Muscle Activation in Yoga: Benefits & Safe Practice

Muscle activation changed the way I understood and practiced yoga. My journey from gym to yoga, and then to applied anatomy, helped me understand the importance of engaging the right muscles during movement.

Journey of Yoga into Muscle Activation

In my High Secondary School, I used to do gym and it gave me stiffness in my muscles, which led to lots of sports injuries. And then I started doing yoga for mobility and flexibility. I went to many studios to practice and also tried to do self-practice as well but didn’t find much difference.

And then I studied applied anatomy, which opened a different perspective of my mind to practice and learn the Applied Anatomy.

And then I found the term Muscle Activation and then a question came in my mind: do we really engage our muscles?

Image Source: Chatgpt

When I did in-depth study about muscle activation, and then I found that beginners have difficulty in engaging the muscles, as when a person starts their journey to any fitness field, they really don’t know how to engage the muscle because they don’t have muscle-mind combination and it takes time to build that awareness.

Basically, Muscle’s Nature is to contract and when we give a stretch, it is the relaxation of the muscle, but there are the chances that the muscle can get overstretched, which gives the injury.

As in the beginning, most practitioners have the injury as they don’t know the correct way to practice and engage the muscles.

So, to prevent yourself from the injury, we should know the correct and safe way to practice, and it is very important to hold into the asana because holding builds the strength to hold into the position.

“Muscle activation refers to the process of engaging specific muscles to ensure they function optimally during movement. This concept is central to Muscle Activation Techniques (MAT), a system developed by biomechanics expert Greg Roskopf.”

Muscle Activation in Yoga

Muscle Activation helps you to do correct movement in any asana with complete benefit of it.

Muscle Activation Is Important in Yoga Because:

Enhance Performance

Muscle-Mind Connection

Improved flexibility and range of motion

Pain reduction

Injury prevention and recovery

Example: How Muscle Activation Helps You in Your Practice

Whenever we do forward bending, so to lift your upper body up, if a person don’t know about use of muscle, he or she will hurt their lower back. So, to keep the lower back safe while lifting your upper body, first you have to micro bend the knees and then you have to squeeze (engage) the Hamstring muscle, Quads and Gluts Muscles to keep the lower back safe. By doing this, the pressure won’t come on the lower back.

In the same way, when we are in the warrior of any variation, it is important to press the back leg on the mat so then your back leg muscles will be activated, which will not let the weight come on the front leg.

In this way, most of the body weight transfers on the back leg, which will give you, let you be comfortable in the asana and then you can hold for longer period of time.

Sensory Neurons

These are specialised nerve cells which detect and transmit sensory information from the environment to the central nervous system (CNS).

Muscles also have sensory neurons which transmit the data to the brain, it also works as defence mechanism for the muscle.

It is known as GTO (Golgi Tendon Organ), it detects the tension and monitors the force generated in the muscles when we stretch or contract the muscle.

GTO senses the resulting tension in the tendon and sends signals to the central nervous system. These signals can trigger a reflex that inhibits muscle contraction, potentially protecting the muscle from injury due to excessive force. :- Wikipedia

So, it is important that whenever we do movement in any asana, we do it with muscle engagement so that we don’t injure the muscle and the way to target the right muscle which benefits the one who is practicing.

In the next blog, we will be understanding more clearly and deep into the Muscle Activation and different techniques to target the specific muscle and movement to build a safer way to practice with proper muscle activation.