STRENGTH vs FLEXIBILITY
Elevate your yoga practice and protect yourself from possible harm through strength. By Stephanie Spence
Let’s pretend I’m your substitute teacher for the day. Like any good sub, I’ll start with a pop quiz. Me: “What’s most important: increased flexibility or improving your balance?”
You: “Ugh, I don’t know.”
Me: “You’ll need to know to ace the quiz, or you’ll end up in pain. Serious pain. Why? Because it’s the one test you’ll fail at some point if you’re not careful.”
Shrugging, you respond: “Flexibility?”
Me: “Strength. Trick question, I know.”
Yoga can be tricky if you’re in a class and the teacher can’t monitor every student as closely as they want. With a packed room of moving bodies, a teacher simply can’t monitor each pose, and more importantly stop the class to demonstrate proper alignment.
So, if you have picked up bad habits from moving from pose to pose without someone stopping you and making an adjustment, you may be in danger of overuse injuries or setting yourself up for future injury.
If you think strength is about holding a pose, that’s only a part of the picture. The kind of strength you need moving through a flow class is more about stabilising the muscles surrounding key joints than the number of push-ups or core stabilising boat poses you can do.
We’ve all been there. We’re in a studio full of others who are doing their best to do the poses correctly. Then you hear the teacher say: “push to your edge.” We all strive to perfect the pose, and then our ego shows up and we push past our strength levels. Normal? Sadly, it could also be problematic if we strive so hard to impress that we compromise the integrity of our practice. I won’t be surprised when you tell me you’ve compared yourself to others based on hoping to get to another plateau in your practice. We’re hardwired to strive. We’re in class with a goal in mind. Only in savasana are we instructed to just ‘be’ instead of ‘do’. Which is part of the reason I am passionate about the importance of balancing strength and flexibility to avoid injury and enable you to practice yoga for a lifetime.