Best Yoga For Strength: Is Yoga Enough Strength Training?

A few years ago, I suddenly became interested in using my yoga practice to develop strength. 

Whether this interest was sparked by the handful of injuries I seemed to continually be nursing or from boredom with my existing practice, I’m not quite sure. But one day it became clear that if I wanted a sustainable movement practice and a body that feels good most of the time, strength was going to need to be a bigger part of that picture. 

As a definition, strength is our ability to generate contractile force against resistance. 

If we want strength from our yoga practice, we need to be willing to imagine a practice outside the context of vinyasa, ashtanga or any other style of yoga. We need to be willing to mix and match movements that are designed to generate contractile force against resistance. 

In yoga, this resistance is our body weight. Body weight is an interesting thing because in some instances it may be not enough resistance to generate strength, and in others it may be too much.

For example, lifting our arms repeatedly overhead in a vinyasa class is not going to adapt those tissues to lift heavier things. So if that’s something we want, we need to be open to adding in additional load or doing other body weight movements that will apply more load to those same joint positions (handstand comes to mind).

On the other hand, sometimes body weight is too much resistance. Plank pose and chaturanga are the first poses that come to mind in this category. Often, and especially if we’re newer to these movements, body weight will be too much load to hold in a push-up or top of a push-up, especially for the shoulders. In these cases we need to figure out how we can de-load a movement. 

The most common example for de-loading chaturanga is putting the knees down on the floor. This is a fine alteration, but perhaps a more useful and effective method would be to practice the same pose on an incline like a countertop. The incline will share the load of the body weight so that we can practice the push-up and our arms and shoulders can generate the contractile force needed to adapt. Then, as the muscles begin to develop more strength, we can gradually re-load by moving the pose onto less and less of an incline (maybe a bench, then a step, then finally the floor). 

This is called progressive loading. Progressive loading means that we load our tissues to the extent that they can perform an action with precision and control and gradually add more load as the tissues adapt. This is how strength develops. 

The concept of progressive loading speaks to two priorities in using our yoga practice to develop strength. Where our priorities may have once been in stretching our muscles or getting “deeper” into shapes, now our priorities shift to precision and control. 

Precision refers to our ability to articulate a movement exactly. As an example, if our goal is to develop external shoulder rotation with a particular movement, our success hinges on our ability to move solely from the shoulder joint without borrowing from anyplace else. That’s precision. This is important because strength is developed over time and through repetition of a loaded action. When we are precise in our repetitions, our tissues adapt faster and more optimally.  

Control is our ability to execute an action thoroughly and slowly. If I want to develop more control, my goal is to move slower with each repetition rather than picking up momentum. Control is important because it gives us a clear picture of what’s going on with our movement. The faster we move, the easier it is to not see where we might be compensating in other parts of our body.

How Can We Add Strength To A Yoga Practice? 

Let’s imagine that we’re going to yoga class tomorrow and we aren’t in charge of the sequence, timing or flow. How could we add strength to that?

I bet if we simply added precision and control to all of our poses and transitions, we would generate more contractile force and feel stronger after class. This would mean going slower with each repetition of a movement, and executing movement from the intended parts of the body. Precision and control are as much a mindset as they are principles of movement. 

But now let’s say that your strength goals extend beyond a group class environment, and you really want to figure out how to use yoga to its utmost capacity to strengthen your tissues. What would that look like? 

Honestly, it would probably look like what my practice looks like right now: a hodgepodge of movements from a variety of modalities strung together in something that feels and is structured as a yoga class. The truth is, yoga can be great for a lot of things, but it sort of needs to borrow the good ideas from other modalities if we really want to get down to the bottom of using our body weight to strength train. Some modalities may include pilates, functional range conditioning, kinstretch, weight lifting and physical therapy. 

If you want to start adding more strength to your yoga practice, I know that can feel like a lot to figure out, and if you don’t have the time or interest to figure it out on your own, you at least need good guides that make the learning fun and accessible.

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