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emma_forever_yoga Movement rooted in clarity, anatomy, and lived experience. I help people build strength, flexibility, and skill by understanding how their body actually works.

12/10/2026

Why does your leg drop when you let go of your toe? 🦵

If you’ve ever practised Standing Hand-to-Big-Toe Pose (Utthita Hasta Padangusthasana), you might have noticed that holding your leg up is much easier when you’re using your hand!

But being flexible enough to lift your leg and having the strength to keep it there are two different things.

When you release your toe, your hip flexors need to produce enough force to hold your leg against gravity. Depending on your available range of motion, hamstring tension can also create passive resistance, while your trunk and pelvis work to keep you stable.

So it’s not necessarily just about tight hamstrings or weak hip flexors. Several factors can influence your ability to maintain an active leg lift.

Here are 3 exercises to explore:

1. Active Half Split — develop active flexibility and control.
2. Seated Leg Lifts — strengthen your hip flexors (with a chair modification).
3. Navasana (Boat Pose) — build hip flexor strength and trunk stability.

Remember, passive flexibility and active flexibility aren’t quite the same thing. Developing strength and control within your available range of motion is an important part of flexibility training.

Save this for your next yoga or mobility practice! 💚

05/10/2026

Can strength training improve hamstring flexibility?

Yes — stretching isn’t the only way to improve your range of motion.

While researching this reel, I went looking for THE mechanism that explains why resistance training can improve flexibility. And, as is often the case with the human body, the answer turned out to be much more complicated 😂

Research shows that resistance training through range of motion can improve flexibility, and eccentric training has also been shown to increase ROM.

But why this happens appears to be multifactorial rather than one neat mechanism.

When you lower into a staggered-stance RDL, your hamstrings produce force while lengthening — an eccentric contraction. Actin and myosin are still interacting to produce force even though the muscle as a whole is getting longer.

Over time, improvements in ROM may involve several adaptations, including changes in muscle architecture, mechanical properties of the muscle-tendon unit, and sensory or neural factors.

Titin also contributes to the passive mechanical behaviour of muscle, but we can’t point to titin — or any single mechanism — and say, “That’s why RDLs improve flexibility.”

That was probably my favourite part of researching this. The deeper I went, the less it looked like there was one simple answer.

Want to try the staggered-stance RDL?

If you’re new to the movement, start with bodyweight. Try 3 sets of 8 slow, controlled reps per side. As you become comfortable, gradually add load.

And stretching still works! This isn’t “strength instead of stretching.” It’s another tool for building hamstring flexibility, strength and range of motion.

Save this for your next hamstring flexibility or mobility session, and share it with someone who still can’t touch their toes.

References:
Afonso et al. (2021) — Strength Training versus Stretching for Improving Range of Motion
Diong et al. (2022) — Eccentric Exercise Improves Joint Flexibility in Adults
Vetter et al. (2022) — Effects of Eccentric Strength Training on Flexibility and Strength
Alizadeh et al. (2023) — Resistance Training Induces Improvements in Range of Motion

07/09/2026

Never underestimate the power of your standing poses. 🧘‍♀️

Mobility drills and weight training can absolutely contribute to improving your Downward Facing Dog — and I’m a big believer in integrating different movement modalities.

But don’t underestimate what your yoga practice is already doing.

Standing poses can challenge many of the same physical qualities you need in Downward Dog — including hamstring flexibility, hip flexion, ankle dorsiflexion, strength and control.

In one study, male college athletes added yoga twice a week for 10 weeks and improved measures of flexibility and balance. Researchers also measured changes in joint angles during yoga poses, including lunges and Downward Dog.

And standing poses aren’t just about mobility. Biomechanical research shows substantial muscular demands through the lower body in poses such as Chair, Warrior II and Warrior III.

That’s one of the beautiful things about yoga: the poses can complement each other.

And yoga isn’t just flexibility. Next up: why I think athletes and bodybuilders can benefit from yoga. 👀



Research:
Polsgrove et al. (2016) — Yoga practice, flexibility & balance in college athletes
Liu et al. (2021) — Standing yoga: lower-limb biomechanical analysis

02/09/2026

Getting deeper into a forward fold doesn’t always mean pushing harder into the pose.

Practising the forward fold itself can absolutely help — but if you’re struggling to find the hip hinge or pelvic movement you need, sometimes changing the position you train from can make that range much more accessible.

Starting from standing gives you another way to practise the movement, build control through your available range, and progressively work on your hamstring flexibility and mobility before taking it back to the floor.

If you want to work on your hamstrings further, I also have a hamstring flexibility practice on my YouTube channel.

YouTube link is in my bio 🤍

31/08/2026

I’ve never fully understood where the idea that yoga is “just stretching” came from.

Yoga certainly isn’t a replacement for resistance training, and different forms of training produce different adaptations. But yoga still asks your muscles to produce force.

Depending on the movement, you’ll find isometric, concentric and eccentric muscle actions throughout a yoga practice. In standing poses, for example, your muscles are producing force to support and control your body against gravity.

And isometric exercise is a recognised form of strength training — the muscle produces force without changing joint position.

So the more interesting question isn’t “yoga or weights?”

It’s: what qualities does each train, and how can they complement each other?

References:
Liu et al., 2021
Ghayomzadeh et al., 2025

I think we sometimes make exercise far more tribal than the human body actually is.Yoga vs weights. Strength vs flexibil...
29/08/2026

I think we sometimes make exercise far more tribal than the human body actually is.

Yoga vs weights. Strength vs flexibility. Mobility vs yoga.

But your body doesn’t know what we’ve decided to call an exercise. It responds to the task you’re asking it to solve.

The more I’ve studied kinesiology, biomechanics and neuromechanics, the more I’ve realised just how much different forms of training actually overlap.

Yoga can involve isometric, eccentric and concentric muscle actions. We produce force, resist gravity, control our body weight, move through different joint positions and develop mobility at the same time.

Resistance training uses many of those same principles but gives us the enormous advantage of being able to progressively add external load.

They’re not opposing systems. They’re different ways of applying training stimuli to the same human body.

Years ago, I trained an extremely strong powerlifter who could lift well over 200 kg. I put him into Extended Side Angle and eventually he had to stop.

Not because he wasn’t strong. He was exceptionally strong.

I was simply asking his body to solve a movement problem it wasn’t accustomed to.

I saw versions of this constantly when I was teaching: strong, athletic people shaking and sweating through yoga poses. And it always made me question the claim that yoga was “just stretching.”

That’s why I found the study in this post so interesting.

Eight months of Ashtanga yoga was associated with an 11.4% increase in 1RM leg-press strength.

One study certainly doesn’t mean yoga is the best way to improve your leg press, nor does yoga replace resistance training.

But it adds to a much more interesting conversation about what yoga is actually training.

And perhaps the better question isn’t:

“Does yoga build strength?”

Maybe it’s:

“What kinds of strength and movement qualities does yoga develop and how might they complement the rest of our training?”

I think yoga deserves a little more credit than “just stretching.”

More on this soon. 👀

17/08/2026

3 drills to help improve your Downward Facing Dog 👇

After Part 1 of my Downward Dog series, I had lots of requests for practical exercises — so we’re taking a little detour this week! 😂

These drills target ankle mobility, hamstring strength and range, and active shoulder flexion — all capacities that can contribute to your Downward Dog.

1. Weighted ankle mobility

Place the weight just behind the knee on the soft tissue — not directly on the kneecap.

Keep your whole foot grounded and gently rock forward with control.

• Start with 5 reps and build towards 10
• Hold each rep for around 3 seconds
• Final rep: hold for up to 30 seconds

2. Straight-leg hip hinge

Keep your feet grounded and slowly push your hips back. Adding load helps develop strength and control through a lengthened posterior-chain position.

• Start with 5 controlled reps
• Build towards 10

3. Overhead squat hold

This trains your ankles, hips and active overhead range together.

Use support if needed and only squat as far as you can while keeping your heels grounded. Stay active rather than relaxing into the bottom position, and reach your arms towards your ears.

• Start with 10 seconds
• Progress towards 20–30 seconds

Remember: these aren’t 3 magical exercises that will “fix” every Downward Dog. It’s a closed-chain, multi-joint position, and different people may need to develop different capacities.

Missed Part 1? Watch “Why don’t my heels reach the floor in Downward Dog?” for the biomechanics behind this.

And yes — the standing poses video is still coming next! 😂❤️

Save this one for your next mobility session.

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