Enhance Your Yoga Practice with TheraBands

For over a year now, I have been integrating stretchy bands called TheraBands into my yoga practice and teaching. My wife and amazing yoga teacher, Melina Meza, turned me on to these useful props, and she started using them for a special series of classes she started in 2023 called Yoga with Weights. 

In that class, she integrates small hand weights, ankle weights, and TheraBands to increase the strength-building potential of our yoga poses. I bet many of you have a TheraBand sitting around in a closet from a physical therapy visit you had years ago. You may want to dig it out and add it to your yoga prop box after you finish reading this post!

Why Is Strength Building Important in Yoga?

Let’s start by asking ourselves why increasing strength in one’s yoga practice is important. The reality of aging is that over time if we are not very actively doing something to maintain or even improve our baseline body strength, we will gradually start to become weaker. 

This aging process has a name in scientific circles. It’s called “skeletal muscle atrophy,” and left unaddressed, it can progress to a more serious form of muscle loss and weakness called “sarcopenia.” I like to say it’s the muscle equivalent to the loss of bone with age, so many of you are familiar with normal bone thinning to the state of osteopenia, progressing to osteoporosis. In fact, these two processes, gradual bone thinning and gradual loss of muscle mass, fibers, and strength, often occur together!

How to Know if Your Muscles Are Weakening

Because skeletal muscle atrophy usually occurs slowly, it may not be readily apparent. However, it does reveal itself when you go to do an activity you have not done for a number of months, such as the first time back out in the garden in spring, when it seems noticeably more demanding for your body than last season! 

So, this gradual loss of strength can start to impact your activities of daily living and those other important things that add spice to your life, like hiking, biking, or playing tennis. You use your body strength for both times of strong exertion (lifting heavy pots in the garden) and activities that require endurance, such as those just mentioned. 

How much loss are we talking about? One source shares the following stats: after the age of 40, the average person loses one percent of muscle mass per year, two to four percent of muscle strength, and eight to ten percent of muscle power. With that in mind, does your yoga practice keep you strong enough as you age?

Can Yoga Practice Keep Your Muscles Strong?

Well, we don’t have adequate research at this time to say for certain, and if it does, it likely depends on the style of yoga you practice. As you may know, there are gentle, restorative practices that may not contribute a lot to building or maintaining strength, and others such as the Iyengar style or “power yoga” styles that are more likely to help some. 

But we do have quite a bit of research on applying “resistance training” in preserving and improving strength as we age. One author defines it as “a form of periodic exercise whereby external weights provide progressive overload to skeletal muscles in order to make them stronger and often result in hypertrophy.”

Your mind might jump to the phrase “external weights” and transport you to the gym and the weightlifting section. However, the use of the highly portable and easy to use stretchy TheraBands have been found to be quite effective in building strength and are easy to integrate into your yoga practice!

The Research: How Can Resistance Training in Yoga Help Build Strength?

The gold standard for health benefits from exercise seems to be aerobic activities, with a lot of research to support it. But did you know that resistance training (RT) actually equals and in some cases surpasses those benefits? 

A 2010 study noted the following benefits from regular resistance training: improved cardiovascular function, improved control or prevention of Type 2 Diabetes, improved function in those with arthritis, improved bone density in osteoporosis, support of cancer recovery, reduction of the chances of sarcopenia, and improved weight management in those with obesity.

And we are now even starting to see research comparing yoga and resistance training. One such study in 2020, looked at the impact of yoga or resistance training on a group of people with high blood pressure and noted that the yoga group showed better impacts on HDL cholesterol, but the resistance training group had more muscle mass. Neither group was superior in regard to insulin resistance. Yet another mental health-focused study showed both modalities improved symptoms of depression, yet another health benefit.

First Things First: Get Some TheraBands for your Yoga Practice

I am hoping you are getting excited about not only the strength benefits that a simple tool like TheraBand can add to your yoga practice but also all the other health benefits that mirror much of what we know yoga can also provide over time. 

Since resistance training promotes a progressive challenge to your body’s myofascial system over time, I recommend getting yourself a set of TheraBands if you are ready to dive in and add some TheraBands to your regular yoga practices. They come in different colors, each related to how much stretch or stiffness they have. 

Especially if strength has not been one of your personal practice goals, start with the easier bands that are more stretchy and gradually work towards the tighter ones over time. I use the 5-foot-long ones, but as you will discover, they come in many varieties once you start shopping around.

How Yoga Can Enhance TheraBand Training

And when you integrate resistance training into a yoga practice, you often bring some distinct advantages to this kind of practice you might not get at the gym. When adopting the yogic mindset, you add moment-to-moment awareness (no TVs on like at the gym!), you connect your breath to your movements, you cultivate interoception or the awareness of the inner effects of your actions, and you prioritize how the work feels over how the body looks. 

Over the last six months or so, many of my students have reported to me the noticeable positive impact of the TheraBands on their strength and endurance experience.

Although I could go into a lot of detail on “how” to use the bands with your dynamic and static poses, I want to invite you to consider joining me for an upcoming in-person or Zoom class to experience it in real time. I believe that what you learn in even one class will give you some great ideas for using these simple, effective tools in your home practice and other classes you take. (Or here’s a recent YogaUOnline course using TheraBands and other props with Melina Meza)