What Major Leg Muscle Does Yoga Not Strengthen?
This muscle gets a lot of attention in yoga, but not the strengthening kind of attention!
If you're familiar with our work, you've probably heard us talk about the fact that yoga isn't a great practice for long-term, progressive strength-building. It's true!
But with that said, yoga does actually have the potential to be strengthening up to a point – especially for beginners to the practice.
Did you know, though, that this strength potential on the yoga mat includes some muscle groups but not others?
That's right! A traditional yoga practice targets some areas of our body more than others. And when it comes to the lower body, there's one major muscle that's hardly strengthened at all. And that muscle is (drum roll, please)…
The hamstrings!
Yes, the hamstrings!
While there's a lot of emphasis on stretching the hamstrings in yoga, there are hardly any opportunities for strengthening the hamstrings in a typical yoga practice.
How could this be? 🤔
Let's take a look at what's required to strengthen the hamstrings.
The hamstrings are a group of 3 muscles that run along the back of the thigh and cross both the hip and knee joints.
When the hamstrings create movement at the knee, they flex the knee:
This means that we can strengthen them when we bend our knee against resistance.
When the hamstrings create movement at the hip, they extend the hip:
This means we can strengthen them when we extend our hip against resistance (especially when our knee is relatively straight).
Knee-dominant hamstring exercise
Here's a classic gym-based example of a knee-dominant hamstring exercise: hamstring curls on a machine.
See how the knees bend against resistance here? That's definitely working the hamstrings!
Hip-dominant hamstring exercise
And here's a classic gym-based example of a hip-dominant hamstring exercise: a Romanian deadlift.
As the exerciser stands up while holding the weight, the hips are extending against resistance. (Note that the knees also stay on the straighter side.)
The hamstrings are definitely working here, too!
What about hamstring strengthening in yoga?
If we examine a typical yoga practice, we can see it lacks moves that significantly challenge knee flexion and hip extension like the gym exercises above do.
Take our standing poses like warrior 1 and warrior 2, for example. We know that these poses can feel like a lot of work in our lower body, right? (Especially in that bent-knee front leg.) Could they target our hamstrings?
Not really! It turns out that the major lower body muscles targeted by yoga's standing poses are our quadriceps – the muscles on the front of our thigh.
The quads work to extend (straighten) our knee, which is effectively what they're doing (isometrically) in these poses.
What about backbends like bridge and wheel pose? Could they target our hamstrings?
As it turns out, not so much! We do move our hips into extension in these backbends, and the hamstrings can help with hip extension. But because our knees are quite bent in these poses, this disadvantages the hamstrings from working at the hip very much.
So bridge and wheel aren't good moves for strengthening the hamstrings either!
If we continue to examine the rest of the yoga pose lexicon, we come up with similar results.
One possible exception is shalabhasana (locust pose).
We do extend our hips with straight knees here, but we're only lifting the weight of our legs, which isn't that much.
We also only move through a very small range of motion, which limits strengthening potential.
Purvottanasana (reverse plank) is one yoga pose that's actually really great for targeting the hamstrings, but it's not a frequently taught pose.
When it is included (as in Ashtanga's primary series), it's only practiced once and it's generally rushed through, so its strengthening potential usually isn't realized.
To summarize...
The major leg muscle that yoga doesn't strengthen is... the hamstrings!
But once we know what types of movements do challenge the hamstrings (knee flexion and hip extension with straight-ish knees), we can be more intentional about bringing this element into our movement practice.
Want a quick and easy way to strengthen your hamstrings?
It's simple! Just follow our 5 Weeks to Strong & Flexible Hamstrings program.
It's a series of 12 follow-along strength training classes that fill in the hamstring strength gap left behind by your yoga practice.
You and your happy hamstrings can thank us later! 😉
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