How A Yoga Pose Makes Energy, And Builds Muscle And Bone At The Same Time
The short answer
Yoga for bone strength and yoga for strength turn out to be the same thing. A yoga pose held still is not resting. Muscles on both sides of every joint pull against each other, like the guy ropes on a tent, and that two-way pull is what practitioners feel as energy. Held for thirty seconds or more, the same pull is isometric yoga: real strength work with no impact. And because every muscle is tied to a bone, it also tells the bone to build itself thicker along the line of the pull. Energy, muscle and bone come from the same thing at the same time.
Why does a yoga pose that looks still make energy?
Because inside it, nothing is still. Stand in Extended Triangle Pose (Utthita Trikonasana) and, to anyone watching, you are holding a shape. Nothing moves.
Try this. Stand up and press your back heel firmly into the floor. The floor pushes back. That push does not stop at your heel. It travels up the outside of your ankle, up the shin, through the knee, into the thigh and into your hip. One small instruction at the foot has woken up the whole leg.
That is the first secret of a yoga pose. Every instruction sends a wave through the body, and a good teacher chains those waves together until the whole body is working as one piece. This is exactly what an Iyengar yoga class at Flametree Yoga Studio in Darwin is doing when the teacher says “press the outer edge of the back heel down”.
Where does the energy actually come from?
From pulling in two directions at once. Think about a tent. The pole stands up because the guy ropes pull on it from opposite sides. Loosen one rope and the tent sags. Pull all the ropes evenly and the tent is firm, yet springy. Nothing is moving, but everything is working.
Your body in a pose works exactly like that tent. Press down through the feet, and lift up through the spine. Reach out through the fingertips, and draw the shoulder back in. The muscles on the front of your thigh and the muscles on the back switch on together and pull against each other around the bone. The leg does not move, but it becomes firm, springy and awake.
Dr Ray Long, an orthopaedic surgeon who studied with B.K.S. Iyengar, calls this co-activation, and says it gives the body an “alive and springy feel”. Joel Kramer, writing in Yoga Journal in 1980, called these pulls “lines of energy”. He mapped five of them in Triangle Pose alone: down the back leg, down the front leg, out through the spine, out through the top arm and down through the lower arm. Each one pulls against another.
So what is this “energy”, really? Here is the honest answer. It is not a measurable substance flowing through your body. It is the feeling you get when several real things happen at once: muscles working, forces running through your bones, nerves sending messages up and down, your breath spreading through the trunk, and your attention travelling into places it usually never visits.
Kramer put it this way: “through yoga, you can actually change its quality and generate more of it, by enlarging the body’s capacity as an energy transformer.” B.K.S. Iyengar said it in four words in Light on Life: “Extension is attention, and expansion is awareness.”
How does the same pulling build muscle?
Hold a shopping bag with your arm bent for a minute. Your arm does not move, but it starts to shake. That is your muscle working hard without moving, which is called isometric work, and it is real strength training. A yoga pose held for half a minute or more does the same thing to dozens of muscles at once.
There is a bonus a gym machine cannot give you. A machine usually works one muscle on its own. A pose asks the muscles on both sides of a joint to work together, so the joint is pulled into its best position and protected while the muscles get stronger. Do it often enough and your brain learns the pattern, the way you learned to ride a bike. You still hold the lines, but with less effort. Kramer called that “dynamic relaxation”: the pose stays alive while the struggle drops away.
Yoga For Strength Darwin Masterclass (Online Too)
This is the whole subject of the next Sunday Arvo Masterclass. On Sunday 27 September 2026, Chris Lalor teaches strength and core stability: half an hour on what is actually happening, then ninety minutes of building it in your body, LIVE online with the recording kept in your video library. In-studio places have sold out; online places are still available. Details and booking are on the Sunday Arvo Masterclasses page.
How does a yoga pose build bone?
Because bone listens to muscle. Most people think bone is like a rock. It is not. Bone is alive, and it rebuilds itself all the time. It grows thicker along the lines where it gets pulled and squeezed, and thins out where it is left alone. A German doctor called Julius Wolff worked this out in the 1890s, and it is still called Wolff’s law.
Here is how the message gets through. Every muscle is tied to a bone by a tendon. When the muscle pulls, the tendon tugs on the bone, and the bone bends by a tiny amount. Deep inside the bone live cells called osteocytes, sitting in little caves connected by tiny tunnels. When the bone bends, fluid squeezes through those tunnels, a bit like squeezing a wet sponge. The cells feel that and send out a signal: build here. Bone-building cells then lay down new mineral along the exact line of the pull.
Now put the two ideas together. When muscles on both sides of a joint pull against each other, the load on the bone can be several times your body weight, with no jumping and no impact. And because Triangle, Warrior 2 and the twists pull on the hip and spine sideways, on a slant and in a spiral, they load bone from angles that walking and running never reach. Those are the very spots, like the neck of the thigh bone, where older bones tend to break, and the poses that load them are the ones taught in the bone strength masterclass.
Is there evidence that yoga poses build bone?
Yes, and it is careful evidence rather than a miracle. The question researchers ask is whether yoga bone density gains show up on a scan. Dr Loren Fishman at Columbia University followed people who did twelve yoga poses, each held for thirty seconds, for twelve minutes a day. The 227 people who kept it up (202 women, average age 68) showed improved bone density in the spine and the neck of the thigh bone, and across more than 100,000 hours of practice there was not a single fracture or serious injury. The results were published in Topics in Geriatric Rehabilitation in 2016 (Lu, Rosner, Chang and Fishman).
Just as important, the balance you learn standing in those poses means you are less likely to fall in the first place, and falls are how most fragility fractures happen.
Two honest limits. The people in that study chose to do yoga, so they were not a random sample. And nobody has measured what happens to the “energy” itself, because it is a feeling, not a substance. What has been measured is the bone, the muscle and the balance.
Why did Mr Iyengar keep talking about the skin?
Because the skin is how you know whether the pull is right. B.K.S. Iyengar taught in two directions. First, “from the skin to the bone”: draw the muscles in so they hug the bone and the joint sits in its centre. Then “from the bone to the skin”: from that firm centre, extend out until even the skin is alive and spread.
Your skin is packed with sensors, so if a patch of skin on the inner ankle or the back of the knee feels dull or twisted, something underneath is out of line. He wrote in Light on Life: “The skin provides our outermost layer of intelligence.” That is why the pose is never just a shape. It is a conversation between your skin, your muscles, your bones and your mind.
What is the core, and why is it a can rather than a six-pack?
The core is not the muscles down the front of the tummy. It is a pressurised can with four walls: the breathing diaphragm as the lid, the pelvic floor as the base, the deep tummy muscles as the walls, and the small muscles along the spine at the back.
Sit-ups train one wall. A held standing pose, a plank or a chair pose makes all four walls work together. That is what holds the low back up, and it is the base that every one of Kramer’s lines starts from. It is also why the 27 September masterclass on strength and core comes before the sessions on bones, breath and hips: get the can working and everything else has something to push from.
What do you get from one pose, every time?
Press down. Lift up. Draw in. Extend out. Observe everything. Do those five things in one pose and you have made energy, worked muscle and loaded bone in the same thirty seconds.
And to do them at all, your mind has to leave its worries and go into your body. That is the part nobody warns you about, and it is the part people come back for.
This post covers only the benefits with a clear mechanism behind them. Flametree has published elsewhere on the wider benefits of Iyengar yoga and pranayama, including Yoga For Bones & Osteoporosis and how Iyengar yoga builds strength in Darwin.
To learn this with a teacher who can see what your body is doing, the Sunday Arvo Masterclasses run LIVE online through to December 2026, with six sessions still to come and the recordings included: Sunday Arvo Masterclasses, Darwin and online. And every ordinary class at Flametree is built on the same five actions. You can see class times and reserve a spot here:
See the timetable and book a class here.
Frequently asked questions
Does holding a yoga pose count as strength training?
Yes. Holding a pose is isometric work: the muscle works hard without changing length, the way your arm works holding a heavy shopping bag with the elbow bent. Standing poses held for thirty seconds or more work dozens of muscles at once, and they work the muscles on both sides of each joint together, which protects the joint.
Can yoga really build bone without jumping or lifting weights?
Bone responds to being pulled and squeezed, not only to impact. When muscles pull on a bone through their tendons, the bone bends by a tiny amount and its cells respond by laying down new bone along the line of the pull. A 2016 study led by Dr Loren Fishman, published in Topics in Geriatric Rehabilitation, reported improved bone density in the spine and hip in 227 people doing twelve minutes of yoga a day.
What does “energy” mean in yoga?
In this context it means the lived feeling of the body becoming alive, connected and awake in a pose. It is produced by muscles working, forces travelling through the skeleton, nerve signals, breath and attention all happening at once. It is not a substance that can be measured, and Joel Kramer, who popularised the term “lines of energy”, said himself that “energy” was an approximate word for the experience.
Which yoga poses are best for bone strength?
Standing poses such as Extended Triangle Pose (Utthita Trikonasana), Warrior 2 (Virabhadrasana II) and the standing twists load the hip and spine from several directions at once, including the neck of the thigh bone where fractures are most common. These are the poses used in Dr Fishman’s research and taught in Flametree’s bone strength masterclass.
Where can I learn this properly in Darwin or online?
Flametree Yoga Studio in Darwin runs the Sunday Arvo Masterclasses with Chris Lalor, a Senior Iyengar Yoga Teacher, LIVE online with the recordings included, and regular Iyengar classes in Woolner and Coolalinga, in the studio and online.
Flametree Yoga Studio, Darwin. This article is general information, not medical advice. If you have osteoporosis, a recent fracture or a joint injury, talk to your doctor and tell your teacher before class.
Sources: Joel Kramer, “Yoga as Self-Transformation”, Yoga Journal, 1980. Ray Long, The Key Muscles of Hatha Yoga (Bandha Yoga, 2006). B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on Life (2005). Lu, Rosner, Chang and Fishman, “Twelve-Minute Daily Yoga Regimen Reverses Osteoporotic Bone Loss”, Topics in Geriatric Rehabilitation, 2016.
