Building Functional Strength

Short course for yoga teachers

Supporting Your Students Build Balanced Strength

Using Integrated Embodied Principles

Ensuring Your Students Avoid Strain, Compression and Injury

EARLY BIRD - CLOSES SOON

For some of our students, this may be their only exercise, for some, they may be restricted from other forms of exercise, for others, this may be their recovery session from other intense exercise and for many of our students need the strength aspect of our class to be able to access the stress release they need. It’s our job to be able to offer it to them safely and hopefully with just the right amount of challenge.

• Discover how principles of embodied yoga can be used to support your students to use the latest research about our nervous system to release the tension, before building strength.

• Discover what your ‘stable range of movement’ has to do with building strength, and how not going beyond it causes strain and destabilisation

• Learn how to recognise when students are ‘hanging out of joints’, which also can result in strain

• Learn how pulling back from a maximum stretch can be the key to building both stability and strength

• Discover why stability and tension release of muscles are fundamental to building real balanced strength

• Discover how proper alignment is important to building functional strength that supports posture and reduces stress and strain on the body

• Proper alignment is critical to ensuring balance throughout the body, ensuring functional alignment and reducing the wear and tare associated with ageing

• Learn how small specific somatic movements may be the key to unlocking a student’s potential to develop balanced functional strength.

• Discover how to support your students build functional and integrated strength

• Explore how to use props to increase intensity

• Identify areas of instability, lack of mobility, misalignment or weakness in order to support your students build strength

• Explore building strength in the 7 functional movements

• Discover how to support your students develop somatic awareness

You already know what poses build strength!

This course will focus more on spotting misalignment and how going too fast or staying too long can cause misalignment but more importantly how to fix these misalignments.

How can we build strength while protecting the body?

Often when we think of strength we think about weight training or poses like plank in yoga, but those are great when you already have strength (you need core strength to be able to do plank, and a lot of core strength to do it well without causing strain on the back). We often compensate in poses by moving our lower back rather than activating the legs and building leg strength, and that is what this training is all about, building real, functional and integrated strength.

We want to create integrated movement within our students, and support them to use the whole body rather than just one muscle to avoid strain and allow them actually gain strength. If your student is coming out of a forward fold simply using the lower back, they are not only putting strain on the back but also they are not actually building strength in the legs of core.

Embodied yoga takes an integrated approach and will support you support your students to build real strength.

During the course we will explore…

• Pathways of weight

• Recruitment of the whole body (i.e. activating the whole body in the poses rather than just using one part)

• The faschia, muscles and joints in the 7 functional movements

• Identify areas of instability, lack of mobility, misalignment or weakness in ourselves and our students’ poses

• How to use props to increase intensity and as a cue to activate

• Ensure your students are building strength safely

You will leave confident with a new tool in your toolkit to support your students with functional, integrated movement which will reduce strain on certain parts of the body and ensure the students are actually gaining strength from the poses rather than compensating with say the lower back.

If our students are misaligned or lack stability they will compensate, which could cause wear and tear, and likely will not get the benefit we intended for them, so by learning how to develop integrated movement you will support your students get all of the intended benefits

What are the 7 functional movements?

• lunge

• squat

• push

• pull

• hinge

• twist

• gait

Details

When: Saturday 25th January 2026

Time: 9am - 5pm

Where: Aruna Yoga Studio, Rathcoffey

Investment: €140 (€130 Early Bird)