Excerpts from Weight Resistance Yoga
From Part One—Exercise Guidelines
Chapter 3 Stillness
Stilling the body allows us to turn our attention to the discrete strengthening movements of weight-resistance yoga. Indeed, the subtle, precise movements that produce force to oppose resistance can only be flawlessly performed within an absolute stillness of the body.
In B. K. S. Iyengar’s conceptualization of weight-surrender yoga, Tadasana, Mountain Pose, is more than the basic standing pose: it’s the primary posture from which all other yoga postures are defined. Each asana is a variation of Tadasana. No matter what variations are demanded by the unique configurations of a pose, Tadasana, the expression of perfect alignment, is maintained as much as possible.
In fact, any configuration of the body during a weight-resistance yoga exercise is perceived as a temporary reconfiguration of Tadasana. No matter how small the trace of it that remains in any given exercise, this upright position is the ground of immobility—of stillness—from which the discrete movements arise. All movement is perceived as a temporary deviation from this immobility.
Attentiveness to the alignment and stillness of the parts of the body not involved in the movement against resistance are just as important as attentiveness to the parts of body that carry out the complex movements against the resistance.
Excerpt 1
From Part One—Exercise Guidelines
Chapter 5 Great Effort
Breathing
Weight-resistance training is essentially a discipline with a bipolar dynamic, whether the opposed forces are considered as types of muscle movement (each exercise consists of concentric and eccentric contractions) or bone movement (each exercise consists of actions that move a bony part away from and toward the body—more specifically, that pull a bone away from the center of its joint and toward the center of its joint). Which is why, unlike the ungainly match of rhythmic breathing to asana movements (first applied in the 1920s to make the conditioning asanas competitive with calisthenics exercises), rhythmic breathing is perfectly matched to the bipolar movements of strength training.
Take, for example, the mid-front raise. To perform this exercise, the middle (sternal) fibers of the pectoralis contract to raise the upper arm from 40° shoulder joint flexion to 90° shoulder joint flexion. We breathe out for 4 seconds during the upward movement of the upper arms and breathe in for 6 seconds during the downward movement of the upper arms.
During the weight-resistance yoga session, we transcend our everyday existence by refusing to conform to its most elementary tendencies. The most important of these refusals, yoga scholar Mircea Eliade argues, is the regulation of the breath—“the ‘refusal’ to breathe like the majority of mankind, that is, nonrhythmically.” “Through pranayama [yogic breathing],” Eliade elaborates, “the yogin seeks to attain direct knowledge of the pulsation of his own life, the organic energy discharged by inhalation and exhalation.”
Although many styles of strength training recommend coordinating the exhalation and inhalation of the breath to, respectively, the contraction and elongation of the muscles of the limbs and trunk, in weight-resistance yoga it sometimes feels as if the rhythmic movements are faithfully serving the breath. Making the breath slow, deep, nasal and even—which is nothing less than knowing through action the very essence of life—facilitates a state of calm that’s largely inaccessible to us in our everyday existence.