Yoga for Strength and Flexibility: Creating A Well-Rounded Fitness Plan

Including yoga in your weekly workout routine provides several benefits to your overall strength. Many consider yoga to be a passive practice that only helps with flexibility and relaxation; in reality, yoga is a much more active activity that enhances strength and mobility. Here are a few ways to work yoga into your weekly fitness routine to enhance your strength and flexibility.

Create Space for Active Recovery
Following intense strength training, the body needs time to recover before it can be pushed hard again. Using yoga to gently take the body through big ranges of motion helps it recover faster and enhances flexibility around the hips, knees, ankles, shoulders, and wrists. Yoga poses help to release tension in muscles and increase blood flow, which helps to reduce the risk of injury and muscle damage over time.

Slow and Flex-y
Many typical gym exercises are done at faster tempos and may not take the hips, knees, ankles, shoulders, or wrists through their entire available range of motion. Yoga is a slow-moving modality that challenges the deeper positions that are missed in most strength training programs. Flexibility is a key component to remain injury free in the gym. Incorporate poses like pigeon, warrior 1 & 2, crescent lunge, and child’s pose to enhance range of motion in the glutes, quads, adductors, and shoulders.

Find Balance, Get Stable
Spending a ton of time strength training on machines can leave your body lacking the ability to balance and create stability. Machines aren’t bad, they just take away the need for the body to create stability while moving weight around. Many yoga poses like tree pose and eagle pose challenge the stabilizer muscles of the legs and arms, respectively, which can enhance your strength when you use free weights and fill the gap in stability left by machine exercises.

Give your Brain a Break
A little mindfulness goes a long way to enhancing strength and flexibility. Yoga practice focuses on breathing to reduce stress. Those same breathing exercises can be included on the gym floor to enhance recovery between workings sets. Breathing deeply increases blood flow to working muscles, enhances endurance, and reduces stress. Most of these benefits can be maximized at the end of a workout to bring the body back to a normal resting state or between hard workouts to aid in recovery between hard sessions.

Incorporating yoga poses and breathing practices can improve your overall fitness when paired with strength and cardio training. Improving flexibility creates a more balanced body and a holistic fitness routine.

If you’re new to yoga, all VASA Fitness locations offer yoga as a part of the group fitness offerings and several offer infrared yoga in STUDIO FLOW. The STUIDIO FLOW space is a boutique-quality room that will leave you feeling relaxed and refreshed. Classes are led by highly trained yoga teachers who will help you find positions that will help your flexibility. In STUDIO FLOW, the overhead infrared panels gently warm the body to enhance blood flow and mobility. We offer three classes—Flow, Deep Stretch, and Restore. If flexibility is your goal, check out a Deep Stretch class at a VASA near you today.