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Yoga is Strength

Moving through his pre-class warm up, Phillip Clift, 32, is nothing short of inspiration. His compact, muscled form flows with great grace through some of yoga's toughest postures—arm balances, handstands, headstands, backbends—rendering them with perfect, beautiful ease. I break a sweat just watching him. He is a testament to the physical benefits of yoga, and his ashtanga yoga class is the embodiment of what has become known as "power yoga"—an aerobic flow of yoga postures that emphasize strength and endurance.

"People who are runners and athletic types tend to gravitate toward ashtanga," says Clift, who's a licensed massage therapist. "An ashtanga personality is someone who is very intense, very driven, because it's very physically demanding if you take it to its full expression."

Clift's grueling but rewarding two-hour Wednesday night class at Our Center is typically packed to the gills with students who, like Clift, wear the benefits of yoga on their taut and toned bodies. "There is no better method of developing physical fitness than yoga," he continues. "It's the most balanced, and you develop strength and flexibility and the ability to control and balance, and you also gain a sense of ease. The stereotypical view of yoga is that it's relaxation and stretching. But that couldn't be further from the truth. To balance your structural system, you have to have equal amounts of strength and flexibility."

Another form of power yoga available in Knoxville is Bikram's yoga, a series of 26 challenging yoga postures, each performed twice in a room heated to 98 degrees. It's hot, it's sweaty, it's extremely challenging—and it offers, at the end, an incredible high. Bikram's is known as a healing yoga—and doing it, you get the sense of being wrung out like a dirty sponge.

"When I took my first Bikram's class, it was my first understanding of the two ends of hatha yoga—one I call feel-good, the other I call hard-core," says Ron Felix, 49, who teaches the class twice a week at his Knoxville Yoga Center on Middlebrook Pike. "They both exist."

"What first came over from India in the '30s was feel-good—who was doing it then? A lot of middle aged women," he explains. "But now yoga is getting popular with everybody. So what are we going to do with the athlete who wants flexibility but strength, too? We're going to dig up all these other styles of yoga that are very physical."

And nothing, surely, could be more American than extreme yoga.