Strength Was Never Missing We Just Stopped Practicing Properly

There’s a noticeable shift happening in the movement world right now. Reformer Pilates studios are booming, classes are fully booked, and more and more people, some of them long-time yoga practitioners, are stepping away from the mat with a familiar refrain: “I want to focus on strength.” Fair enough. Strength matters. It’s essential for longevity, resilience, and overall health. But the assumption sitting underneath that statement, that yoga somehow lacks strength, is, at best, a misunderstanding, and at worst, a complete rewriting of what yoga has historically been.

Much of what passes for “yoga” today is heavily skewed toward flexibility, relaxation, and aesthetic shapes. Scroll through social media and you’ll see deep backbends, passive stretches, and an emphasis on softness. Many influential teachers are quick to reinforce the idea that yoga shouldn’t be about strength, as if effort and intensity somehow dilute its essence. But this is a relatively recent interpretation.

If we look back at early Hatha yoga texts, particularly the Hathabhyasapaddhati we find something very different. This was not a gentle stretching routine. It was a physically demanding, often gruelling system of practice that included dynamic movements, rope work, inversions, and strength-based transitions that would challenge even well-trained athletes today. In other words, traditional Hatha yoga wasn’t avoiding strength, it required it.

Properly practiced Ashtanga yoga, emphasis on properly, is one of the most effective strength-building systems available without external load. The problem is that very few people actually practice it in its intended form. When you slow things down, pay attention to breath, bandha, and precise transitions, and remove the tendency to rush or collapse into flexibility, the practice becomes brutally honest. Holding your own bodyweight with control, moving through vinyasas with integrity, stabilising joints under load, this is strength work, not the kind that isolates muscles on a machine, but the kind that integrates the entire system.

In my own practice, influenced by Ashtanga and what I refer to as Ashtanga Nada, I’ve leaned heavily into this aspect, drawing from both traditional yoga and my background in strength and conditioning. The result is a practice that demands as much from your nervous system and musculature as it does from your flexibility or breath.

Now, to be clear, this isn’t an attack on Pilates. Joseph Pilates was ahead of his time. His work emphasised control, precision, and functional strength long before these became buzzwords. But the modern reformer boom raises a valid question: are we building strength, or are we outsourcing it to a machine?

The reformer provides guidance, resistance, and support. That’s part of its appeal. But when an entire movement practice is built around a single apparatus, we risk narrowing our adaptability. Strength becomes context-dependent. It’s not entirely different from trends like kettlebell circuits or TRX workouts, useful tools, yes, but not complete systems in themselves.

Real strength should transfer. It should show up when you’re carrying something heavy, climbing a hill, getting up off the floor, or simply moving through life with ease and control. A well-rounded yoga practice, particularly one rooted in traditions that valued physical robustness, can absolutely develop this, but it requires a shift in how we approach it. Less collapsing into end-range flexibility, more attention to control, tension, and integrity. Less chasing shapes, more building capacity.

The current migration toward reformer Pilates might actually be highlighting a gap in modern yoga teaching. People are looking for challenge, for structure, for something that makes them feel physically capable. Yoga can provide that. It always could. But only if we stop pretending that strength doesn’t belong there.

Because historically, it did. And when practiced with intention, it still does.