move with a different attitude than the gym, in a different environment, and with a different focus.
People know where they can be building strength, lifting heavy weights at the gym or at home. But, instead (or along with their strength or resistance training practice) they are choosing yoga, and they are making that choice for a reason.
It’s up to every individual to decide what their teaching philosophy is, how they are going to construct their classes. I have a bias coming from a fitness background that I want my classes to have some strengthening elements. I find that strengthening movements not only help us to build a yoga practice, but also help us to develop confidence in our bodies, confidence in movement, and overall help us to build and maintain a healthy body.
Sure, there are gaps in what we can do as far as strengthening in a yoga class, but I like to add those strength elements, that’s a conscious choice I’m making in my classes. I like yoga to be a place where people are getting physically stronger and mentally stronger and feeling more confident in their bodies and more confident in moving their bodies. That’s a goal for me as a teacher. That’s part of my teaching philosophy.
At the same time, I am careful that my enthusiasm for strengthening doesn’t overshadow those other essential components that make yoga ‘yoga’.
As a teacher, it’s worth taking some time to consider your own teaching philosophy.
A Student-Focused Approach
While we think about our approach to strengthening in a yoga class, I think one of the things to remember as yoga teachers is that our students may not have our level of fitness. They may not have our level of strength. They almost certainly don’t have our level of experience with yoga. Therefore, they also haven’t worked out the rhythm, the timing, the coordination, the control, the stability, or the confidence
So, as teachers, we need to regularly get out of our own bodies in order to recognize where are our students are starting from and offer them that progressive overload so that they can safely build strength and confidence in movement.
6. Pose Study: Is this yoga pose making us stronger?
Let’s step into some technical study now and look at a few key elements. I think these are useful to consider when you are learning about yoga anatomy and physiology, and then carrying these into your sequencing and teaching.
When you are asking, am I strengthening in this pose, consider the following:
- Load (body weight)
- Gravity (are you working against gravity?)
- Current strength (can you already do these movements with ease, are these movements challenging?)
- Type of contraction
Load: the load you are working with in yoga is your body weight. You can modify this somewhat by using props or finding different angles, but your body weight is all the load you’ve got to work with.
Gravity: in most cases, we are only getting stronger when we are lifting a load against the force of gravity. So, just contracting a muscle doesn’t create more strength. Consider the difference between Standing Forward Fold, Seated Forward Fold, and Extended Hand to Big Toe Pose. Where are we getting stronger? How?
Current Strength: If you are already capable of a movement (load + gravity) you aren’t getting stronger when you do it. Remember the principle of Overload. How much are we able to add strengthening to yoga movements once we are able to do them all?
Let’s look together at some poses and identify those key elements:
• Key Movement
• Load
• Gravity
• Current strength
• Type of contraction
Let’s look at three different poses who have the same key movement – hip flexion – Standing Forward Fold, Seated Forward Fold, and Extended Hand to Big Toe Pose.
Standing Forward Fold (moving into the pose):
- Key movement: hip flexion
- Load: upper body (moderately heavy)
- Gravity: moving into gravity
- Type of contraction: Eccentric contraction of the glutes and hamstrings
So, your glutes, hamstrings, and some of the postural muscles of the back are lengthening while they contract to lower your upper body down under control.
Seated Forward Fold:
- Key movement: hip flexion
- Load: upper body (very light)
- Gravity: moving into gravity
- Type of contraction: concentric contraction of hip flexors and abdominals
So, same movement, but what pulls us into the fold is the hip flexors and abdominals, and the only load they are bearing is a bit of gravity, and the counter-pull of the hamstrings/glutes
Extended Hand to Big Toe (Utthita Hasta Padangusthasana)
- Key movement: hip flexion
- Load: leg (heavy)
- Gravity: moving against gravity
- Type of contraction: Concentric contraction of the hip flexors
So, again the same movement, but what pulls us into the balance is the hip flexors, and they load they are bearing is the weight of the whole leg against gravity, as well as a bit of counter-pull of the hamstrings and glutes, so lots of strengthening here (plus all the stabilizers!)
7. Common Strengthening Yoga Poses
If we do want yoga to be a place where people are developing their physical strength, as well as their yoga practice, these are some movements to be including in your sequences:
Upper Body:
Poses like Plank, Chaturanga, and Arm Balances strengthen chest, upper back, biceps and triceps
Lower Body:
Poses like Warriors, Powerful Pose, Extended Hand to Big Toe, Bridge all focus on quadriceps, hamstrings, glutes, and stabilizing muscles.
Core and Back Strength:
Poses like Boat Pose, Plank, Locust, Inclined Plane, and our transitional poses help stabilize the spine and trunk.
9. Closing and Yoga and Strengthening Resources
Yoga does offer us opportunities to build muscular strength and endurance, and develop coordination, stability, and stamina.
Yoga has limited opportunities to adjust load, and not enough opportunities to build strength in every muscle group (e.g., more pushing than pulling movements.)
If yoga is to be our primary movement practice, we might think about getting creative about the strengthening movements in our practice.
But, ideally I think it’s a good idea to have a movement practice outside of yoga – lifting weights for example – so that yoga can stay ‘yoga’, and not become totally oriented around fitness benefits, and can remain a practice of self-knowledge, and meditation, and moving into stillness, with all the general health benefits that this entails.
Right, now for some Resources:
If you are wanting to continue to explore anatomy and physiology for yoga
- Key Muscles of Hatha Yoga, Ray Long
- The Anatomy Colouring Book, Kapit and Elson
- Yoga Anatomy, Amy Matthews & Leslie Kaminoff
- Functional Anatomy of Yoga, David Keil
- Anatomy of Yoga, Paul Grilley
If you are keen to learn more about strengthening opportunities within a yoga class, follow some of these innovators: Kathryn Bruni Young of Mindful Strength, Trina Altman, Jules Mitchell, Jenni Rawlings.
Okay, that’s all from me today. Thanks for joining me for a bit of an explore of how we might strengthen our bodies in yoga.
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