Essential Exercises to Elevate Your Yoga Practice

• May 13, 2024
• By Cynthia Chiariello

Essential Exercises to Elevate Your Yoga Practice

One of the reasons we love a consistent yoga practice is the integration we experience on and off the mat of mind, body and spirit. In the body, stretches such as forward fold or crescent lunge increase our flexibility, cat cows and twists benefit our spinal mobility, holding postures such as Warriors and planks build strength, and postures such as tree and dancer enhance balance. 

One study found that subjects who practiced repeated sun salutations 6 days a week for 24 weeks improved their respiratory endurance and lowered their body fat composition, especially in women (Buktar, et al., 2011). Perhaps you love yoga but are looking for fitness activities to complement your yoga practice. Maybe you are taking some time to rest a wrist or shoulder injury, or just want to try something new. 

If you tend to be very flexible, chances are you could be hypermobile, and it will serve you to strengthen the muscles around the joints to keep them safe. There are several other kinds of exercises that fit a variety of needs, preferences, and lifestyles that can be introduced to round out your yoga practice. 

Upper Body Strength Training

Let’s start with building upper body strength. In general, strength training is important to maintain muscle mass and bone density which decrease as we age. In yoga, we use mostly pushing actions to create resistance and strength in our upper bodies including: 

• Plank

• Chaturanga

• Side plank

• Downdog 

However in yoga asana, we do not execute pulling actions or perform activities that develop grip strength. You could work these at the lat machine, but functionally, a worthwhile skill to pursue is the ability to pull up or at least hold our own body weight.  

One simple way to develop this kind of strength is by working on pull ups. If you don’t have a pull up yet, you can start with a dead hang which is simply holding on and hanging from a bar.  

This will develop your grip strength and has many other benefits:

• Decompresses the spine

• Stretches and lengthens the large muscles of the back, the shoulders, the arms and abdominals. 

• Relax and breathe in your dead hang and work up to holding the dead hang for at least 10 seconds.   

The next step toward a pull up is a flexed arm hang. 

• Using a block or a step stool, bring your chin over the bar and hold yourself there with bent elbows

• Work up to ten seconds here in the flexed arm hang

• From here, you are ready to do a “negative” pull up

• Starting in the flexed arm hang position, slowly lower yourself down to the dead hang

• Try to do 5-10 of these

From controlled negative pull ups, you can progress to pull ups in two ways: Either lifting up to the pullup from a block, or using a bit more support by placing a resistance band under your feet to take some of the load off. Eventually, you will be able to remove these supports altogether. 

The slower you go, the stronger you will get. It is better to practice in short controlled sets. Factors such as your previous exercise history, genetics, body size, energy level, will affect your progression to a pull up. It may take some time and that’s okay! Even maintaining a hang is a great functional exercise. Working on these skills will develop your strength and increase your confidence… It could even save your life or someone else’s life one day.   

When you build your grip and strength to pull up your body weight, a fun activity to explore next is climbing, at a rock climbing gym or outdoors. Rock climbing will challenge your forearms, shoulders, grip strength, core, back, and develop your mental flexibility and cognitive function as you need to execute decisions and adapt as you make your way up the wall. 

Low Impact Exercise

• Swimming

• Walking

• Hiking

• Ice Skating

• Rollerskating

• Pickleball

• Tennis

Swimming and walking are both low impact activities that can increase our endurance. Hiking has many additional benefits: It demands that our feet, ankles, and legs (and our brain) constantly make adjustments to novel and uneven surfaces. 

Hiking solo can become a time of reflection or a walking meditation, while hiking with friends nurtures our need for community and social connections. Scientists have also found that seeing and being surrounded by green is good for our mental health, affirming that something deep inside us remembers the Garden in which Adam and Eve walked with God (Hunter, et. al, 2019). 

Skating (ice or roller) and skiing utilize more lateral (side to side) movements than we would normally make on our mat or while walking or swimming. These are also forms of exercise that will increase your cardiorespiratory fitness. Lateral movements are important exercises to perform to complement your yoga practice. 

If you find that you have weaknesses in your glutes, or experience difficulty with balancing postures such as tree, you can also utilize lateral movements by performing monster walks with a band. You can also do a set of speed skaters, a more explosive form of side lunge which will strengthen glutes and increase cardio fitness regardless of whether they are done in either high impact or low impact style.

Pickleball is increasingly popular for many good reasons! Racket sports such as pickleball and tennis are easily modifiable to various fitness levels and will also complement your yoga practice. These sports also provide lateral movements. 

These sports are often played outside, where you can enjoy the mood-boosting sunshine and increase your vitamin D. Studies show racket sports have many cognitive and social benefits that are associated with greater longevity and positive outcomes for adults of all ages. 

Even if you do not have access to a swimming pool, a court, or a gym with some basic equipment (exercise bands and hiking shoes or sneakers, a portable pull up bar, or the monkey bars at a local playground) you can complement your yoga practice and keep your body and your brain healthy and strong.  

Finding the Right Fitness Routine for You

Before you decide to introduce a new activity or not, it is wise to check with your doctor, especially if you have concerns about a prior injury or preexisting condition. It can be tempting to embrace a new fitness activity from a place of fear, lack, or shame. Instead, reflect on your motivations and be honest about your needs and resources. Then, have fun introducing new physical activities from a place of curiosity, joy, and celebration.

If you introduce a new activity, give it sufficient time to see improvement. Remember that yoga is more than the postures (asana). When we introduce new activities, we are still practicing yoga by applying our yamas and niyamas (non-harming, self-compassion, moderation, non-grasping). Your body and mind are gifts from God to be cared for and enjoyed. Have fun, be patient with yourself, and be safe!

The benefit of yoga is that you can easily fit it into your fitness routine at home with Holy Yoga TV+ on-demand programs, including low-impact strength training such as the Weights Training Program! With Holy Yoga TV+, you have a wealth of programs at your fingertips, ready to support you and meet you where you’re at on your path to holistic wellness and Christ-centered spiritual connection. Stay tuned for all the new content that will be launched throughout the year!

Resources:

Bhutkar MV, Bhutkar PM, Taware GB, Surdi AD. How effective is sun salutation in improving muscle strength, general body endurance and body composition? Asian J Sports Med. 2011 Dec;2(4):259-66. doi: 10.5812/asjsm.34742. PMID: 22375247; PMCID: PMC3289222.