Power yoga

Power yoga is a vigorous, fitness first flow class: an improvised sequence of postures linked by breath and movement, taken at speed, usually with added strength work and often to music, and taught openly as exercise rather than as a spiritual discipline.

Its history is recent and unusually well documented. It appeared in the United States in the 1990s in several places at once. Beryl Bender Birch created what Yoga Journal called the original power yoga in 1995, and Bryan Kest and Baron Baptiste built their own versions around the same time. All of them came out of ashtanga, whose fixed series they loosened and whose religious framing they mostly dropped, with the aim of making a demanding practice legible to a Western fitness audience.

Not everyone was pleased. Pattabhi Jois, whose method the new style was built on, wrote to Yoga Journal in 1995 to call it ignorant bodybuilding and to object to its being associated with ashtanga at all. That exchange is the whole argument about this style in one paragraph, and both sides of it have a point.

These three words are used interchangeably on timetables and they are not the same thing. The distinction is worth having because it decides whether a class will suit you.

• Ashtanga is one fixed sequence, practised in the same order every session, traditionally six mornings a week. Nothing is improvised. See ashtanga yoga.
• Vinyasa keeps ashtanga's grammar of linking each movement to one breath, but the teacher writes a new sequence for every class. See vinyasa yoga, and ashtanga vs vinyasa for the two set side by side.
• Power yoga is vinyasa with the fitness dial turned up and most of the tradition turned down. Added press ups, added core work, music, a peak posture, and very little pranayama or philosophy.

In practice the labels leak. Plenty of classes advertised as vinyasa are power yoga and plenty advertised as power yoga are simply a strong flow. The reliable test is not the poster but the first ten minutes: if the warm up is short, the music is loud and nobody has mentioned the breath, you are in a power class whatever it says on the door.

This is the one style where the fitness claim is largely true, so it is worth being precise about how true.

A systematic review of the energy cost of yoga put the average across all measured practice at about 3.3 metabolic equivalents, with individual postures at 2.2 and breathing practices at 1.3, and a total range from 1.83 to 7.4. Slow held practice sits at the bottom of that: measured energy cost in traditional hatha postures is mostly between one and two metabolic equivalents, which is light activity. A strong flowing class sits in the upper half of that measured range rather than the bottom, which puts it inside the moderate intensity band that the World Health Organization's request for 150 minutes a week is written around. Two power classes a week make a real contribution to that total in a way that two slow classes do not.

On weight, the honest answer is that it helps and it is not the lever people hope for. An hour at that intensity is somewhere in the region of 300 to 450 calories for most adults, which is a decent hour and is not a large deficit. What people actually report over months, and what I have watched happen many times, is that a class they enjoy enough to keep attending changes their appetite, their sleep and how much they move on the other days, and the weight follows from the pattern rather than from the hour. Yoga for weight loss sets that out properly, and yoga vs gym is the comparison to read if this is your only question.

The risk is the same as vinyasa's and larger. Repeated lowering from plank thirty or forty times an hour is a heavy shoulder load, speed removes the window in which you would notice a fault, and music and a full room add a competitive pressure that a slow class does not have. If you have a shoulder, wrist or lower back complaint, read yoga for neck and shoulder pain and yoga for back pain before booking rather than after.

Power yoga has a narrow but real indication, and it is a bad answer to most of the questions people bring to it.

• You are already fit and other yoga classes bore you. Power yoga. This is exactly who it was built for.
• You train in a gym and want mobility work that still feels like training. Power yoga, once or twice a week. It slots in without an argument.
• You have never done yoga. Not power yoga. You will spend the hour copying at speed and learn nothing you can repeat. Four to six weeks of a slower held class first.
• You are over fifty, stiff, or coming back after a long gap. No. Yoga for beginners over 40 explains why in more detail than I can here.
• You want to lose weight. It helps, and it is the third most important thing you will do about it. Read yoga for weight loss before you commit to three classes a week.
• You want breath work, meditation or philosophy. Not power yoga. It was designed with those removed. Sivananda or kundalini.
• You have a shoulder, wrist or lower back problem. Not until it has settled, and then with the knees down for every press up.

My verdict. I do not object to power yoga and I object to how it is sold. A strong class taught by somebody who watches the room is good exercise and people enjoy it, and enjoying it is why they are still moving at fifty, which is worth more than any argument about purity. What I will not accept is the pretence that it is a beginner class, and it is advertised as one constantly, because a beginner is precisely the person who cannot tell that their lower back has taken over from their hip. My rule of thumb for the person asking me: if you can already hold a plank for forty five seconds and stand on one leg for thirty, go and enjoy it. If you cannot do either, give me six weeks first and then go, and you will get more out of it than the people who were there before you.

Power yoga is not taught here, and no style here is labelled at all. What exists is one teacher, about forty years of it, one hall at the residents' association in MSR Nagar in north Bangalore, and an hour of asana, pranayama and relaxation taught slowly, in person there or live online, all ages and all levels.

So this page cannot sell you anything, and it should also be honest about the limitation. If what you want is an hour of hard continuous work and a heart rate in the moderate band, a slow class will not give you that, and anybody who tells you it will is either confused or selling. Walking, cycling, swimming and a strong flow class all do that job. A slow class does the other job, which is teaching you the postures accurately enough that the strong class stops being a risk.

What is here from the same family is the sequence power yoga was ultimately built out of. Surya Namaskar is taught step by step with the breath marked at every movement, which is the original of the thing a power class does at four times the speed. If you want to build up to a strong class, the seven day beginner plan and how to start yoga at home are the honest route in, and the first class is free if you would rather see the room first. Timings and costs are on the classes page.

The vocabulary is small and mostly borrowed, which is good news, because it means you can learn the whole of it slowly somewhere else first.

Everything hangs off Adho Mukha Svanasana as the resting and transition shape, with Tadasana, Urdhva Hastasana and Uttanasana as the ladder up and down. The lunge is Ashwa Sanchalanasana, held longer and lower than a traditional class would hold it. The press up between everything is the shape this site covers as Ashtanga Namaskara in its knees down form, which is the version I would have you use every single time. Standing strength comes from Trikonasana and the warrior family, and the balance is usually Vrikshasana or something harder.

What is missing is the seated half. Padmasana, Paschimottanasana and the breathing that belongs with them are usually cut to ninety seconds, and Savasana is often shorter than it should be. Fill that in at home with Anulom Vilom and either the bedtime sequence or a long relaxation. If you are trying to work out how many strong classes a week is sensible, how often should you do yoga has the answer, and what to wear matters more here than anywhere else because you will sweat through it.