Resistance training keeps me strong. Yoga keeps me safe.

One builds muscle. One builds literacy.

I am a yoga teacher. Yoga is my daily practice, my professional identity, and the lens through which I understand almost everything about how the body moves.

I also do progressive resistance training every week — whether that's reformer Pilates, weights, resistance bands, or targeted strength work. And I want to tell you honestly what it does for me — and what it doesn't.

Because there is a version of this conversation that goes: "yoga teacher endorses strength training, therefore both are good, do both." That is not the conversation I'm trying to have. The more useful version is specific about what each practice delivers, where each has genuine limits, and what that means for someone building a sustainable movement life with a spine that has a history.

What progressive resistance training actually does for me

I do resistance training because it does something that my yoga practice, for all of its depth, does not do as efficiently.

It loads me under control.

Progressive resistance — whether through reformer Pilates, weights, bands, or machines — provides systematic, escalating challenge to your muscles. It wakes up my glutes, the deep hip rotators, the posterior chain in ways that bodyweight or mat-based work reaches more indirectly. I leave a good resistance session with muscle fatigue in places that tell me something real happened. Not soreness as a goal, but the honest fatigue of tissues that were asked to work.

For my spine specifically, that matters. The muscles that support my lumbar spine need to be strong — not just mobile, not just present, but actually capable of generating force under load. Progressive resistance training builds that capacity in a systematic way. Whether it's a reformer spring system, a barbell, or resistance bands, the load allows me to work at a level that challenges without compromising my mechanics.

But here's what actually makes it work: I have somatic literacy coupled with clinical knowledge about my spine.

Somatic literacy — we will define this as the ability to feel what's happening in your body and know whether it's right or wrong for your spine. Not intellectually, but through direct sensation. You know what neutral feels like. You can feel when you're drifting. You understand the difference between muscular fatigue and spinal strain.

Clinical knowledge is understanding your spine's specific constraints. For me, that means avoiding all flexion — regardless of how minor it may seem. The "flatten your spine" cue. The loaded forward fold. The Hundred. The Roll Up. The Criss Cross. The endless parade of spinal flexion/dressed up “sit-ups” masqueraded as deep core work on a reformer. The subtle rounding of the lumbar curve that happens when fatigue sets in. All of it, off limits. My spine's architecture is extension-biased, and flexion — even micro-flexion — loads structures that need to be protected.

So when I move through a resistance class, I'm not just following exercises. I'm filtering them through what I know: somatic literacy telling me what I'm feeling, clinical knowledge telling me what's safe. I maintain neutral throughout loaded positions and movement series. I recognize when a cue doesn't apply to me. I don’t modify, I flat-out substitute exercises entirely. Not because I'm limiting myself, but because I understand precisely what my spine needs.

When the class moves to loaded flexion plus rotation — because it always does, and because instructors love oblique exercises the way some people love unsolicited advice — I move into a steady side plank instead. Not because I'm avoiding work. Because I know what my spine can handle, and loaded flexion with rotation isn't it. That's not deprivation. That's precision.

That combination of somatic literacy and clinical knowledge is what allows me to use resistance training as a tool rather than a gamble. 

And it's exactly what SAAL Yoga Fundamentals teaches you to develop: the embodied understanding of your spine's baseline, the ability to feel neutral in your body, and the clinical framework to know what your structure actually needs — so you can move intelligently in every class you take, regardless of what's being cued.

I also find the external structure useful. A booked class or a programmed workout has a different relationship to my calendar than an open practice. I protect my yoga practice because it is daily and non-negotiable. But there are days when the resistance workout is what gets me out the door when nothing else would. I have made peace with using external structure when internal motivation is not showing up.

What progressive resistance training cannot do

Here is where I want to be direct — not to diminish strength training, but because I think the current cultural moment around it is doing people a disservice by implying it is complete.

Progressive resistance training does not teach you how to move your specific spine safely.

This is the critical gap. A group resistance class — even a small, well-run one — is designed for a general population. The instructor is demonstrating a movement pattern and the room is following it. But your spine is not the room's spine. Your disc herniation, your stenosis, your post-surgical restrictions, your specific movement directions that are contraindicated — these are not baked into the programming.

What gets delivered instead is: "Here's the exercise. Here's the modification." What's missing is: "Here's what safety actually looks like in your body. Here's what right feels like for your spine. Here's how to know the difference between challenge and compromise."

Most people move through resistance training without ever developing that discernment. They learn the exercise. They don't learn to feel the difference between muscular fatigue and spinal strain. They don't know what neutral looks like in their lumbar spine during a loaded movement. They don't have language for what's actually happening mechanically when something feels off.

That is a problem — especially for anyone with a spinal history.

Progressive resistance training does not work on your nervous system the way yoga does.

This is not a soft claim. It is a clinical one. Chronic pain — which most people reading this know something about — is not purely a structural problem. It is a nervous system problem. The research on this is not new or contested. A spine that has been in pain for a long time has a sensitized nervous system: one that has learned to perceive movement as threat, to brace preemptively, to interpret sensation as danger even when the underlying structure is stable.

Yoga, practiced with breath-centered awareness and sustained attention to sensation, is one of the most direct interventions available for that sensitized system. The extended holds, the breath work, the quality of attention that a good yoga practice cultivates — these communicate safety to a nervous system that has been in protection mode. They are not decoration. They are mechanism.

Resistance training is largely silent on this. It is an excellent strength and conditioning method. It does not, in its standard form, address the nervous system's relationship to pain with any systematic intentionality.

Progressive resistance training does not accumulate the way yoga does.

A yoga practice, maintained over years, builds something that does not disappear between sessions. Postural awareness that becomes automatic. Breath patterns that change how the body defaults under stress. A relationship with sensation that makes you harder to destabilize — literally and otherwise. These are long-arc changes that compound slowly and then suddenly feel like who you are.

A resistance session is a workout. A very good workout. But it does not reach the same depth of patterning over time because it is not designed to. It is designed to make you stronger and more controlled in movement. Those are real and valuable goals. They are not the same goals.

How SAAL Yoga Fundamentals changes what's possible

This is where alignment-based yoga — the kind SAAL Yoga is built on — becomes essential infrastructure for intelligent strength training.

You learn what neutral actually feels like in your body

SAAL Yoga Fundamentals teaches you what a neutral spine feels like in your body. Not the textbook definition. Not the instructor's alignment cue delivered to the room. What it actually feels like when your specific lumbar spine is positioned to distribute load safely. You spend time there. You practice from there. You build proprioceptive awareness of what "right" is for your structure.

You develop the ability to notice when you've drifted

Once you've really lived in that supported neutral — practiced it, felt it, made it familiar — you develop the ability to notice when you're no longer there. When you've drifted into flexion. When you've traveled into extension. When rotation has crept in. That somatic awareness is what allows you to catch yourself and return to what works for your spine.

You understand your spine's specific story through exploration

Fundamentals also teaches you to understand your spine's specific story through exploration and observation. What movements feel right in your body? What creates strain or discomfort? What does your spine seem to prefer? You develop the somatic literacy — the embodied ability to feel what's happening and know whether it's appropriate for your structure — that allows you to move safely in any environment.

You gain the literacy that resistance training cannot provide

That's the piece resistance training cannot do on its own. A good strength program will make you stronger. But without the somatic literacy that SAAL Yoga Fundamentals builds, you won't know while you’re in it whether you're getting stronger safely. You won't have the discernment to modify intelligently. You won't notice when you've drifted away from what your spine needs.

When you then move to resistance training with the foundation from SAAL Yoga Fundamentals, you're not just following exercises. You're choosing exercises — and modifying them — based on what you actually know about your spine. You're the expert on your body. The instructor is offering load. You're deciding whether that load is appropriate for your structure.

That is the difference between doing resistance training and doing it intelligently.

What this means in practice

I do progressive resistance training every week and it makes me stronger and more resilient in ways that support my body. It is NOT interchangeable with my yoga practice. It does NOT address the things yoga addresses — the postural awareness, the nervous system regulation, the somatic literacy that allows me to move my spine safely under any condition.

They serve each other — SAAL Yoga Fundamentals gives me the somatic literacy and clinical knowledge that makes the strength training work better, and the resistance work gives me the load and muscular development that tests and reinforces the foundation that yoga builds.

Neither is sufficient on its own for the kind of long-term spinal health I am working toward. Together, thoughtfully combined, they come close.

But the combination only works if you are honest about what each one is doing, and you have the literacy to use them together. The resistance training is not teaching you how to move safely. The yoga class is not going to build your glutes the way a loaded resistance program does. Pretending otherwise means expecting something from a practice that it was not designed to deliver — and being confused and disappointed when it doesn't.

Know what you're using each thing for. Use them accordingly. And if you don't yet have the somatic literacy to know the difference between challenge and compromise, that's where Fundamentals comes in.

P.S. If you do any form of progressive resistance training and the instructor or program has never once asked about your spinal history, your movement restrictions, or what you were told not to do — that is worth paying attention to. Not because they are doing something wrong, necessarily, but because it tells you something about how much of the clinical responsibility is sitting with you rather than with them. If you don't yet have the somatic literacy to know the difference between challenge and compromise, that's exactly what SAAL Yoga Fundamentals is designed to build. If you're curious about your spinal baseline, I have a free resource video on identifying your patterns at www.nicolesaal.com/resources.