Building Strength: How to bring resistance training into Yoga
It is a well-known myth that you cannot build flexibility while building muscle. This is supposing they are opposites, that you cannot build muscle, while lengthening a muscle. This is completely wrong and, in fact, increasing your mobility can mean you can lift even more. It also helps longevity and quality of life as building muscle around joints can considerably improve overall mobility.
Mobility Vs Flexibility
Flexibility used to be the commonly used term for building more range of motion in your joints and movement, only recently has the term ‘mobility’ had more mainstream use.
Mobility simply means having an increased controlled range of motion. When you are controlling the joint with greater movement you have more muscle surrounding the joints and are less likely to suffer injuries.
Why do you want this with Yoga?
Doing an asana practice can focus on a lot of mobility and flexibility, but there are strong and very, very strong poses. If you are looking to get into handstands and other arm balances, you need to build strength to discourage injury and also help get you there quicker.
Common injuries from practise Yoga are, pulled hamstrings and shoulder injury. They happen from not having enough resistance in the muscles to support the joints and tendons. To help prevent these types of injuries, I encourage the use of weights in your life, as if you can build muscle through progressive overload, you are going to prevent these injuries from happening.
Bringing in Strength Training into your Yoga Practise
Adding more movement classes can make an already busy life even more hectic, but I do like to remind you that you can do more than just a movement practice and still be practising yogic values. I encourage you to try to get to a regular class or studio and go once or twice a week. Start small. Bring in 1-2 strength training sessions a week. The mixture of strengthening and mobility training may actually mean that you see results from your goals sooner.
You can then add your at-home yoga practice when you know it fits in, maybe in the morning before work or before your children wake up. There can provide more freedom, as you can make it as short or as long as you need and you can also do it whenever you have a free moment.
There is now a popular class in bigger yoga studios that involves light weights and adding them to yoga practices. This is not what I am talking about when I mean adding strength training as it lacks progressive overload. But if you enjoy this kind of yoga, make it one of the classes you do.
Exercises to do with weights
For yoga, the most common injuries are shoulders and hamstrings. But you also find your glutes are weak or maybe you get lower back pain after back bending. As I am only a yoga teacher and not a personal trainer, I am going to share my personal exercise choices.
Deadlifts or 1 legged deadlifts - Strengthens glutes and hamstring to support forward folds and the splits. Also, balances and backbends. 1 legged deadlifts are great for Warrior 3s, they are a similar shape and help build stabilising muscles.
Shoulder press - They build stability muscles around the shoulder so then arm balances become a lot stronger and prevents injury in chaturanga. If you do dumbbell shoulder presses, you can see the mimicry of a handstand.
Bent Rows - Very good for back muscles so when you come into the wheel and other backbends your muscles fully engage protecting the lower back. Also, rows are pull exercises, which are good as a yogi to do, as it is no longer in yoga practices.
Finally, hip flexor training - This makes control in balances and lunges a lot easier and can help you when getting in and out of posture. As I said, you want control coming in and out of postures to reduce injury and also to enable you to try more difficult transitions.
I hope this has encouraged you to lift some weights. I did not even mention the other benefits so if you would like to know more, don’t be afraid to ask.
Thank you for reading.
The Light in me sees the Light in you!
Thank you for being here xx
It is a well-known myth that you cannot build flexibility while building muscle. This is supposing they are opposites, that you cannot build muscle, while lengthening a muscle. This is completely wrong and, in fact, increasing your mobility can mean you can lift even more. It also helps longevity and quality of life as building muscle around joints can considerably improve overall mobility.