If you are someone who has a hard time practicing yoga, it is time to include some strength-building exercises to your daily routine. Moreover, if you have a fast metabolism then putting on weight and muscle only becomes a part of the problem. You might have even tried mixing yoga with gym workouts but it did not work out.
Whether you want to gain weight and muscle or increase your strength, these exercises help you achieve equilibrium during yoga practice. Moreover, it also helps you accomplish the RYT 200 program with ease. Read further to know what these exercises are.
Strength Building Exercises For Yoga Practice
First, let us pay attention to the various upper body exercises to strengthen your arms, shoulders, and neck area.
Upper Body Exercises
Given below are four exercises to help you develop strength in the upper body for yoga practice.
1. Push-Ups
Start in the Plank Pose, get lower to the ground and push yourself off of it. The push-ups provide your triceps, chest, and shoulders with impressive strength. You should do this exercise to build impressive upper body strength before doing yoga.
2. Headstand / Handstand
Even if you are a complete beginner to yoga, you should try to do a headstand or handstand after a yoga session. These are the best upper body exercise to help you develop strength in the upper body.
3. Bench Press
Apart from the countless exercises that require some amount of strength, you should try the Bench Press with an empty bar. You can also do yoga sequences like Sun Salutations to strengthen your upper body. For more, you can enroll in the RYT300 program.
4. Dips
The best exercise to strengthen the chest, shoulders, and triceps dips. You need not visit an expensive gym. Just having two chairs standing back-to-back would help you do this exercise with ease.
However, that is not all as you would need solid strength in your legs and the rest of the lower body before doing yoga.
Lower Body Exercises
Given below are two exercises to help you develop lower body strength.
1. Squats
The oldest yet the most effective lower-body exercises to improve yoga practice are squats. You can develop serious muscle strength by adding a little weight to your back.
2. Standing Yoga Poses
If you have signed up for a yoga class, the basic yoga poses you would practice include Chair Pose, and Half-Moon Pose that tone and strengthen your legs. Enroll in the RYT 500 program to know more about these yoga asanas.
However, that is not all as some yoga poses help you develop considerable strength in your entire body.
Yoga Poses For Strength
First, let us find out what style of yoga is suitable for building strength.
How To Choose The Right Yoga Style?
Always look for active and dynamic styles of yoga especially when the end goal is to develop strength. Although the practice might appear to have a lot of repetitions, the benefits are hard to ignore. There are numerous yoga styles like Ashtanga, Power, Rocket, and Jivamukti yoga.
In the long run, the styles where you hold onto a yoga pose for a longer duration are the ones that build muscles and develop strength. Different yoga styles require you to hold onto the yoga poses for different time duration.
With that said, yoga experts at the RYT 200 program have come up with four yoga poses to help you develop serious strength.
1 .Plank Pose
These are the best yoga asanas for strengthening your lower back, abdominal muscles, and shoulders. The Plank Pose might appear simple you have to do it using the right form to keep your shoulders safe from an injury. To develop strength, try holding this pose for at least a minute.
2. Cobra Pose
Cobra Pose offers you a rare opportunity to utilize the most underused muscles in your back. This yoga pose is quite low. A common mistake you should avoid when doing Cobra Pose is not to press into your palms and straighten your chest without using the back muscles.
3. Warrior II Pose
This is one of the best standing yoga poses that strengthen your arms, legs, core muscles, and back. You have to follow the right alignment during this yoga asana for the maximum duration to experience its full benefits.
Holding your arms outstretched in Cobra Pose strengthens your biceps and deltoids. Enroll in the RYT 300 program to know more yoga poses for developing considerable strength.
4. Tree Pose
You should know that any standing yoga pose strengthens the legs, back, and core muscles. The Tree Pose is usually the first yoga pose you do as a beginner. The challenge in this yoga pose is to shift the entire body weight on one leg while maintaining your body balance and alignment. You should enroll in RYT 200 to learn more yoga poses.
Conclusion
Do you know how strength and yoga are related to each other? Enroll in a reputed yoga school and become RYT 200 to understand in-depth this concept.
