Is your Yoga practice at a dead-end?

Did your yoga practice come to a dead-end the day you started practicing arm-balances?

The handstand, crow, crooks-pose and other arm-balances are extremely challenging and can become roadblocks to progress for 90%+ of yoga students.

Why is this?

Your flexibility has limits. Your not going to get into an elevated lotus pose if your hips are not open enough to do lotus. You are not going to perform crooks pose if you can not comfortably put your calf on top of your shoulder. You're not going to balance on 2 hands with both feet behind your head because, well, you are not able to put your feet behind your head!

Your bodyweight. Most people can not balance all of their bodyweight on their hands and as yoga students are by definition not doing what they need to do in order to get stronger. This is assuming that you are taking classroom yoga which lets face it is what 99%+ of the US population practices. The basics for getting strong at an arm balance require the student to spend multiple hours each week practicing that arm balance and its progressions to develop strength. They will need to work that arm balance hard enough that next day they will be sore and need recovery. In a yoga class you will be lucky to spend 10 minutes on any individual posture and that is what most people end up spending on their arm balances. 10-15 minutes a few nights a week when what they really needs is 3-4 hours a week! This is a serious roadblock for students trying to get strong at the arm balances. The 10,000 chatarungas + up/down dogs you did over the past 5 years did absolutely nothing to prepare you for what is essentially holding your entire bodyweight in the palms off your hands.

Your diet. Yes, your diet plays a big role how your yoga progresses. You may have progressed a couple of years on a low fat/low protein diet but that is because beginner yoga is just not that stressful on the body, you can eat in almost any manner and still improve your general flexibility, strength and stamina. You are able to improve through a combination of CNS adaptations (this basically means getting better at a certain skill) and strength/flexibility/conditioning gains but the longer your train the more progress depends on increasing your actual muscular strength. Once your have trained religiously for 2-3 years you are close to hitting your maximum flexibility potential and the practice becomes largely strength oriented. If after 2-3 years of practice you have not gotten to 90% of your potential flexibility-wise you have not been training hard enough! Once the practice becomes basically a strength practice then your diet becomes extremely important. Eating more protein and less refined foods becomes very important. The protein is important for building muscle and strength. The refined-food-restriction is necessary because these foods make you tired and your will need a very high level of energy if you are pursuing what amounts to the most advanced yoga poses.

What is the solution to this yoga-roadblock? I want to be honest and say that yoga teachers are not really the best at teaching the arm balances. The yoga teachers you see executing yoga asana (postures) at the highest level either started their yoga practice in childhood or trained in some other modality during childhood (usually gymanstics or dance) at a very high level and that is where they really learned to do these moves. These people are often lousy at figuring out progressions for yoga students to follow. I spent over 10 years as a yoga student and never saw any teacher do anything other than lamely try and grab the students ankles in handstands or to ask the student to squeeze their forearm between the thighs. These are great progressions but there are many others that most yoga teachers are not aware of because ultimately they are not S&C or Gymnastic coaches, they are yoga teachers.

I offer 2 different solutions to improving your intermediate yoga practice and they both ask you do to some form of strength training.

You can either attend a gymnastics school or start seriously studying some form of strength training. Gymnasts are the best at standing on their hands so they know all the proper progressions. Simple weight training, especially standing overhead presses, are great links to the handstand and improving your ability to hold the other arm balances. A standing overhead press is basically a handstand turned right-side-up. This way we can use less than our bodyweight, get a chance to strengthen the arms, back and core, and improve our chances of eventually being strong enough to hold our entire bodyweight in various positions.