Why I Stopped Teaching (Only) Yoga
This week a student asked me what I would call the style of yoga I now teach. After pausing for a moment, I responded, functional yoga. It's not the sexy, impressive yoga you'll see on social media; it's the yoga that will ensure that you have hips that work when you're 90.
If you've been to my classes in the last year, you know that I no longer teach a straight vinyasa class with repetitive flows and many chaturangas. What I teach has expanded to encompass more tools and new ways of moving to create a well-rounded movement practice.
Many traditional vinyasa or hatha yoga postures repeatedly stretch the same lines of tissue over and over. There is a lack of strengthening across whole areas of the body. Many long-practicing yogis end up with sleepy glutes and hamstring and labral tears and hip replacements under age 50.
Plus, when we become familiar with poses and exercises, we create a pattern and repeating those poses or exercises simply engrains the pattern - it doesn't necessarily ask more of our movement capacity. We just become good at training our midrange of motion, where we already have a ton of experience.
In other words, yoga is not the "be-all-end-all" of movement practices. It shouldn't be yours.
The more you vary your movement patterns, the bigger your capacity to accept new movement variables. The more you strengthen a muscle or joint across it's total range of motion, not just where you're already comfortable and strong, the less weak tissue you have. The more you train both passive and active range of motion, the more your flexibility and mobility and functional movement improves.
That's why I've thrown in the towel on only teaching what's considered "yoga" in the Western world and started to teach smarter, not harder - not more chaturangas.
This shift in what I teach is thanks to expanding my own horizon of study through certification as a mobility specialist through Functional Range Conditioning and taking courses with the Postural Restoration Institute. If you'd like to learn more about the science behind some of what we do in my classes, check out this video of Dr. Andreo Spina discussing the Functional Range System's perspective on strength training: