Rethinking Yoga: The Standing Poses

Take a stand for your health (your most important poses)

If you ask most people what yoga is for, they'll say flexibility. And I get it. But after years of teaching and digging into the research, I've come to a pretty firm conclusion: the most important poses in your entire yoga practice should be the standing ones. Hence why I place such an emphasis on them in class. Long term health is built around the foundation of these poses.

Here's why I feel so strongly about this 👇🏽

When you stand in Warrior II, hold Chair Pose, or balance in Tree, you're doing something that a seated stretch simply cannot do. You're loading your muscles against gravity. You're asking your body to hold, resist, and stabilise. And that matters enormously, not just for how you move on the mat, but for how well your body functions over the next few decades.

Muscle isn't just there to make you look good or help you carry the shopping. It plays a genuinely central role in your metabolic health (the body's ability to efficiently convert food into energy). After a meal, your muscles are responsible for processing around 80% of the glucose in your bloodstream 🩸. That's not a small job. Strong, active muscles help keep blood sugar stable, which is one of the most significant things you can do to reduce your risk of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and the creeping weight gain that a lot of people assume is just 'part of getting older.'

When muscles are weak and underused, that system starts to break down. Inflammation creeps up ⬆️. Insulin sensitivity drops ⬇️. And the knock-on effects touch almost every part of your health 🧠🫁.

And here's something most people have never heard 👉🏽 When your muscles contract under load, they don't just move your body. They actually release chemical signals into your bloodstream. Think of it like your muscles sending out a broadcast to the rest of your body saying "we're working, everyone pitch in." Those signals travel to your fat cells, your immune system, your brain 🧠. They help your body burn fat more efficiently, dial down low-level inflammation (which is quietly behind so many chronic health problems), and even support brain function and mood.

The research calls these signals myokines, but you don't need to remember that word. What matters is this: a muscle that's being loaded and challenged isn't just getting stronger. It's actively talking to the rest of your body in a way that a muscle being gently stretched simply isn't.

This is why standing poses are in a different category to most of what we do in yoga. They're not just exercise. They're your body's built-in maintenance system, and every time you hold Warrior 2 for one more breath than feels comfortable(ish), you're switching it on.

Watch 👇🏽

Standing poses are also the best thing yoga offers for bone density 🦴. Bone responds to load. When your muscles pull against your skeleton, they send signals that keep bone tissue dense and strong. This is why weight-bearing movement is consistently what the research recommends for reducing osteoporosis risk, and it's exactly what standing poses deliver.

I'm not saying ditch your forward folds. Flexibility poses absolutely has its place. But if every class you attend is mostly stretching with a token Warrior or two, you might be missing the most valuable part of what yoga can offer your body long-term.

Here's the thing that really stays with me though. Most of the factors that influence how we age are out of our hands. Genetics. Environment. Luck. But muscle is different. It's the one organ system in the body that responds directly to what we choose to do with it. We can actually build it, maintain it, and protect it through the way we move.

Scientists have started talking about something called our "muscle span" - the years of our life that we spend with strong, functional muscle. And unlike our lifespan, which we can influence but never fully control, our muscle span is genuinely in our own hands.

Yoga has always understood this. Long before the research caught up, the tradition pointed back to the same truth. As Vivekananda put it: "It is we who hold our hands over our eyes and cry that it is dark."

Our muscle span is ours to shape. So next time we hold Warrior 1 for 3 minutes - know, that I'm doing this for you 😀

Namaskar

Zahir

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