13/12/2025
Let’s never skip ‚leg day‘ again 🤞🏽
Or is there no proper leg work in yoga anyway?
Standing postures in yoga are usually exactly that — you are standing, nothing more — no bending and extending, working the muscles in a concentric way like in a strength workout. We stand, balance on one leg at best, and usually fold forward to lengthen and stretch the back of the body, the whole line of fascia in the posterior chain. Now, if you want to do that safely and more effectively, we recommend having the legs engaged, active!
In the beginning of our yoga journey, the job of finding balance usually does its work to make the legs “work.” Proprioception is improving, legs sometimes shaking. However, soon enough, we get familiar with the posture, balance comes more easily, and now we see most yoga students standing in the posture with the legs kind of dead, muscles completely loose. They’ve just figured it out, right? Sort of. Because they are missing out on some essential benefits here… while skipping leg day again.
Using the legs in a functional way in yoga starts with awareness of the feet. The weight distribution between heel, ball of the big toe, and ball of the pinky toe. You ground your feet so that the connection — and the flow of energy, if you wish — can travel up to the knee, where you make sure it’s not swinging inwards and never hyperextends. Like this, you can create a spiral of strength in the whole leg.
We are not talking “lift the kneecap” here. But a real connection from the ground up. The tension in your quads, for example, will not be rock solid but functional and very evenly spread around your whole leg. It requires a fair amount of focus and work to get there, but then it feels amazingly stable. And it goes all the way up into your pelvis and can inspire the most practical feel for **Mula Bandha** in the pelvic floor.
The easiest posture to try this out is **Prasarita Padottanasana / Wide-Legged Standing Forward Fold**.
You’d like to try that out? We’ve got the cues that get you there 😊
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