Strengthen Your Practice: How Strength and Conditioning Can Elevate Your Yoga Journey

Benefits of yoga.

Yoga has so many benefits for our bodies and minds. It can help us tune into ourselves and become more aware of how our body feels in movement. Yoga can help us increase our flexibility and strength in many ways, along with reducing pain and inflammation by lowering blood pressure and blood glucose levels. It also has hidden benefits, such as helping us reduce our stress levels and improving our sleep. Furthermore, yoga is also a fantastic choice when recovering from injury or illness.  

Why strength and conditioning?

However, solely doing yoga may hold a few limitations. While yoga is excellent at building strength, flexibility and awareness, it may not build substantial muscle strength. Yoga often relies on bodyweight strength, which we all know is hugely improved and deserves all the credit. However, if you are hoping to gain more strength in large muscle groups, strength training may help. Many yoga poses focus on small muscle groups and stability which is great for injury prevention. Traditional strength training can help within our yoga practice by building even more stability and strength to help us maintain proper alignment within our yoga poses. It can help reduce injuries and enhance your stamina for your yoga practice, empowering you to flow for longer. 

Flexible or strong?

Did you know that for us to be flexible we must be strong? So strength training can help improve muscle strength and elasticity through gaining strength within different ranges of motions, transferring that back to our yoga mats so we can suddenly hold poses for longer and build up that heat in our body. 

Confidence for all. 

Now we all love a confidence, pick me up, and strength training might be the extra boost you need! When you start to see improvements in your strength and how long you can hold your yoga poses suddenly that confidence will grow. 

Injury prevention.

Alongside this, we all want to ensure we stay injury free, of course. Strength training can help us prevent injuries by improving joint, stability and lumbar control, which can be hugely important in many of our bendy yoga poses. 

Many people try a pick-a-mix approach with yoga and strength training combined. Why not try this and see what happens to your body and mind, and what you can achieve on your yoga mat?

If you have any questions, be sure to send them my way, looking forward to 2025 as we all get strong, flexible and confident together.