@bonsaibadboi B4

I'm
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on a secret.

Chair yoga

When I started practicing in 2002, there wasnt a yoga studio on every corner. Yoga hadn’t quite hit the granola standard yet (when its not just for hippies anymore). Practice in general was still counterculture, with lineage-based yoga studios having been established for a decade or two. It wasnt yet seen from a consumerist athleisure lens.
This was at a time when traditional yoga studios had begun to propagate naturally into smaller studios from their spry, allowing 30-something teachers to enter full time teaching, inside their own four walls. It was a time before the big boxes, the local chains, and venture capital from Wall Street. Yes, at one time, independent yoga studios were owned by people who had made exotic journeys and devoted insane amounts of time to their spiritual quests amd studies.

So what happened? Head to michaeljoelhall.com to read more.

Resistance bands are great for end-range strength training, and this can be especially beneficial for Ashtanga Yoga asana practice—here’s the “why” in both anatomy and Ashtanga terms:

1. Why resistance bands work for end-range strength

Resistance bands provide what’s called variable resistance: the further you stretch them, the more resistance they provide. This makes them perfect for training end-range strength—that’s the strength required when your muscles are either fully lengthened or fully shortened. Think of the top of a backbend, the deepest point in Supta Kurmasana, or holding your leg behind your head: these are all end-range positions.

Unlike free weights, bands make it harder as you move deeper into the range, which is the opposite of most real-life strength patterns (where you tend to be weakest at the extremes). So by training at those extremes with resistance bands, you’re preparing your muscles and joints to be strong, stable, and supported in yoga’s most demanding positions.

2. Why that’s good for Ashtanga yoga

In Ashtanga, especially the Intermediate Series and beyond, we are constantly exploring the limits of flexibility and control. But:
• Flexibility without strength is like stretching a rubber band with no tension—it’ll snap or sag.
• End-range strength helps prevent injury by supporting joints in vulnerable positions—like Kapotasana or Karandavasana.
• It also helps balance the nervous system’s stretch reflex. If your nervous system doesn’t trust you to be strong at end-range, it will limit your flexibility. But when it feels you’re strong and stable, it lets you go deeper—safely.

3. Systems Thinking

From a systems view, resistance bands act as an elegant feedback mechanism. They amplify the demand precisely when the system (your body) is most vulnerable—end-range. By strengthening the feedback loop between mobility, control, and proprioception, bands help shift the whole system (your practice) toward resilient adaptability—aka fewer injuries and deeper poses with less drama.

I think I’m Steve Martin and I’m really Martin Short