The Lifter's Edge: Yoga for Performance
Discover How Yoga and Strength Training Work Together to Maximize Performance. In this article, we break down the performance benefits of combining yoga and strength training—improving mobility, recovery, breath control, and muscular awareness. Learn how The Lifter’s Edge Workshop at Gray Wolf helps athletes unlock better movement, prevent injury, and build total-body resilience through an integrated training approach.
Maribeth Eiken and Monte Pascal
8/5/20252 min read
In fitness, we often think of yoga and lifting as two separate things. But if you start to peel back the layers, you notice how they complement each other in key ways. Both yoga and lifting strengthen your connective tissue, increase circulation, elevate proprioception, train the nervous system, and fortify willpower. When paired together, they provide a powerful foundation to understand how your body moves and why—giving you actionable insight to get more out of your workouts.
Strength training without yoga often leads to poor range of motion, lingering tightness, and soreness that sticks around longer than it should. Eventually, that can turn into nagging pain or stalled progress. Yoga brings balance—helping to unlock stiff joints, restore tissue quality, and speed up recovery. Strength helps anchor that improved range of motion, giving you the control and stability to actually use it. One without the other leaves gaps. Together, they create resilience.
Both yoga and lifting require proper breathing and physical technique. Breathing is what takes us through a yoga practice and what provides the feedback for proper pose alignment—not the instructor, not the sequence, the breath. Lifting requires the same awareness. Breath is what helps us brace, control tempo, and recover between reps—not the workout, not the program, the breath.
The Lifter’s Edge Workshop was crafted to showcase the shared benefits of yoga and lifting by pairing key movements from each modality together. Leading with the lift, we’ll walk through form and proper execution. But before we add weight, we’ll take you through a yoga flow targeting key muscle groups and full-body activation—establishing a wider mental and physical range of movement. After the flow, we’ll return to the lifts, now with sharper awareness of what each muscle is doing, where the mind is focused, and how the breath ensures proper technique and exertion.
This workshop is part of the Gray Wolf approach. Mind/body connection is more than just a buzz phrase. It’s a vital approach to lifting, which in turn becomes a vital way to live. Lifting is not just lifting. Yoga is not just yoga. Gray Wolf is not just a gym.
By actively connecting these two modalities together, you receive the benefit of both—and a new opportunity to develop multiple skills at once.
We hope to see you there.