Strength Training Will Not Make Yoga Better

In their latter years, yoga teachers who rely solely on their practice for physical fitness often end up realizing the shortcomings of traditional postures and look to other forms of exercise as part of their overall self-care. In particular, adding some sort of strength training can often become warranted. However, the integration of strength training into yoga practice as a marketing angle easily becomes misleading.

Debates about what makes something a yoga practice notwithstanding, intents and purposes matter. Even if one decides that yoga practice can be limited to physical fitness, many claims being bandied about by well-meaning teachers do not hold up to scrutiny. And, if we agree that yoga practice is about the alleviation of pain, or spiritual evolution, then simply finding ways to incorporate strength training on the mat will be insufficient to the challenge before us.

Strength training is not a substitute for self-inquiry.

I was always one of those people who never did anything but yoga. Students would always ask me if I ever do other forms of exercise and I would always say that I didn’t need anything else. Until I felt like I did. After the age of 40, not only did my physical yoga practice stop meeting my needs but it was actually contributing to my pain. In the process of addressing the situation, my physical practice took on more specific intent. Using poses for strength and flexibility was just making matters worse. However, utilizing my practice of poses strictly as a vehicle for cultivating deeper sensitivity and awareness, so I can better identify my patterns, is what has actually helped address the sources of my suffering.

I have also begun exploring strength training as a separate ritual from my yoga practice. I decided to do this because of one simple idea: If I want to be able to lift something heavy with confidence then I need to practice lifting something heavy with confidence. You see, I had recently been at a Home Depot with my wife buying some tiles and when it came time to load those boxes onto a cart I was struck by how worried I was that such a simple act might injure me. So I’ve sought the help of a professional trainer and over the course of a few months have gotten measurably stronger when it comes to lifting things (using weights does allow for an objective metric.) And I was definitely feeling more confident. Yet, my new strength and confidence did not prevent me from overworking myself right back into my same pain patterns.

Stronger muscles do not equal less pain or greater well-being.

The efficacy of strength training is relative to whatever my desired outcome is. I can work to become stronger at lifting things or using stretchy bands or executing arm balances and still have lots of pain and feel unwell at the same time. This is not to say that there is no benefit to doing strength training, I plan to continue working with my trainer because I like the way it feels and enjoy being able to lift things with greater confidence. However, the implication that strength training will improve my yoga, as though my yoga is a matter of physical fitness more than spiritual well-being, is both inaccurate and misleading. If increasing strength is the goal then we have to ask ourselves: “Stronger to do what?”

I wonder whether developing strength as an abstract concept divorced from any specific task, as though engaging pushing and pulling actions regardless of who we are or what we want or need, really has any implicit benefit. Watching the Instagram videos being shared by many yoga teachers certainly would make you think that there is something to be gained by looking at poses through the lens of movement science. And maybe there is. But the conflation of creatively incorporating strength training principles into the execution of yoga poses with more “advanced” or “skillful” practice is unfortunate because its reductionism obscures the healing aspects of yoga that movement science is incapable of explaining or measuring.

Strength training is beneficial but yoga is better without it.

Working with a trainer to increase my strength is definitely part of what I would call “my yoga” but it is not a Hatha Yoga practice. The engagement of my breath and body in the context of a yoga practice has the specific purpose of developing and reinforcing sustained attention as a building block for clearer perception and intuiting meaningful direction. Any other purpose added to the practice of yoga poses, while potentially being attractive to a wider range of people, is ultimately still nothing more than a distraction.

And yes, I just asserted an idea about what yoga practice is. You may disagree. But if you think that yoga is about the same things as I do, then we have to stop perpetuating the same old bait-and-switch ideas that have mainstreamed yoga. Attracting more people to yoga for strength and flexibility does not amount to more people getting into the deeper aspects of yoga. Only when people stop doing yoga for strength and flexibility do they then discover all the rest. Strength training and movement science are interesting and valuable areas of study that can certainly enhance a person's experience of life, but the inconvenience of yoga’s subjectivity and nuance is also its greatest strength. For only in the nonempirical space of our own imaginations may we either embolden or undermine the great well of untapped power available to us.