Hey friend

Nicole here, and I'd like to challenge you to reconsider: can deliberately adding tension to your yoga or movement practice actually be a good thing? 

Tension usually gets a negative connotation. This may be because we tend to associate emotional stress with the experience of tension, or an unwelcome sensation of tightness in our bodies. Because “feeling tense” can generally suck, tension itself tends to get a bad rep. It’s not uncommon for us yoga teachers to try to banish it to the sidelines through our verbal prompts like “unclench your jaw” or “soften your belly.”

While these cues can serve the valuable purpose of helping you settle in during restorative moments, you can also benefit from tension by exposing your body to the rigours of more time under tension through actions like pushing or pulling, as we would in a strength-based practice. Spending more time under tension leads to greater capacity, more options, and more freedom to live fully.

So, in light of this reframing of tension, perhaps its presence – and whether it’s detrimental or supportive to our aims – is of relative value after all. Here's a brief anecdote from a recent Essentials class with a theme of (you guessed it) tension. The class included familiar and doable classics like Warrior 2, Extended Side Angle, and Chair pose, but with the use of resistance bands integrated throughout.

After class, one of the participants happily remarked: “I could really feel that!”

This student had encountered something new and something challenging that day. Even within a series of familiar poses, new dots were connected! Here’s to you, modest resistance band, with your novelty, dynamic exploration, and greater muscular recruitment required to overcome your tension. 

Stretchy bands are a safe, portable, and low-barrier entry point to explore strength-based movement patterns, and a way to introduce more load to your life. When we consistently increase load over time, we expand our movement options - on the mat and off!

If you’ve got an appetite for adding resistance ingredients to your movement menu, join us for Strength & Fun with Resistance Bands via Branches On Demand. I love it as a way to invigorate my movement practice wherever my Summer adventures take me!

Yours in Summer fun,
Nicole