POWER YOGA
This yoga style came to be in the mid-1990s, where several prominent teachers skilled in traditional yoga sought ways to make more people have access to flow yoga.
At first, power yoga was influenced by the intensity of Ashtanga but permitted variation in the sequencing of yoga poses as instructed by the teacher. Modern yoga classes are more energetic vinyasa flow. Power yoga is a term that describes an intense, fitness-based method of practicing vinyasa style of yoga. Most people see power yoga as “gym yoga.”
this style uses the strength of Ashtanga and several vinyasas, but allow teachers to use their discretion in teaching any yoga pose in the order they desire, making each class different. This style emphasizes strength and flexibility, this style introduced yoga into America gyms as people started seeing yoga as a workout method.
What to Expect in Power Yoga classes?
Despite the variations in yoga classes due to the type of instructor, you can also observe an intense yoga flow with little meditation and chanting. Health clubs and gyms, to be specific, have taken up power yoga as a method to describe yoga as a type of exercise.
However, have at the back of your mind that power yoga requires serious hard work accompanied by lots of sweating.
Founder of Power yoga
This yoga style was formed by two American yoga teachers in the mid-1980s, they studied with Sri K. Pattabhi Jois (Ashtanga guru), and they made yoga more accessible by sharing their knowledge with Western students. Both of them wanted shifting from the tough Ashtanga sequence – a set series of yoga poses carried out in the same order all the time.
Beryl Bender Birch, based in New York and Bryan Kest, based in Los Angeles, usually receive credits for inventing the power yoga simultaneously on opposite coast. Both of them belong to the second generation of American Ashtanga students.
Bender learned from Normal Allen, and Kest learned from David Williams. Both Allen and Williams were among Pattabhi Jois’s first students from the west. Bender Birch worked with Jois when he visited the United States in the 1980s. Kest traveled to Mysore, India, to study with Jois.
Both Bender and Kest used the name power yoga in differentiating the vigorous, flowing method of yoga; they taught from the simple stretching and meditation associated with yoga by most Americans. According to Bender Birch, she still taught her students Ashtanga pose sequence when she started calling her classes power yoga.
Power Yoga Styles
Larry Schultz introduced a variation of this style at his studio in San Francisco, “It’s Yoga,” in the early 1990s. Schultz studied Ashtanga in the 1980s with Jois. He later deviated from Jois’s method by combining poses from the first three series of Ashtanga. Schultz codified his method into a style he called rocket yoga.
Another famous yoga instructor who succeeded in establishing his own yoga style know as Baptiste Power Vinyasa is Baron Baptiste. These yoga innovators were able to create something new by combining methods and poses they acquired while studying yoga.
Core Power Yoga franchises hot yoga studio also practice this yoga style as a fitness routine.
