When I was teaching yoga for healthy aging regularly to a small group of older people, I quickly realized that several of the students were very weak. For example, one woman had trouble balancing because knee problems led her to stop walking and her legs had lost a lot of strength. So even though I had originally intended to cycle between sequences focused strength, flexibility, balance, and agility, which would mean focusing on strength only once a month, I decided that I should include some strength building poses in every single yoga for healthy aging class I taught. It also motivated me to share some of my favorite strengthening poses with our readers in my post The Importance of Yoga for Strength.The thing is that even though people think of yoga as “just stretching,” it’s actually very effective for increasing strength, both muscular strength and bone strength. In his post Yoga Asanas: Endurance Training or Resistance Training Ram Rao explains how yoga asanas help build strength.Because we all lose strength as we age unless we continue to work on maintaining our strength, today I thought I’d remind you all about the importance of continuing to work on strength building as part of your yoga for healthy aging practice and to provide an overview of all the strength building sequences we have on our blog. We’ve got practices that focus on overall strength, upper body strength, lower body strength, and core strength so you'll have lots of options! But before you get started with these practices, you might like to check out my post Techniques for Strength Building with Yoga for an overview of techniques to use when practicing yoga for strength building because this can help you plan your week of practicing, help you figure out how long to hold poses, and so on.Overall Strength SequencesSpring Strength Building Practice. Barrie Risman designed this sequence to provide overall muscular strength building.
Featured Sequence: Bone Strength Practice. Baxter designed this short, accessible yoga practice for building overall bone strength.Upper Body Strength Practices
Easy Mini Upper Body Strength Practice. I designed this short, easy practice to help you regain upper body strength.
Building Upper Body Strength the Easy Way. I designed this practice to show how you can build upper body strength with simple common asanas (no, you don’t need to do arm balances!).
Featured Sequence: Upper Body Strength. Baxter designed to get you started on the road to a stronger upper body.Lower Body Strength
Featured Sequence: Lower Body Strength. This sequence by Baxter is an all-around strengthening sequence for your lower body.Featured Sequence: New Lower Body Strength Practice. I designed this sequence to be gentle on the wrists and knees while cultivating lower body strength.Friday Q&A: Strengthening Your Hips. In this post Baxter provides a set of poses for strengthening all your hip muscles.Friday Q&A: Strengthening Your Legs. In this post Baxter provides a set of poses for strengthening all your leg muscles.
Meet Your Hardworking (and Possibly Under-Appreciated) Outer Hip Muscles. This post by Ellen Saltonstall explains why your outer hip muscles are so important and provides a set poses you can practice to strengthen them.Core Strength
Featured Sequence: Core Strength Practice. This post by Baxter includes information about what your “core” actually is and provides poses to strengthen more than just your abdominals.Subscribe to Yoga for Healthy Aging by Email ° Follow Yoga for Healthy Aging on Facebook ° To order Yoga for Healthy Aging: A Guide to Lifelong Well-Being, go to Amazon, Shambhala, Indie Bound or your local bookstore.
