Strength Training for Yogis: What Yoga Builds and What It Misses
Yoga builds strength, but it leaves gaps. A regular practice makes you strong at pressing and holding your own body weight, as in Chaturanga, Plank and arm balances. It rarely trains pulling, rarely loads the back of the body with anything heavier than your own weight, and has no simple way to add load as you adapt. Two short strength sessions a week (squat, hinge, press and pull) fill those gaps and work well alongside a yoga practice.
What yoga does for strength
Start with what the practice gets right. Studies of beginners and older adults who take up yoga often report gains in strength and endurance: more chair stands in 30 seconds, more push-ups, longer holds. For someone who has not trained before, holding Warrior poses and lowering through Chaturanga Dandasana is real resistance work.
Some of it is specific and hard. A slow Chaturanga is a narrow-grip push-up held near the floor. Bakasana (Crow Pose) asks the front of your trunk and your shoulders to hold your whole weight off the ground. Vasisthasana (Side Plank) loads the side of the waist and the shoulder that holds you up. Many people who lift weights cannot hold these positions.
So the question is where yoga stops, and for whom that matters.
The three gaps in a yoga practice
1. Almost no pulling
Count the poses where your arms pull something toward you. In a standard class there are close to none. You press the floor away in Downward Dog, Plank, Chaturanga, Upward Dog and every arm balance. The muscles that pull, the latissimus dorsi, the middle trapezius, the rhomboids and the biceps, get little direct work. Over years that is an imbalance around the shoulder, the joint that takes the most pressing in a vinyasa class.
2. The back of the body gets light work
Salabhasana (Locust Pose) and Setu Bandha Sarvangasana (Bridge Pose) work the back of the body, and they are good poses. The load stays small: part of your own body weight, lifted a few centimetres. A hip hinge with a weight, like a deadlift or a kettlebell swing, loads the glutes, hamstrings and spinal muscles far more. Yoga stretches the hamstrings a lot and loads them little, which is the pattern our guide to hamstrings and yoga covers in detail.
3. No easy way to add load
Muscle and bone adapt to a load and then stop adapting until the load grows. That is progressive overload. In a gym you add two kilos. In yoga your body weight stays about the same, so progress means harder poses, longer holds or slower movement. That works for a while. Most students do not follow a plan like that, and the next step in difficulty can be a big jump, from Crow to a handstand press.
Flexible students need strength most
If your hips and shoulders move further than most people's, you need more control around those joints. A joint that can reach the end of its range needs muscles that can hold it there. Deep poses such as Hanumanasana (Monkey Pose) are where that control counts most. Physiotherapy guidance for hypermobility puts strength and control work at the centre of treatment for this reason, although the studies behind it are small.
In a class this shows up in familiar places. The shoulder that starts to ache after years of deep binds. The pain high in the back of the thigh, where the hamstring attaches to the sitting bone, that comes back every time you fold forward. Long forward folds with no loading of the same tendon are one common story behind that second one. We cannot say that a lack of strength causes these injuries. Strength work is a reasonable way to lower the odds, and it is the standard treatment once they happen.
For the pose side of this, read our 10 tips to avoid yoga injuries.
Bone density: why load matters after 40
Bone responds to force. When a muscle pulls hard on a bone, or you land from a jump, the bone gets a signal to keep or add mineral. Stretching gives almost no such signal.
Women lose bone faster in the years around menopause, as oestrogen drops. The best studied answer is heavy, progressive strength training. In the LIFTMOR trial in Australia, postmenopausal women with low bone mass did supervised heavy lifting and jumping twice a week for eight months. Their bone density in the lower spine and hip went up, while the group doing gentle home exercise kept losing it. Nobody in the lifting group had a serious injury.
Yoga and bone is a weaker story. A widely shared study of 12 yoga poses reported better bone density, but it had no control group and most participants dropped out. Yoga does train balance, which lowers the risk of falling, and falls are what break weak bones. Your yoga keeps the joints moving. The lifting keeps the frame under them solid.
If you already have osteoporosis, talk to your doctor or a physiotherapist before heavy lifting. The LIFTMOR group was supervised the whole time.
How to add strength training to a yoga practice
Two sessions a week of 30-45 minutes is enough to start. That matches the WHO and ACSM advice for adults: muscle strengthening for all the major muscle groups on two or more days a week.
- Squat. Goblet squat with a kettlebell or dumbbell held at the chest. Your yoga hips help here: most yogis squat deep with a straight back from day one.
- Hinge. Romanian deadlift or kettlebell deadlift. Fold from the hips as in a standing forward fold, with a flat back and soft knees, and stand up by driving the hips forward.
- Press. Push-ups with a full range, then a dumbbell overhead press. You already know this pattern.
- Pull. The one yoga leaves out. Rows with a band or a dumbbell, inverted rows under a bar, then assisted pull-ups.
Pick a weight you can lift 8-12 times with good form and two or three reps left in the tank. Do two or three sets. When the last set feels easy, add a little weight. Keep a note of what you lifted so you know when to add.
Put the lifting on separate days from a hard vinyasa or Ashtanga practice if you can, or lift first and do slow yoga after. Deep stretching right before heavy lifting can take a little power off the lift. The effect is small and mostly shows up with long static holds.
Measure first: how strong are you?
Most yogis have no idea how strong they are, because the practice never asks in numbers. Strength standards do. They compare one lift to large groups of people at your body weight, sex and age, and place you on a scale from beginner to elite.
The result can surprise you in both directions. Teachers who expect years of vinyasa to have built lifting strength often test as beginners on the pull and the hinge. That is useful: it shows which patterns your practice covers and which it never touches. Nicklas built a free strength level calculator at Movement Rebels, our sister site for strength training, that does this in about a minute with no signup. Enter one lift, your body weight and your age.
A beginner score is good news. Beginners gain strength faster than anyone, on two short sessions a week, and the mobility you already have means you will lift in better positions than most people in the gym. For women thinking about bone health, Movement Rebels also has a longer guide to bone density loss prevention, from loading to nutrition.
Where the sources disagree
"Yoga is all the strength training you need." For a beginner, yoga does build strength, and the studies back that. For someone who has practised for years, the gains flatten, because the load stays the same. Both are true at different stages.
"Lifting will make you stiff." Heavy lifting through a full range of motion does not reduce flexibility in the studies that tested it, and some show gains similar to stretching. A yogi who lifts keeps her range if she keeps practising.
"Strength training is foreign to yoga." Less than it seems. Historians of modern yoga, Mark Singleton among them, have shown that the vigorous yoga taught in Mysore in the 1930s grew up next to Indian physical culture: gymnastics, wrestling training, the Hindu push-up. The sun salutation was promoted as an exercise system in the 1920s. Modern posture practice and strength training have been neighbours for about a century.
Who benefits from the advice? Worth asking of any article, including this one. The calculator above comes from Movement Rebels, which Nicklas also runs. The advice to lift twice a week does not depend on it: it comes from the WHO guidelines and the bone research above.
If you want strength work inside your practice, start with Slow Strength, a 45-minute Hatha class that builds strength through slow movement, or browse all our Yoga Strength classes.
Frequently asked questions
Is yoga enough strength training?
For a beginner, yoga builds useful strength, above all in pressing and holding. Over time it leaves gaps: almost no pulling, light loading of the back of the body and no easy way to add weight. Two short strength sessions a week cover what yoga leaves out.
Does yoga count as muscle-strengthening activity?
Yes. The WHO and US guidelines list yoga as an example of muscle-strengthening activity, as long as it works the major muscle groups with real effort. A strong vinyasa class qualifies. A restorative or yin class does not.
Will lifting weights make me less flexible?
Not if you lift through a full range of motion and keep practising. Studies that compared full-range strength training with stretching found similar gains in flexibility. The stiff, bulky lifter is a picture of a training habit, not of lifting itself.
Should I do yoga or strength training first?
On the same day, lift first and do a slower yoga practice after. Long static stretches right before a heavy lift can take a little off your strength. On separate days, the order does not matter.
How often should a yogi lift weights?
Twice a week is enough to start, 30-45 minutes each time, with a squat, a hinge, a press and a pull. Add weight in small steps when the last set feels easy.
Can yoga improve bone density?
The evidence is weak. The best known yoga study on bone had no control group and lost most of its participants. Heavy strength and impact training has the strongest support. Yoga helps in another way: better balance means fewer falls.
I am hypermobile. Should I do strength training?
Yes, it is the usual advice from physiotherapists. Hypermobile joints reach further than they can control, and strength around the joint adds that control. Start light, stay out of the far end of your range, and get guidance if you have pain.
