Resistance Bands for Yoga | Exercises for Asana Mastery
Is it a good idea to use resistance bands for yoga?
Although resistance bands are not exactly a traditional part of yoga practice, this doesn’t mean you can’t use them as a supplementary training tool to improve your asana practice.
Using resistance bands for yoga will help you increase strength, flexibility and balance to prepare yourself for getting into the more challenging poses.
While latex hadn’t been invented at the time Patanjali was writing his Yoga Sutras, there’s no reason why we can’t take advantage of whatever tools are available to help us on our way to yoga mastery.
Why are exercise bands useful for yoga practice?
Although resistance bands shouldn’t be part of your core yoga practice, using them as a supplementary training tool will help you to increase your strength in areas which are important for more advanced practice.
Having strong legs, hips, glutes and core muscles (including lower back) is essential for progression into more advanced poses. For this reason, using exercises bands is an excellent way to improve your strength with much less chance of injury compared with using weights.
In this guide, we’ll have a look at some of the best exercises bands you can use to help with your yoga practice. For each band, we’ve given a few example exercises which will increase your strength and flexibility for those more difficult asanas.
Best resistance bands for yoga
Below are four kinds of exercise bands for yoga which you can use to increase strength for your asana practice.
Resistance Loop Bands
Long resistance loop bands are 208cm in circumference and made of 15 continuous layers of natural latex for extra strength and durability. They are available in 5 different resistance levels, meaning you can level up as you get stronger at each exercise. Being a loop makes them easy to hold onto in different ways or hook around your feet for exercises like kickbacks, as shown below.
Example exercises:
See our full guide to resistance loop band exercises for more workout ideas using this band.
Mini Resistance Loops
Mini resistance loop bands are 60cm circumference and either 5cm or 7.5cm wide. They’re designed to be looped around the legs, ankles or feet to add extra resistance to lower body exercises like squats and lunges.
You can also use mini bands for all kinds of abdominal and upper body exercises. As with the long resistance loops, these are available in several strengths so you can move to a heavier band as your strength increases.
Here’s a video from our YouTube Channel showing you some of the best exercises for glutes and legs:
Example exercises:
See the full mini band workout guide for more exercises.
Flat Resistance Bands
Flat resistance bands are either 1.2m or 2m length and available in four different resistance levels. These bands are super versatile and can be used to add resistance to any movement you can think of, letting you gently build strength in your yoga asanas.
Example exercises:
See our full guide to flat resistance band exercises.
Resistance Tubes
Resistance tube bands are 1.2m length and come with foam handles, making them super comfortable to use for all kinds of strength exercises. They’re available in four resistance levels and include a door anchor which lets you attach the band at any point along a door frame by wedging the anchor between the door and the frame.
Example exercises:
Here’s our full guide to resistance tube band exercises.
