Yogi Aaron is a trailblazing yoga teacher who is leading a global rebellion against the harmful practice of stretching. He pioneered the groundbreaking approach to yoga that shows people how to live pain-free by activating muscles through Applied Yoga Anatomy + Muscle Activation (AYAMA).
In a world where conventional stretching and flexibility practices are the prescribed norm for pain, Yogi Aaron’s unorthodox method provides a safer and more effective permanent solution — and it isn’t being taught by anyone else!
Whether at his scenic Blue Osa Yoga Retreat in Costa Rica or through his online AYAMA Certification Program and The Yogi Club, Yogi Aaron is dedicated to teaching students worldwide to break free from pain and unlock their full potential and life purpose.
What sets him apart is his wisdom, infectious humor, adventurous spirit, and personal healing journey, which distinguish him as a beloved leader in the yoga community.
Listen to this episode of The MOVEMENT Movement with Yogi Aaron about how yoga isn’t stretching.
Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:
– How the Muscle Activation Technique is a way to address muscle-related problems.
– How yoga postures have evolved over time, and their original purpose may differ fro today’s practice.
– Why there is a misconception that yoga postures are primarily preparing the body for meditation.
– Why mastering comfort and stability in yoga postures can lead to a deeper understanding of life and decision-making.
– How different yoga postures can impact the nervous system and energy levels.
Connect with Yogi Aaron:
Guest Contact Info
Links Mentioned:
theyogi.club/movement
Connect with Steven:
Website
Xeroshoes.com
Twitter
@XeroShoes
Instagram
@xeroshoes
Facebook
facebook.com/xeroshoes
Episode Transcript
Steven Sashen:
So you want to get flexible. Maybe you want to do some stretching or do some yoga. What if that is the worst and stupidest thing you could do? Well, that’s what we’re going to talk about on today’s episode of the Movement Movement, the podcast for people who want to know the truth about what it takes to have a happy, healthy, strong body. Usually starting with your feet because those things at the end of your legs are pretty important. But we also, on this podcast, break down the propaganda, the mythology, sometimes the flat out lies you’ve been told about what it takes to walk or run or play or do yoga or CrossFit or whatever it’s you like to do and to do those things effectively and efficiently and enjoyably, most importantly enjoyably, because if you’re not having fun, you’re not going to keep it up anyway, so make sure you’re doing something you enjoy.
I am Steven Sashen, CEO, and actually Co-CEO and Co-founder of Xero Shoes, along with my lovely wife and brilliant wife, that’s the same person, Lana Phoenix. Here’s the T-shirt to prove it if you’re watching, and we call it the Movement Movement because we’re creating a movement that involves you, tell you about that in a second, about natural movement, letting your body do what it’s made to do without getting in the way and the way you’re involved is really pretty obvious. It’s just we want you to spread the word. If you like what you hear, leave a review, give us a thumbs up, hit the bell icon, give us five stars wherever you give us five stars, give us 10 stars if you can give us 10 stars. I don’t know how this stuff works. And if you want to find out more, go to our website, www.jointhemovementmovement.com.
There’s nothing you need to do to join. You don’t need to spend any money, learn secret handshake, wake up and do a special dance every morning. It’s just that’s where you find the previous episodes, the ways you can find us in social media and the ways you can find the podcast if you’re not happy with the way you found us already. Okay. So basically, if you want to be part of the tribe, just subscribe. It’s really simple. So let’s have some fun and get started. Aaron, do me a favor. Tell people who the hell you are and what you’re doing here.
Yogi Aaron:
I’ll give you the quick version. My name is Yogi Aaron. I’m the owner of Blue Osa Yoga Retreat in Spahn, Costa Rica. I’ve started a few yoga movements, but the one I’m working on right now is to stop stretching. I’ve been teaching and doing yoga since I was 18 years old and-
Steven Sashen:
How old are you? 25, 26?
Yogi Aaron:
I need to hang out with you more often. I am 51 at this moment-
Steven Sashen:
Still a child.
Yogi Aaron:
But the short story is that as soon as I got into yoga, which I got into it when I was 18 to stretch, 25 years later, I ended up in a emergency room of a hospital with a surgeon telling me that I was going to need a spinal fusion in my lower back. And that was a huge come to Jesus moment for me because-
Steven Sashen:
Pardon me, I think the appropriate thing for a yogi would be a come to Ganesh moment or come to Shiva moment-
Yogi Aaron:
Come to Ganesh moment or Shiva, whichever way you go.
Steven Sashen:
It really doesn’t matter, any one of those.
Yogi Aaron:
But no, that just made me do a whole restock or inventory of everything that I thought I knew. And a friend of mine was teaching muscle activation technique, or not teaching, sorry, doing muscle activation technique. I went to see him and he did this thing with me where he got a group of muscles strong and then passively, and when I say passively, I also mean gently, he really gently stretched me, and where those muscles were strong, they all went weak. It was like turning off a light switch and it blew my mind. I then decided-
Steven Sashen:
I want to pause on that one for a second-
Yogi Aaron:
Sure.
Steven Sashen:
People what happened, because I’m following it. So muscle activation technique in short, is a process where they will do certain things, literally just like some pressure often to wake up some muscles or, and let me say that differently, to remind your brain that those muscles are functioning a neurological thing and get them to turn on. And then there’s things that they will test you with different movements, different positions, et cetera, to see if your brain then stops and those muscles turn off and they become weak and inactive. So if I got it, there was particular muscles that he had gotten strong by doing this “activation” and then just doing a stretch, suddenly they’re weak again. Did I get it?
Yogi Aaron:
Yes, yes, yes. Yeah. And the thing with muscle activation is it’s not really about the muscles. It’s working with the neuromuscular system, which I mean, blows my mind because so many bodybuilders can be walking around with really big muscles and none of them are working, which is why a lot of bodybuilders get injured all the time. So he tested me after he stretched, they all went weak, he then, I like to use this expression, turned the muscles on, so he turned the muscles on and they just started to become strong. And I’ve conducted this experiment many, many, many, many times on students who come in and are questioning whether or not I’m a nut job or not. And it’s fascinating to watch their eyeballs jump out of their head when they feel themselves strong and then feel themselves weak. But going back to the story, I decided to study muscle activation technique myself.
It was created by Greg Roskopf, who’s go to school outside Denver, Colorado. And in that world, there was nobody translating this into yoga. So then I took it upon myself to do it, and I initially did it just for myself and for my students, but as I started to see people becoming pain-free as a result of this, which is a direct result to muscles working properly, people get out of pain really quickly. And so I decided that we need to have a real conversation, not just in the yoga world, but also in the fitness world and in any kind of movement world because we are stretching and it’s actually making us, I use this word very strongly and intentionally, crippled. We are crippling ourselves. I know that we’re recording and we’re live, but I have a very fascinating story to tell you, not now, but later about-
Steven Sashen:
Oh, come on.
Yogi Aaron:
Well, it’s about my mother because your whole thing is feet. And I have been really starting to study feet recently, and my mother just all of a sudden started getting plantar, I never pronounce it right, plantar fasciitis. And-
Steven Sashen:
Well, let me pause and say, maybe, but keep going and I’ll come back to-
Yogi Aaron:
Well, enormous pain in her feet. And so she asked me what to do. I’ve just started putting out some exercises for the feet, which of course don’t involve stretching in the message. She said, “Well, I’ve been doing some stretching.” I said, “Stop stretching. Just start doing this.” And within literally, and I’m not exaggerating, 24 hours, her pain has gone down like 90% and she’s able to walk normally. So it goes back to what I was saying, once we get the muscles working in the body, the joints are supported and the stress is released. It is no longer being inflicted by stress. And a lot of people forget that the byproduct of stress is inflammation, which is causing the pain. So if we get the muscles working, no more stress.
Steven Sashen:
So first of all, thank you. There’s a lot of things to tackle in there. So one is, I’ll start with your mother and please don’t take that line out of context. The thing that happens often, people will say, “I have plantar fasciitis”, and I will look at them and go, “No, you don’t”. They’re like, “What?” I go, “I can see it from a mile away. You’ve actually got really tight calves. They’re hypertonic.” And so I don’t say stretch them, but I say, “Let’s do some things so that they’re not hypertonic, that they’re not just constantly stressed”, and people are like, “Oh my God, that helped.” And my story, actually, it’s fun. It was a special ops guy who I met at a trade show and he said, “We all switched to barefoot shoes. We all got plantar fasciitis. I went, “No, you didn’t.” He’s like, “What?” And I said, “Again, I can see it. So can I stick my thumb on your calf?” And I can see the spot that’s super tight, and I just put my thumb right there and started digging in.
And this guy who’s like 6,5, 250, no body fat, hits the ground. And I just sat there grinding on his calf for a few minutes and I said, “All right, stand up and see how you feel.” He goes, “Wow, it’s like 90% better.” I went, “Yeah, go back to the base and have your PT do that for everybody.” I bumped into him a year later. He goes, “That was it.” So that’s one part.
The next thing is as a competitive sprinter, that would be me, the thing that’s been very interesting to me, and by interesting, I mean frustrating, is the research couldn’t be more clear and agree with you that the worst thing you could do prior to something like sprinting is stretch. And yet you go to any track meet and guess what people are doing? They’re stretching. And at best people have gone from doing static stretching, like sitting down and doing hurdler stretch to doing dynamic stretching, which is fundamentally not really any different, especially the way people are doing it. The news is out there a little bit, but it’s just not making it down to humans in the place that would be valuable for them. And the other thing, I had two more thoughts that pop in my head. One of course, and it’s too late to make this joke work, unfortunately, but I’ll tell it anyway.
It’s a comic, and I wish I remember who it was who said this. He goes, “I’ve been doing yoga a really long time. In fact, I’ve been doing it so long that when I started doing it was just called stretching.” And I truly like that line. But again, given our conversation, not at all funny now, but last but not least, the thing that occurred to me is the people that I know who’ve gotten really good about getting really flexible, didn’t do it by stretching. They did it by making the opposing muscles really strong. And so I had a hunch you would nod your head at something like that. So anyway, and back to your point about bodybuilders. I mean, one of the guys who’s a friend of mine who is famous for this, is a guy he calls himself Jujimufu, otherwise known as Jon Call.
And Juji is famous for doing splits between two chairs while either holding a human being, Heidi Klum on America Most Wanted, or a hundred and some odd number of pounds on a barbell above his head. And he will tell you, when he was a kid, he was doing martial arts and they did stretching, but you want to get that way, you just need to get your quads and your hip flexors super, super strong. And that’s how he got that way. And there’s other people who’ve done, oh, I wish I could remember. I probably got this book somewhere in my bookshelf, someone else, same thing. It’s like that’s the basic idea. So the fact that you’re nodding your head, I can sense that we’re heading in that direction. So I’ll use that as the springboard, which is a thing that doesn’t really stretch to let me riff on what I just said while I get a drink of water.
Yogi Aaron:
So I loved your yoga joke. That is priceless. And it’s kind of where we’ve started to move to. So many yoga teachers today, self-proclaimed yoga teachers were ex-aerobic instructors who were told by their manager that they had to start teaching a yoga class. And so they just figured it out. And that’s why we see this warped idea of what yoga is. You need to go to yoga class, put on a light show, have the most amazing playlist of Led Zeppelin and AC/DC, and to make people happy because they kind of expect that. And so that’s why I was laughing so much because we don’t have enough honest conversations in the yoga world about why this madness has started.
Steven Sashen:
Oh, well, don’t get me started. I mean, anything where-
Yogi Aaron:
I’m getting you started. I’m starting you.
Steven Sashen:
Well, that’s true. What I mean is, look, I live outside of Boulder, Colorado. I lived in Boulder, Colorado for 20 years, and I’ll say this as a jumping off point for somebody to rail in against me, one of the things that amazes me is there’s no willingness to question things like Buddhism. So there are people who will have a lot of opinions about Christianity in its various forms, about Islam in its various forms, about Judaism and its various forms, but Buddhism is off limits. It’s cool, it’s fine, it’s immune to all those things. And I would argue that it is as necessary for there to be conversations about that world as anything.
Basically anything that’s in the “self-improvement game” needs to really have some attention focused on it and honest conversation about what is working, what isn’t working, what’s gone awry. And look, even in the business world, I have a fantasy. I say, when and if my wife and I sell the company and we have buckets of money, I want to go around to bookstores and buy every book on how to succeed in business and then take them into the parking lot and burn them.
Just any domain that seems to be about the idea of making yourself better is just full of propaganda and mythology and superstition and all those things. And as you probably have discovered, when you point this out to people, they don’t just go, “Oh, cool, let’s take a look.” They get defensive and want to kill you and your children. So it’s a very wacky thing. And I’m only half joking when I say that. When you question or more accurately seemingly attack someone’s beliefs, they do respond like you’re trying to kill them and everyone that’s ever been related to them, it’s a very fascinating phenomenon. And my suspicion is because the way we hold our very sense of self is connected neurologically in some way to the way we hold other kinds of non-provable beliefs. So you get in there and you’re messing with someone’s sense of identity, and we don’t respond well to that, typically, the average human being. So before we back up to how you took this-
Yogi Aaron:
Can I quickly respond to that?
Steven Sashen:
Yeah.
Yogi Aaron:
Because you just said something that I personally dealt with. Before I ended up in the surgeon’s office, I myself had already started to read research on the detriments of stretching. And so in my mindset, I really had a hard time grappling with some ideas. I understood it fundamentally, and it did affect the way I taught yoga to some degree, but part of it was like, I am a yoga teacher, therefore I teach stretching. Therefore, if I don’t teach stretching, who am I? And that was a really hard thing for me to get past. And I empathize with yoga teachers. I’m critical and hard on them. At the same time I’ve walked in their shoes and I can understand that struggle of who am I if I’m not teaching stretching?
I was teaching at this yoga festival, I had this woman come up, she teaches the deep stretching kind of yoga. Sometimes people call it yin, and she also works in a stretching clinic. And so she stretches the heck out of people and opens their hips. And she looked at me after we had some time talking, I was being as respectful as I could, just giving facts and just saying, and did a demonstration with her. And she goes, “Who am I if I’m not stretching people?”
Steven Sashen:
Well, look, I think now is the time that you stop calling yourself Yogi Aaron and change it to Yogi-ish Aaron or something.
Yogi Aaron:
Well, but this is also part of it. One of my catchphrases that I say all the time, what I’m about is flipping the script on yoga and stretching. And so that has many different double entendres, but one of them is, the fact of the matter is nowhere in the yoga world, in any yoga scripture sutra, is there a mention of stretching or the need to be flexible. It’s just nowhere.
Steven Sashen:
Wow.
Yogi Aaron:
And so-
Steven Sashen:
That’s interesting. But I’m also flashing back, so I was in India 15 years ago, it was 16 years ago, I don’t know, something like that, for friend’s wedding. And one of the people who was there was researching the history of yoga because she was really into it and she was getting some big deal scholarship to do this research. And her premise was she was going to find this deep, historical, long-lasting spiritual path or spiritual lineage, whatever. And what she found was no, the yoga that we know today was a political movement, and it’s actually only a couple of hundred years old. And same thing, she’s like, “What do I do with my practice that was all based on this whole spiritual thing when I just discovered that that was actually a recent idea that was mostly done for marketing.”
Yogi Aaron:
Yes.
Steven Sashen:
Well, okay, so let’s just cut to the Chase. So once you start… First of all, actually, I got to ask this because as a guy who’s got, I’m going to use a medical term, pardon me for anyone who doesn’t understand-
Yogi Aaron:
And I want to come back to dynamic stretching, but-
Steven Sashen:
Oh no, we’re going to get there.
Yogi Aaron:
You’re asking about that.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, but I want to ask you a quick question. I was saying we have something in common maybe, and again, I’m going to use a medical term to describe my experience. My back is fucked-up, and that’s the medical term. The other way describing it is I have an L5S1 Spondylolisthesis, grade two spondy with a pars defect. So I imagine you had something similar.
Yogi Aaron:
Mm-hmm.
Steven Sashen:
Okay, yeah. Cool.
Yogi Aaron:
Yeah, yeah. Well, and so my L5S1 is basically grinding into each other and there’s definitely, I forget the term, spindynosis I think it is. I always forget that term.
Steven Sashen:
It’s not that. Now you said that, I can’t get that out of my head.
Yogi Aaron:
And I have a disc herniation between L4 and L5, and so that’s pressing into nerves. And it was actually, that pushed me into the hospital. I just went into this inflammatory process that lasted almost a good part of a year and got to the point where I just couldn’t even walk anymore. It was that bad.
Steven Sashen:
That’s interesting for a yoga boy.
Yogi Aaron:
Yeah.
Steven Sashen:
Okay, so let’s do two things. Talk about the dynamic stretching part, and then let’s jump into once you started having this realization, what changed? What’d you start doing? I mean, let’s talk about what you’re actually doing with people that isn’t stretching, that is yoga.
Yogi Aaron:
Can I answer the first question or second question? Then circle back to the first question ’cause I think that-
Steven Sashen:
You don’t know me very well. You can do whatever the hell you want.
Yogi Aaron:
But it was really the answer to your first question is from the second question. I had to sit with this. How am I going to teach yoga if I’m not teaching stretching? And I feel like I have to back up one second, because you raised something really interesting. How did these yoga postures emerge and what is the purpose of yoga posture? So if you ask most yoga people, they’ll say that the purpose of yoga postures is to prepare the body for meditation. And that’s kind of true, but not really true. And it just depends on what lens you’re looking at it. But yoga postures, so we have like… This will only take less than a minute of explanation-
Steven Sashen:
Knock yourself out.
Yogi Aaron:
But we have potentially the great Sage. He gave us the yoga sutras, he gave us a roadmap for the mind to understand suffering. He’s then, in jumping forward to Sutra 246, he describes exactly the qualities of anasana. And so the asana that he was describing is how to be seated, how to sit for meditation. And he said, there’s two qualities. You have to be comfortable, and by the way-
Steven Sashen:
You screwed up with everybody.
Yogi Aaron:
The word comfortable also is the word sukha. And one of the interesting translations of sukha is joy. And Patanjali also talks about Shraddha, cultivating Shraddha, which is a sense of faith. And this other great Sage came around and translated Shraddha as a joyful state of mind. So there’s this-
Steven Sashen:
Hold on, hold on, hold on. Because I’m going to lose it if I don’t do this. So how do I want to do this one? So I’ve done boatload of meditating, and again, technical term. I’ve done in, I don’t know, 20 plus 10 day programs where I’m sitting for 20 hours a day. And one of the teachers that I sat with is a woman who was a still is Burmese grandmother. And the way her whole path, if you will, what got her to be a meditation teacher was actually very simple. It didn’t evolve a whole lot of effort and suffering and all the rest. And so there are times when we’re all sitting and we’re supposed to sit unmoving for an hour, and there were times, and it’s supposed to be all totally silent. There are times where I’ve sat with her and she will suddenly get irritated and point to someone or go grab someone who’s in this meditation hall and scream at them, “Get out”, and everyone’s like, “What the hell just happened?”
And when I talked to one of the people to whom she did this, he says, “She came up to me after she forced me out of meditation hall and said, take a walk, take a nap, smoke a cigarette, have a joint, do whatever you need to do. Meditation isn’t something that you’re supposed to suffer for. If you’re not already in some state of comfort and spaciousness, you can’t get there from here. Come back when you’re relaxed and then see where it goes.” And most of the people in this particular lineage, and I’m not going to dive into that one, they think it’s the exact opposite, that it’s all about endurance and putting yourself through hell to get to basically a point where your mind snaps and suddenly you’ve got some pleasant things going on. And she’s like, “No, no, no. Start with the comfort and then just work on that.”
Yogi Aaron:
Yeah, it’s a great point. And so Patanjali said sukha and which I find one of the translations, is joy, also easy, comfortable, effortless. Effortless is a really good word. And then the other word is sthira and sthira translates to a few things, but it means stable or still. So we’re getting really still, but you have to be stable to get still. And that’s it. That’s it. Those are the two qualities that you need to master. And just to jump ahead for one second to Sutra 248, he says, “If you can master both of those qualities, embody them, you can overcome all pairs of opposites of life”, meaning that nothing disturbs you in life anymore.
Steven Sashen:
For a little while. And this one, I will, I’m not throwing this under the bus, but I will mention it by name. I for a couple of years was doing Bikram Yoga just because, and after a while I said, it occurs to me that if you could master the Corpse Pose, Savasana, then you’ve mastered yoga. And they looked at me like I was crazy, but that’s exactly what you just described. If you could master lying down effortlessly, then all the rest of it is taken care of. I would-
Yogi Aaron:
And be still.
Steven Sashen:
And be still. I would argue for the fun of arguing or diving into it, that the idea of handling opposites is not about being unswayed, but having a, how do I want to put it, boy, where to go. If you’re upset, you’re upset if you’re happy or happy, and you’re not arguing with either of those, nor are you seeing one as the antidote to the other or the obstacle to the other. So it’s not about being immo… I think this is one of the actual misconceptions about meditative practice or spiritual practice, however you want to think of it, is that you do get to this imperturbable state rather than a state where you’re just not arguing with reality in that same way where there’s a certain open-heartedness to the, for lack of a better term, part of you that is out of sorts and an open-heartedness to the part of you that is happy knowing that that’s not going to last forever.
But there is this idea that the opposites are somehow supposed to be resolved into something approximating imperturbability and perpetual equanimity rather than having an actual human life, but just not doing the added bonus of beating yourself up when it’s not the way you want it.
Yogi Aaron:
Sure. It’s also, I mean, one of the ideas of this, the pairs of opposites is sort of pain and pleasure, and that our boat isn’t constantly being rocked by them, that we’re able to see, as I think you mentioned, see the ultimate reality of life and be able to make decisions that are from a place of within rather than a reactionary space.
Steven Sashen:
Well, it’s funny, I’m thinking about this in a weird way. I have a line about when we’re in some sort of emotional distress and people have the idea that they should… I’ll tell it this way. When I was in college, I was hanging out with a guy who was a meditation/yoga teacher. He and his wife both were, and he had just helped bring this American guy back from Thailand. He’d been meditating on a mountain for God knows how long. And so my friend, the meditation teacher, suggested that a way of bringing himself back would be to coach little league. And so he was coaching having a fine time, then they had their first game, and I happened to have dinner with mall after the first game, and this guy was beside himself and just so frustrated, so upset, got so agitated during the game because he’s coaching a bunch of seven year olds. And I remember him saying, “I’ve got to go do some more meditation.” And I remember thinking, “No moron, coaching a bunch of seven year olds is frustrated. That’s just the way it is.
But we have this idea that if we learn the right meditative technique, the right psychological technique, that when we’re really upset, either it shouldn’t have happened or we should be able to snap ourself out of it, to which I say you can’t be smart when you’re stupid. It’s like when your brain turns into stupid mode, you’re in stupid mode until you’re not, you can’t deliberately get yourself out of it. So back to the pleasure, pain dichotomy. Both of those are a form of stupidity is what I would say. And when we’re in that bliss of a new relationship, we’re unbelievably stupid.
When we’re angry at our partner for being themself, we’re unbelievably stupid. But again, if for whatever reason, you can have the wherewithal to not just add onto that, I shouldn’t be like this, it shouldn’t be like this, then it’s just a weird thing where that dichotomy just doesn’t have the same sway, even though you might have to say to your partner calmly or not, yeah, I’m in dumb mode. I’ll check in with you every 20 minutes till I’m not. So I think because if you read the story, God, we could go down this path for a long time. I don’t want to, I want to come back to the yoga part, but I’m going to do this one thing.
If you read certain stories of the life of the Buddha, for example, he was not just living in a perpetual state of bliss. He was having a very human life, frustrated with his students having difficulty with the government, just like normal, every day, what’s the word I’m looking for? Not bullshit. There was a word, I was looking for an adjective before bullshit that have to do with government and whatever. Anyway, like the DMV, that kind of thing.
Yogi Aaron:
Bureaucracy.
Steven Sashen:
Yeah, yeah, bureaucratic bullshit. That’s what I was looking for. But that doesn’t mean that there’s not something valuable to learn or something valuable, whatever. But people just mythologize this stuff in ways that, again, if you read the text carefully, and I guess what that means is with some inspection, without just buying the mythology, then it’s a very different thing than putting someone on a pedestal and trying to emulate them to become something that no human being has ever become. So anyway, we can go down that path forever. Apparently we will at some point. But let’s back up to the non-stretching yoga. That’s what people came here for. My god, my gods as the case might be in this conversation.
Yogi Aaron:
Well, where I was going with that really quickly-
Steven Sashen:
Well, good luck.
Yogi Aaron:
I’ll segue into this, but that we had this yoga potentially was like, you’ve got to deal with the shit in your mind. And then these people decided that it’s hard to sit, I mean, you just said it’s hard to sit with yourself. So over the course of the millennia, there was different groups that popped up, and one of them is a group of yogis. They’re actually called the North Cult. And the North Cult discovered this body has a lot of energy in it. And if we do certain things with the body, we can start to affect its energy, we can start to move energy in a different way. And so this whole idea of asana came about was a way for us to access the energetic body.
And before some people think like it’s a little woo-woo, we know that if we do a twist, for example, we start to affect the nervous system differently. If we go into a backend, we affect our energy levels, we affect our nervous system differently. So that’s the reason for these postures is to start shifting the momentum of our nervous system. If you take someone who’s depressed and there tends to be, I think, a little bit of lethargia around them, if we can get them doing, for example, some back bends, all of a sudden their nervous system starts to get rewired in a different way, and they feel different about life because they’re feeling different.
Steven Sashen:
Do you know about the interstitium?
Yogi Aaron:
No.
Steven Sashen:
The interstitium is something that has only in the past few years been discovered in the body as either an organ or a system. And people aren’t really sure. There’s like a collagen matrix that surrounds pretty much every cell, and the interstitium is part of that matrix, and it’s basically little fluid filled tubes. The amount of fluid is about one quarter of all the fluid in your entire body, and no one knows what the hell it is and what it does. They’re still figuring that out at all. But what’s interesting is there are some parallels, and I’m not saying they’re equivalent, no one who’s researching this wood, but there are some parallels that are still being explored between when people refer to things like energy body or Qi or Prana or all these things, that maybe some of the things that are happening is that there are places where the flowing this of the interstitium has been impeded for God knows what reason.
And some of these movements or acupuncture or fill in the blank, may help get that flow going. And it literally may be a biomechanical thing that’s happening that does have a neurological response where you feel it and it makes you feel good, better, more energized, et cetera. Those are all words that we use arguably badly described feelings. But it’s a fascinating thing because there are people now having questions about how does this relate to yoga or Ayurvedic medicine or Tibetan medicine, which by the way, the Dalai Lama’s doctor 40, 30 something years ago didn’t speak a word of English, took my pulse, smelled my pee, and gave me the most accurate diagnosis of every medical event I’ve ever had in my life. Crazy.
So how do you explain that? I don’t know, maybe there’s something. Maybe it’s something, but suffice it to say, it’s open up this conversation between people who had been at odds with each other, where it’s like there’s no proof for how acupuncture works other than for pain reduction, which we can argue it has to do with just releasing dopamine or whatever the hell. So anyway, so maybe this energy body, don’t know, is related to this interstitium. And to your point, whatever it is, it is having this neurological, neurochemical effect that’s fascinating.
Yogi Aaron:
It is completely fascinating. You described going to Bikram before. I mean, it doesn’t, as much as I rag sometimes on some of these other kinds of yoga, like Bikram for example, the fact of the matter is people go into these yoga classes, they do some postures, they breathe and things start to shift in them. How do you explain that? And-
Steven Sashen:
Heat. It’s just the heat. Sit in 103 degree room with 95% humidity for an hour and a half, that’s all you need. Really that’ll do it.
Yogi Aaron:
That too. So this idea of stretching is not in the yoga anthem at all.
Steven Sashen:
It’s so cool.
Yogi Aaron:
And it’s something that has come out in this last 50 odd years, especially we saw it really start to pop up more so in the seventies and eighties, and as I said, people started getting into yoga. All of a sudden aerobic instructors were faced with this dilemma of, “Oh, I don’t know anything about yoga, but I’m going to start teaching it and I’m going to put some music behind it. I’m going to put on my leotards and leg warmers and a headband, and we’re going to call that yoga.” And of course, all the men got scared, which is a whole other topic. And then it’s completely changed into something that it was never of course intended to be.
But in the whole anthem, there is no mention of stretching or flexibility. So when I started going down this path, one of the things I started asking was, well, what is the intention of yoga? What are the postures supposed to be about? And that started to inform me about, okay, well, it doesn’t matter how far, for example, you fold forward, if you fold forward a little bit, 10 degrees, you breathe, you bring in intention, you practice sukha and sthira, you’re doing yoga. And that is a really profound experience. So that was one part of the equation, another part of the equation-
Steven Sashen:
Can we pause on that one for a second?
Yogi Aaron:
Yep.
Steven Sashen:
Because I think people can have the experience of it. So can you imagine people are sitting somewhere, can you walk, I mean just that simple example you gave of a 10 degree forward bend or whatever you want to do, with the right mindset, et cetera, can you walk people through that for a minute just so they can get the feeling for what you just described?
Yogi Aaron:
Yeah, sure. Let’s do even something a little bit more simple, because if people are sitting and listening to this, which they probably are, or running, not driving though. If you’re driving, stop the car or don’t do that.
Steven Sashen:
So if you’re driving, pull over and stop the car.
Yogi Aaron:
Pull over. Pull over and stop the car. Thank you.
Steven Sashen:
To be clear.
Yogi Aaron:
But just talking about a backend and the energetic effects of back bending. So if you bring your arms up to the sky, have them in a V form and with the thumbs pointed back, and then just close your eyes and find your chest lifting up a bit, feel your shoulder blades not necessarily drop. Don’t pull them down. Just allow them to be comfortable. Now take the thumbs and drive them back about three or four degrees, and you start to feel your chest opening up. Lift your chin about three degrees up, and now just breathe in deeply and exhale deeply and feel the oxygen filling your lungs, hitting down to the bottom of your chest cavity. And then exhaling completely and do about two more breaths just like that, inhaling deeply. Now see if you can bring your arm bones back just a little bit more and maybe just lift the chest a little bit more. And then exhale, let the arms come down. And as you come down, just take a moment, a very brief moment, and notice the quality of your mind. And there you practice yoga.
Steven Sashen:
But I want to highlight especially the sukha part in any part of that, whether it’s in the middle of it or the releasing of it, in paying attention to the quality of your mind, if you notice just that sweetness if you will, that little bit of pleasure, doesn’t have to be a lot, just that little bit. That’s from what I’m hearing from what you’re saying, that’s it.
Yogi Aaron:
That’s it. And just doing that little movement and breathing consciously, intentionally is enough for us to start shifting our momentum. And you just think about the typical office worker. What do they do when they get tired? They literally do that pose. They bring their arms out, lift the chest, and now it’s a little bit more forced, and it’s only for a brief second, but they’re trying to shift their momentum. There’s this innate quality within us to want to move in a different way, energetically speaking. And so that’s one part of the equation. It’s like one of the very first questions I always ask my students who come and train with me is, how much flexibility do you think you need to have to be happy?
And so if you have that question in your mind, how much do I actually need? And what am I really doing this for? Am I doing this with the goal of becoming more stable, becoming pain-free in my body, or am I doing this with the goal of trying to look like a certain shape? And if that is the goal, is that really going to make you happy? I don’t know a single person who can bring their forehead to their knees and is happy as a result of doing that.
Steven Sashen:
Well, it’s so interesting because human beings, all we seem to do is try to predict or imagine the things that we need to do to be happy in some imagined future. And we’re horrible at guessing what that would be. And we’re worse at remembering how bad we are at making that guess. And then of course, we think that we’re special. And if a million people told us that it wouldn’t work ’cause they tried it and it didn’t work for them, we’d still go, “Yeah, but if it was me”. I mean, I know that everyone who won the lottery is no happier after they won the lottery. Sometimes worse. But if I won the lottery, I’d be different. Okay. Yeah, you keep telling yourself that.
Yogi Aaron:
So that was one part of the equation. Another part was to then say, okay, if we are going to work towards a forward fold for whatever reason, because we want to do a forward fold and we want to hold that pose for a little longer maybe, and of course we’re always working within people’s ranges of motion, but if we are working towards something, what do we need to do to prepare? And so this comes into that whole dynamic stretching, working on activating the agonist muscles. And so one of the biggest mistakes that people make when they’re stretching and why they hurt themselves so much isn’t because they go deep. By the way, that has absolutely no bearing at all, in my humble opinion on it. What happens is let’s use a hamstring stretch. So people like the runners, you were talking about running earlier, they’re going to go and they want to stretch.
And so they’re like, “Oh, I’ve got really tight hamstrings. I should loosen them up before I go for a run”, which is interesting. One of the most fascinating things in my mind that just blows my mind, you and I and all the people listening right now, when we were in grade school, we learned biomechanics. We learned how muscles work. We learned that muscles work by contracting. What do they contract for? They contract to move bones. So a bone can only move when a muscle is contracting properly. And the other thing they do is stabilize joints. We also learned another fact about muscles, that muscles work in pairs, as you alluded to earlier. When one muscle is contracting, the opposite muscle is releasing. Now you can use the word stretching. That’s not really, I think, the best biomechanical term for it. If you really want to look at what it’s doing, it’s just letting go.
It’s letting go to allow movement in a joint. And it only does that when the opposite muscle is contracting properly. So with the hamstrings, the reason why people are having tight hamstrings is because the quads are not contracting properly. And so what is interesting is why are the muscles then tight? Well, the muscles tight because the body senses instability. And the central nervous system sends an SOS message to the body basically saying, “Tighten up, tighten up, tighten up.” There’s instability in the hip joint, there’s instability in the knee joint, so tighten up. And the correct thing to do then would be to go, “My hamstrings are tight. Where is the source of the instability?” Well, the logical place would be to go, “Well, my hamstrings are tight, therefore probably my quads and or my hip flexors”, the quads are part of the hip flexors, to activate them and get them working properly.
And so where I’m going with this is coming back to yoga postures. The biggest mistake that people make is like you see Stiff Biff, for example. You get Stiff Biff in your yoga class and he can barely touch his toes. So what do all, if we took a thousand yoga teachers, what would a thousand of them say? I bet you, if I was a betting man in Vegas, I would bet every single one of them would say, “Biff, you need to stretch your hamstrings. Biff, your back is too tight. Biff, we need to open your hips.” One of those three things, pretty much all of them would say, and what do we really need to do with Biff is get his core muscles activated. They’re not contracting properly, they’re not shortening properly, his quads are not shortening properly. And so when we focus on just stretching in Stiff Biffs case, the back muscles and or the hip extensors and or the hamstrings, if we’re just focusing on that, we’re negating the whole problem, which is these muscles are not firing properly.
But this is what makes it even worse, is when you start to stress out the muscles, the hamstrings, you’re now going to have a reciprocal effect, a negative reciprocal effect on all of the muscles that should be working, all of the front body muscles too, because they in turn lose their ability even at a greater range to be able to contract properly. So how I started flipping the script, again, the flipping the script has a lot of connotations to it, but one of them is no longer worried about stretching, but activating the agonist muscles, activating the muscles that should be shortening as we go into certain postures.
Steven Sashen:
That’s really interesting. So I imagine, and please correct me / give me an example that in a class that you would lead, if you are doing some sort of forward bending, for example, your cue would be about contracting the muscles that would allow the forward bend to happen. Am I-
Yogi Aaron:
Yes.
Steven Sashen:
So what would that sound like, for example?
Yogi Aaron:
Well, it would sound a couple of different ways. Number one, I would do certain muscle activation practices to get all of the trunk flexors working properly. So if you come into a range of motion and those muscles aren’t working, then you’re going to create more stress and that stress then will shut down more muscles. So just doing simple muscle activation practices to get the core muscles working. Muscle activation practices are not that complicated. There’s a lot of crossover between certain yoga postures and the muscle activations. For example, in most yoga classes you’ll see plank pose. Well, if you cue plank properly, like an upward pushup position for example, or lower plank, when you come onto your elbows, if you cue it properly, you then start to activate all the transverse of dominance, for example. So right away you’re now starting to activate some big trunk flexor muscles.
But then when you are doing a forward fold, let’s just imagine for example, if I was going to teach wide leg forward fold, there’s a couple of ways that I would do it, but one of them is I want to take the arms out of it. I don’t allow people to just fall forward in using gravity to pull them down. I cue it, say bring the hands to the hips or clasp your hands behind your back, and that way they won’t use their hands at all. Now I’ll say stand tall, extend the spine, and then come forward like 10 degrees or 20 degrees. And as you come forward, feel the pubic bone lift, squeeze the sides of the belly in towards the midline, and now you’re starting to use your core. But the thing is, a lot of these muscles start to engage, especially like TVA, for example, transverse abdominis.
It’ll start to engage once the body is off its center. And so by having them stop at 20 degrees, now the muscles are really starting to get kick started. And that kickstart then signals to the nervous system in the form of gamma motor neuron co-activation, say that 20 times really fast.
Steven Sashen:
Nice.
Yogi Aaron:
Gamma motor neuron co-activation. It sends a message to the nervous system saying, “Hey, we’re here.” And the central nervous system sends back a message and says, “Okay, contract.” And so we’re reinforcing this feedback loop. While I’m on this topic of gamma motor neuron co activation, when you stretch, what actually starts to happen is that gamma motor neuron co-reactivation, in other words, the telephone communication system becomes desensitized. It actually cuts off. And that’s why people become weaker because it actually desensitizes that communication system. And I’ve actually heard people that know the science of stretching talking about that as if it’s a positive thing. And I’m like, “Are you kidding me?” Because you want that system to be working properly so muscles can contract and contract on demand. So anyway.
Steven Sashen:
Oh no, that was great. I mean, that was basically the short version of living through the idea of a class without actually experiencing it. Clearly 180 degrees different from anything anyone has probably experienced going to a yoga class and arguably something that makes more sense logically, philosophically, et cetera, without the necessity to add any woo or additional woo.
So that was really, really interesting. I got to be totally candid about this. I don’t know what that means. I’m going to be totally candid about this. When I think about my post-retirement life, I thought maybe yoga class be fun. But I’ve never found most yoga classes in any way really interesting. I had a couple of really cool experiences in Bikram, like doing this one particular pose where something in my back just seized up into this massive cramp. And once it let go, I had more flexibility in my shoulder than I had in years. That was pretty cool. But beyond that, just seeing a bunch of people who were semi clad at 6:00 AM, that was entertaining too. But what you just described makes so much sense and seems like such a much more interesting exploration than just try to get to the pose the way that person in front of you who has rubber bands for legs can do. It’s like, “Oh, this sounds compelling.” And of course, Costa Rica, what could go wrong?
Yogi Aaron:
Exactly. One of the biggest, I think compliments, if I’m going to use that word, that I’ve received is from people who have said, and especially I’ve had people that have been in yoga for a long time come up to me and say that they’ve never felt so much in their body afterwards. And when you’re doing this, see, the thing is like we always say in yoga that it’s about developing a mind body connection, which is very true. We’re becoming kinetically aware of our body, which is a positive thing. But what we’re missing is the proprioception, that proprioceptive connection to our body. And by stretching, we’re actually cutting it off. And I would argue that if we improve proprioception, which by the way happens at an unconscious level, it’s not conscious. When I’m testing people, their muscles are going to contract or not. They have no willpower over it at all. But if we improve that proprioception, by the way, which ties into the work that you do with people’s feet, you’re improving proprioception in a big way, you’re actually going to improve kinetic perception.
Steven Sashen:
Well, you’re giving me the opportunity to clear up a misconception. A lot of people think proprioception is the experience of feeling the ground. What it actually is is the awareness of where your joints are in space, basically.
Yogi Aaron:
Yes.
Steven Sashen:
And that doesn’t mean that when we’re talking about barefoot running or minimalist footwear, it’s not about proprioception. It is, but not the thing of like, “Oh, I’m feeling the ground.” It’s that you are becoming more aware of how you arrange your body in space, if you will, where your foot is landing and what that does to all the other upstream joints. So we like to say that, or my wife came up this line, she goes, “Our shoes are not a medical device even though they may produce medical benefits. They’re actually just a coach. They’re giving you feedback that you can use to move.”
Actually, I’ll tell you my favorite proprioceptive story. A guy contacted me last week and said his father-in-law has, I think he might have just either diabetic neuropathy or peripheral neuropathy, I’m not sure. But his doctor tested and just put a scraper thing on the bottom of his foot, and the guy couldn’t feel anything. There was no reflex arc, there was no nothing, just couldn’t feel the bottom of his foot. And yet he’s living in an assisted living facility where they have a number of blind people and what they’ve done to accommodate the blind people is have different types of carpet so they know where they are, say in the hallway.
And so this guy, he said his father-in-law can’t feel anything with the bottoms of his feet, but he can close his eyes and we can move him around the place, and he can tell you where he is because he can feel the carpet when he’s wearing your shoes. And I said, that’s because he’s getting proprioceptor feedback from the position of the joints in his feet. He’s not feeling the soles of his feet, he’s getting that other information, which is cool as shit.
Yogi Aaron:
Yeah, it’s so cool. I mean-
Steven Sashen:
That’s a plus.
Yogi Aaron:
The whole idea is really amazing. Again, what happens when we start getting muscles working properly and we build up that proprioception, which again, it happens. Really, it’s this feedback loop with the central nervous system. It’s happening on autonomic nervous system, but then our peripheral awareness just dramatically increases a lot. So that’s the circle in how I went from teaching regular yoga to introducing this idea. Unless you really knew me, if you walked into one of my classes, you probably wouldn’t know what I was doing. You wouldn’t know to differentiate it with the exception that I don’t do pigeon pose, I don’t do child’s pose, and there’s certain things that I just won’t do in my yoga classes, and I definitely don’t play AC/DC and turn the heat up.
Steven Sashen:
So actually you got to do this. So explain what those two poses are and tell me why you don’t do those.
Yogi Aaron:
When I ended up in the hospital, one of the number two poses I was doing was child’s pose and pigeon pose. And so child’s pose is when you come onto your shins and you rest your stomach onto your thighs and your forehead comes to the ground. It’s a very typical pose that most yoga classes will have. And a lot of yoga teachers are just trained and it just kind of rolls off of their tongue automatically without any process of thought. If you need to rest, just come into child’s pose. So that’s out there and it’s sort of the norm, and it’s the worst yoga pose that you can do. And the reason why is because you are overstretching all the back muscles, you’re overstretching your hip extensor muscles. So all these muscles start stretching, and now you’re forcing your abdominal muscles to shorten and all of your hip flexor muscles to shorten.
So all of these muscles now are becoming disabled, literally. And because a lot of those muscles relate to trunk and spine rotation, now there’s five groups of muscles that are basically shutting down, major major muscle groups that are shutting down. And the other thing is that you and I both have back issues. I would argue that either most people, if not all people have some sort of disc herniation or are doing things in their life that will lead them to a disc herniation. I think if you did an autopsy on most older people, obviously after they pass, you would find some form of, well, here’s disc herniation.
Steven Sashen:
Where’s the fun of waiting?
Yogi Aaron:
So the point is, when you look at what child’s pose is doing, it’s actually exacerbating that disc herniation. And if you look at how most people are sitting throughout the day and then go look at child’s poses, actually mimicking that potty posture, which is not what we want to do.
Steven Sashen:
Well, and back to your original point, if you were going to do that pose, you would do it by engaging the muscles in the front to get you there, rather than having it be this thing that’s ostensibly just relaxing in that position.
Yogi Aaron:
But the thing is that most people’s bodies, and when I say most, I would argue probably somewhere between 95 and 99%, don’t actually do that. And here’s the reason why. When you want to see what somebody’s natural muscle function is, take everything out of it, take gravity out of it, take any kind of ability to get you there outside force. And by that, lie on your back. You don’t do this now, but lie on your back and then bring your arms to the sides and then with your muscles, pull your knees to the chest. Most people would have a good five, six, seven, eight inches from their chest to their thighs, to their knees. But what are we doing in child’s pose? We’re actually forcing, again, those muscles to contract. So even if most people did prepare for child’s pose, I still wouldn’t put them in it because again, you’re passively forcing muscles to do what they’re not ready to do.
There’s one of the words I like to use is accountability in biomechanics. There’s just no accountability. If I wanted to do that pose, the accountable way to do it would be to have someone lie on their back again, arms to the sides, and then use their muscles to bring their knees to their chest. Of course, that’s no longer relaxing. So that would take the relaxing part out of it. But the alternative to child’s pose would be to come and do this great yoga pose, which is a relaxation pose, it’s called crocodile pose or Makarasana, you come onto your stomach and you just rest your forearms on top of each other and your forehead to the forearm. And that is a great pose to really begin oxygenating the blood and to breathe because you start breathing diaphragmatically and all the blood starts to pool down at the base of the lungs. And so it’s a great oxygenator.
Steven Sashen:
I love it. Well, Aaron, this has been a total, total pleasure. And again, there are very few people who dive into something that they already know well with the willingness to discover something new. So hats off to you.
Yogi Aaron:
Thank you.
Steven Sashen:
And yeah, so it’s an absolute treat. If people want to find out more about this and you and how they can experience what we’ve been talking about, please let them know how to do that.
Yogi Aaron:
Well, one of the ways to do that is go to my website, yogiaaron.com, and we’re going to put a link in the show notes so people can click on that link-
Steven Sashen:
For the fun of though, I know this is going to sound silly, but this is inspired by the fact that I have a physical therapist named Amy and she has a spelling that no human being other than her has, and so just spell out your domain name so people can really get it in their brain.
Yogi Aaron:
Yogi is Y-O-G-I and then Aaron, A-A-R-O-N.com, yogiaaron.com.
Steven Sashen:
Awesome. Well, I hope people do take you up on that and hope they were inspired to either visit yoga from this perspective for the first time or revisit yoga in a whole new way and see what they discover. That would be really, really exciting to hear.
Yogi Aaron:
Thank you.
Steven Sashen:
A, thank you, and B, let me just wrap it up by saying to everyone else, let me know what your experience is, leave some comments in all the places you’re going to leave comments, and again, give us a review wherever, a great one obviously, and thumbs up where you thumbs up and bell icon on YouTube and like it on Facebook and you know what to do. Again, like I said, if you want to be part of the tribe, just subscribe and you can subscribe actually to hear about upcoming episodes. Go to our website.
You can do this on YouTube also just by hitting the subscribe thing, the bell icon, but on our website, www.jointhemovementmovement.com. You’ll find previous episodes. You can subscribe to hear about the upcoming ones. You can find all the places to interact with us in social media, and if you have recommendations or suggestions, people that you think I should chat with, ideally, I’m still looking for someone who thinks I have a case of cranial rectal reorientation syndrome. I would love to chat with them. So you can drop me an email at move, M-O-V-E@jointhemovementmovement.com.
For people who are watching this on video, something Aaron said at the beginning of this that I haven’t addressed. I’m doing this podcast from my home office and behind me is a sign that says shoplifting is a crime. I want to be clear that when I was in c
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