I made this course partly because I know from experience that devoting yourself to getting stronger in your practice is extremely difficult to do-especially when you attempt to develop strength over an extended period of time. Extracting strength is a matter of learning to sleuth out, contemplate, detect and extract strengthening possibilities from your efforts in practice.

I will take you through 15 intensive sessions (of approximately 30 minutes each) of rigorous, fun and original exercises that are not only designed to help you build strength and stamina but also to help you THINK more effectively and creatively about how to use the foundations of your practice to get stronger. I created most of these exercises by working in different ways with postures and transitions in the primary and intermediate series of ashtanga yoga. Thus by working with the material you will build strength and increase your knowledge of ashtanga yoga. Additionally these exercises offer an extensive body of supplemental ways to approach strength so that by the end of the course if you so desire you’ll have the tools to build your own (mini or maxi) strength routines where you combine the exercises and make up your own sequences.

Part of breaking out and gaining new strength ground is learning to be smart about how you approach the work of strengthening. This course will give you new asana skills and teach you new ways to apply actions and hatha yoga techniques to the postures and movements. Each session is different and offers new insights, the various exercises teach you to apply the strength perspective to a specific area of the body and/or the practice. For example you will learn how to extract strength from doing Sun Salutation, standing postures, jumping back and through between seated postures, arm balances and inversions such as Sirsasana (Head Balance), Sarvangasana (All Limbs Pose-Shoulder Stand), Adho Mukha Tadasana (Downward Facing Mountain Pose—Handstand), Bhujapidasana (Arm Pressure Pose), Caturanga Dandasana (Four Limbed Staff Pose) and variations Karandvasana (Duck Posture) , and Astavakrasana (Eight Angled Pose).

There is a brute, gross aspect to getting stronger, an application of will power and an essential persistence and stubbornness. If you want to continue to get stronger you learn to invite postural puzzles that require endurance, facing hardship and successfully fighting against physical and mental resistance. Steadiness is your aim. But also there is a more subtle, perceptual and intellectual aspect to the process of gaining strength. The strength extraction process involves thinking swiftly and responsively about how to express a dynamic skeletal position, you become skilled in tapping into strengthening possibilities that exist in fully expressing the great ebb and flow rhythms of your breath and most importantly how to gain strength by stopping and observing the workings of your mind in order to arrive a new, untried, creative ways to direct your efforts.