How Is Stretching Killing Us? With Yogi Aaron

Yogi Aaron is a trailblazing yoga teacher who is leading a global rebellion against the harmful practice of stretching. He joins Adiel Gorel to share how he pioneered the groundbreaking approach to yoga that shows people how to live pain-free by activating muscles through Applied Yoga Anatomy + Muscle Activation™.  Yogi breaks down how conventional stretching can weaken muscles and lead to instability, as well as how we can properly listen to the signals of our bodies. He also talks about his yoga retreat center in Costa Rica and how he helps people discover a more permanent solution to their physical pains.

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How Is Stretching Killing Us? With Yogi Aaron

How To Live Pain-Free By Activating Muscles Through Applied Yoga Anatomy + Muscle Activation™

It’s such a joy to be back here with you again. I’m very excited. We have a special guest, Yogi Aaron. Welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me on. We got here.

Introducing Yogi Aaron

I am very fascinated. Yoga is something that we are all exposed to, and familiar with. I will even confess that, several years ago, I used to teach Hatha Yoga in Montreal, Canada, and we are all exposed to it. There are some fascinating notions that you use and teach, and I can’t wait to learn more about them. First, welcome, and then I would like to start with your story. How did you get to this point? How did you develop your method?

That’s cool. That you taught in Montreal. I remember making my way to Montreal and taking a couple of classes, but not several years ago. I got into yoga when I was about eighteen years old. A lot of people who get into yoga, that into it because their bodies are tight, and they are feeling like a lack of range of motion. That’s why I got into it. I worked out to work out. I did yoga to stretch.

Very quickly, though, I started to hurt myself. What happened, was one time I was moving, and I was eighteen. Like I said, I started, and my back seized up on me. I realized that maybe this was happening because my hamstrings were tight. I started stretching more, and I would tell yoga teachers, I have a bad back, and they would be like, “You need to stretch more. We need to open those hips.”

This perpetuated on and on. As time went on, I started to teach. I got into teaching. I found that yoga was a good life path for me, and then you know that deepened my sense of practice,ce and then I ended up in the emergency room of a hospital 25 years later, with an orthopedic surgeon telling me that I was going to need a spinal fusion in my lower back. That was a wake-up call for me to begin investigating how I ended up here. What don’t I know about the body, and what am I doing wrong? What needs to change?

The reason that you found yourself in a hospital we don’t know orthopedic surgeon, did that have to do with the way you were practicing yoga?

What was going on physiologically was I ended up with a herniated disc that was creating an inflammatory process, which was creating an enormous amount of pain. I could barely move and had sciatic pain and all the rest of it. That was what was going on. The stretching, and the way that I was coming into poses. I was probably doing a lot of forward folds at that time. I was doing a lot of hip openers, such as pigeon pose, or some people know as runner’s stretch. I was doing a lot of those kinds of poses and stretching my hamstrings.

All of that stuff kept exacerbating my condition with this disc herniation that was going on. The disc herniation was getting worse because of the way that I was holding my body in these poses. The second part of it was, that I was disabling all of the muscles that should be supporting my spine. I had no support in my lower back. My glutes weren’t working. Nothing was working to stabilize the back, and so everything was exacerbating the issue.

Isn’t that fascinating that sometimes, when we go to a physician or healer, and we tell them, “I have back pain,” and sometimes they say something that seems so old-fashioned and archaic, and they say, “Maybe you should rest for a month,” and the notion is, “No way? My yoga practice, my disc, my Pilates practice? Maybe there’s a point there.”

I don’t know if anybody ever told me to rest. Looking back on it, I should have. The first thing I should have done was stop stretching. The second thing I should have probably done was look at doing some muscle activations. I ended up having to be forced to rest. Like, I could barely move, especially in the last couple of months. I could barely move. There was such an inflammatory process. Now, would it have healed without me doing something medically? Yes.

I never did get the spinal fusion. What they did do was an injection of anti-inflammatories right into the spine. It’s a special procedure, and that helped dramatically but even healing from that took an enormous amount of time. What I needed to do was stop stretching which would have helped months before that and then start to do some more muscle activation practices.

Muscle Activation Technique

There is a bridge between what happened to you and the method that you now teach. You wrote a book. The name of your book is Stop Stretching!, a name that grabs your attention, especially from a yoga teacher. Take us through that route to the system that you have now, that you call yoga anatomy and muscle activation technique.  Please tell us how that came to be.

Thank you. When I ended up in the hospital, shortly after that, I made a trip to New York to see a healer. I call him a healer. He’s much more than that but he’s a person who has a lot of certifications under his belt. He’s a certified chiropractor and trained in Rolfing, but the one modality that he uses the most is the muscle activation technique.

Muscle Activation Technique, or MAT, was created by Greg Roskopf, who got into the healing world and became a movement specialist. One of the big questions he asked was, “Why are muscles tight?” His specialty was working with athletes, and with athletes, for example, they want to improve their internal range of motion. They want to improve hip flexion, hip extension, and all of these things.

The way to do that was through stretching, but what he found was his light bulb moment and it’s a story but he found that when he stretched people, he made them weaker. If you’re stretching a football player and sending them out to play in a game, you don’t want them to leave weaker. You don’t want them to enter with a body that’s not functional, with a muscular system that’s disabled.

He started to test the question, “Why are the muscles tight in the first place?” The muscle activation technique addresses muscle tightness head-on by looking at what muscles aren’t working. I got into that world. My friend Eric, who’s the healer, was working on me. In yoga, we do a lot of hands-on adjustments. Sometimes, we’ll push. I’m going to use the word push, people beyond their end range of motion.

He did this experiment with me where he got my hip flexors to strengthen my psoas more specifically. He got me strong, and then he passively stretched me. It was very gentle, not an obtrusive thing. He just gently moved my body and then came back and tested my psoas again. It tested weakly. That was my light bulb moment because I felt my muscles strong, my psoas strong, and then, in the next moment after he stretched me, I felt it weak. I thought to myself, I need to understand what’s going on here. I went on to study muscle activation techniques. The short story is that I noticed very quickly there was nobody in that world translating this to yoga. That inspired me to take the bull by the horns and bring this into the yoga world.

Before we even go there, why is it that when he stretched your strong psoas, it became weaker? What happened?

It’s because there’s this brain connection literally. I’m not talking figuratively. Biomechanically, we are connected. The brain is connected to the muscle system. One of the medical terms is proprioception. There’s this proprioception between the central nervous system and the muscles. When we start to stretch a muscle, we cut that proprioception. When we start to passively elongate a muscle or force it to shorten, there’s this cut of proprioception.

We also create stress. It’s mild stress, and most of the time, it’s mild stress, but it’s stress and so, that stress is enough to shut that muscle down. If you want to get more into the specifics because I know you love this stuff there’s a communication system always going on between the muscles, the intrafusal muscle fibers, and the central nervous system.

When the intrafusal muscle fibers sense that a muscle needs to shorten, they send a message to the central nervous system in the form of gamma motor neuron coactivation. I’m going to tell you why I’m telling you this in a second. This sends a feedback loop from the central nervous system to the muscle. When we stretch, we start to cut that gamma motor neuron coactivation. We desensitize the intrafusal muscle fibers so that gamma motor neuron coactivation becomes less.

Here’s another factual thing that doesn’t get enough press when you stretch, as I mentioned, you start to become desensitized. That’s how people start to become more flexible because their pain tolerance levels go up. They start to feel less in their bodies. Some people can gain enormous flexibility, and part of that is because they don’t feel any pain or discomfort.

Gaining Flexibility Without Stretching

That’s probably as far as we want to go into that part for our viewers and for me but let me ask you the following question. I’m making an educated guess that you right now are a very flexible person. You can do things like touch the floor with your legs straight, probably put your full hand on the floor, things like that. You are flexible. How does a person get to this level of flexibility without using the title of your book, Stop Stretching!?

What we want to do is improve muscle function. I’m going to use the example you mentioned. If I want to fold forward and touch the floor with my fingers, we need to start thinking differently. Instead of thinking about what muscles need to lengthen, think about what muscles need to shorten. I call it “Stiff Biff.” If you take Stiff Biff your very good friend we all have friends named Biff. He’s trying to touch the floor, but he can only get his hands, maybe to his knees. The immediate thought is, “He needs to stretch his hamstrings. That’s why he can’t touch the floor.” That’s not the real reason. The real reason is that his core muscles specifically, of them are not shortening properly. They’re not able to contract and contract on demand.

As he’s folding forward, he’s got tightness in his hamstrings and his back because the core muscles are not shortening. The core muscles are not contracting, nor are his hip flexors and quad muscles. If you think about it, where I come into it from a different perspective is instead of saying, “Let’s loosen the hamstrings,” I’ll come in and say, “Let’s get the quads and hip flexors to start working.” We’re looking at what muscles need to shorten. We’re looking at the front body. Does that make sense?

It does, but it brings up a question. Let’s say Biff learns to activate the quad muscles, the core muscles. They do what they need to do perfectly. Biff’s hamstrings are still incredibly tight, though. How is that going to resolve?

His hamstrings and the tightness will start to go away once these muscles start working properly. Maybe it won’t go away on a dime. Maybe it won’t go away right away, but it will improve over time. I can tell you something. I’ve worked with a lot of “tight” people, and I constantly see people have that experience of tightness going away. Tightness is a protective mechanism in the body. If Biff can only get his hands to his knees because his hamstrings are tight, it’s the body saying it does not want to go further. It doesn’t feel safe to go further. It doesn’t feel stable past that range of motion. It’s the body’s way of saying, “It’s not safe to go past here.” Once we start to deal with the instability once we start dealing with the muscles that aren’t working the tightness always goes away.

You bring up something that, scientifically, feels very because again, let’s take the stiff person and use that motion. Move forward to touch the floor with your knees straight. You can only reach your knees. Whatever process it is that we normally take, which may take 1 month, 2 months, or a week, depending on the person, to finally touch the floor.

When I think about those processes, they involve resistance. You work against something that tells you, and you say, “Don’t tell me no, I’m going to make it yes, but I’m going to be gradual about it.” I can feel you resisting me, body, but I’m going to force you to go a quarter inch more than you’re comfortable with but the whole process is fighting resistance and a certain amount of pain. You are describing something else.

Very different because what you are alluding to in that statement you hear a lot of yoga teachers say like, “Find the edge. Ride that edge, feel the pain, and breathe into that, and then go further.” Breathe into that, go further. I’m saying, “Don’t do that.” That is the worst thing that you can do to yourself. Pain is the check engine light of the body. Muscle tightness is another check engine light of the body coming on, saying, “There’s something wrong here. We need to fix it.” To fix it, we need to go in and start getting the system working properly.

I suffered severely from tight hamstrings when I got into yoga. To some degree, I still do. If I have been sitting for long periods, or I push my body into something, I will wake up the next morning with tightness, and that tightness is telling me something. It’s saying to me, “Your quads are not connecting properly, your hip flexors aren’t connecting properly.”

About an hour before I got on the show with you, there was tightness in my back from sitting because I had been sitting all morning. I went and did a few muscle activations to start getting my core muscles working. The tightness disappeared. Tightness and pain are two things that are telling us there’s something wrong and the problem is that a lot of us I can speak from personal experience have learned to ignore it and then all of a sudden, you are driving your car in the Mojave Desert, and you’ve ignored the check engine light, and then your car stops working.

How To Stretch The Right Way

The way you described it even intuitively feels very but it brings another question/emotion. I say, “I’m at home by myself, and I want to stretch my hamstrings the way that we always talk about. I can do it.” To do something like you were describing, not only would I need a teacher, but I would need a teacher who knows that system, your system. How do we bridge the gap? How do I? Let’s talk about me. It sounds great. How do I find a teacher?

I have a few responses to that but number one, that’s why I wrote this book, Stop Stretching!, because I go through it very systematically what muscles you need to start working and why so you can start to learn it on your own. There’s a ton of YouTube videos out there. I put a lot of content out there. One of my favorite videos that I put out there and the title of the video is something like, “Become Flexible With These Five Hacks.” Part of it is doing that test bending over, seeing how far you can bend forward, and then doing these five muscle activations.

I put a lot of content out there for people to access. It’s important for people to and I say this delicately but what I endeavor to do is to begin empowering people to learn this stuff so they can start to heal their own body and feel their own pain journey, if you will, and become more empowered by the knowledge.

Many people are reading saying, “No, don’t leave me. Come and teach me,” or if one of your students, how can I do that?

They can come get the book, and access me on YouTube. They can message me, they can take the course. I have a great certification course that they can jump on.

Certification implies some of this is learning to be a teacher.

It’s a certification course for twofold. Either you want to begin learning for yourself and empower yourself. That’s what I endeavor to do or, if you are interested, you can also keep learning to empower others. I have a three-level certification course. Levels 1 and 3 are for personal use, and then level 3 is if you want to teach this to other people.

How do we take those level 1 and 2 courses?

Go to my website, YogiAaron.com, and they can access it from that direction.

Yoga Retreats

You did mention Costa Rica.

I was living in New York City, and I had a yoga studio. I knew that my life path was not going to stay in New York City. I started thinking about a place where I could open up a retreat, like a yoga home. I met my business partner while I was leading a yoga retreat in Costa Rica. We were driving down this dirt road to this retreat center, and there was a Century 21 sign outside this property that we passed. As I looked through this tunnel of bougainvilleas and hibiscus flowers, there was this beautiful emerald sea, turquoise sea, right through there. I felt like it was home. We went back and bought the property, and we opened up Blue Osa Yoga Retreat. We are located in the Corcovado National Park. It’s one of the most biodiverse places on the planet, and we have been open for several years.

You are living in Costa Rica?

Yes. I’m in Costa Rica right now.

People can reach your courses, probably on your website, or you give live Zoom events and stuff like that.

I do it all. The certification course is completely online. You go at it at your own pace. It’s also very interactive, so you do a lot of quizzes and worksheets along the way. You are constantly interacting with me through that process, and then people also come and study with me in Costa Rica. I often lead muscle activation retreats. I’m starting a muscle activation pain-free retreat at Blue Osa. I also lead yoga immersion teacher training as well. For a lot of people who are reading, they might not think that teacher training is right for them because they don’t want to become a teacher but about 70% to 80% of people that do yoga teacher training do it for their purposes. It’s only for them to learn more about yoga. If you study with me, you get hands-on experience on how to do these muscle activations and how to live a pain-free life.

It resonates with me because I was impressed by the work of a friend of mine, who is the foremost Feldenkrais teacher in the world. I told her, “I love your work. How can I do more?” She said, “Take my teacher training.” I said, “What?” Then I did. I’m a teacher of the Feldenkrais method, but, like you say, it’s not for me. I do it on my kids and some friends when they are in pain, but I understand.

When you talk about yourself, even at this stage, sometimes feeling like you are tight and you need to come out of being tight, that brings the reader closer to you because the usual position of a yoga teacher is, “I’m super-duper flexible, amazing, and you are Stiff Biff.” That’s the relationship. It does make me feel comfortable.

I will say that even when I used to teach yoga back in the day, I was a very young man back then and I taught young men and women. Everybody was boys and girls. As the yoga teacher, who did it more than the rest, I was flexible. I was flexible, and yet this could be a coincidence, but I will say it like it was. Every single female student I had was much more flexible than me, even though I was flexible. One other shameful thing I will say is, that I could certainly touch the floor with my forehead, and straight legs, no problem but I could never do a full plow. I couldn’t. Something on the way from being flexible enough to touch the floor like this to doing the plow something was missing. Probably some muscle activation.

Probably some of your core muscles, your trunk flexors, were not firing properly. They were not able to contract, or they weren’t able to contract that much. People that are in touch with their muscle tightness are going to be a lot more stable. People who become flexible have learned to go beyond their end of motion. Their joints go to these extremes, and the huge problem is that they cultivate an enormous amount of instability.

Probably a lot of those bends, I’m going to call them “Bendy Wendys” in your classes, as a Stiff Biff. They have probably been dealing with enormous issues in their bodies since then. I would be very curious to see where they are at in their journey right now in their body but most people that have enormous flexibility always end up with enormous instability, and they have dealt with a lot of issues. A lot of yoga people always look to gymnasts as the pinnacle. “If I could only do that.” One of the things that doesn’t get talked about enough is that 93% of professional competing gymnasts will end up with surgery of some kind. Knee surgery, shoulder surgery, and back surgery.

I didn’t know it was because of flexibility. I was engaged to a gymnastics champion. We didn’t end up getting married. We heard that injuries I thought they came from the landing. The huge landing. When you see it on television it’s beautiful and yet so much weight and momentum goes into your poor little feet. I thought that was the source of her pain.

You look at the amount of stress that they are putting on their bodies. They are constantly stretching. They are constantly trying to make their muscles longer, and they are putting a lot of pressure, a lot of stress, and overuse in their bodies. It’s going to have an impact over time and if you keep stretching a muscle, that muscle is going to lose its ability to contract and stabilize the joints and so, if she’s landing and her muscles aren’t working properly, later on in the journey, that’s going to have a ripple effect down the road for sure.

Are you saying it’s a little bit like you take one of those bands, and you stretch them out, and eventually, the band is going to be a little stretched out? It’s not going to flex back. Is that the same thing that you are talking about?

The analogy I like to use is slinky. If you take a slinky out of the box, and you know it’s brand new, it’s coiled up. The slinky is a better analogy because this exactly imitates what a muscle spindle is. A muscle spindle is a coiled-up spindle, and its nature is to get coiled up. It can lengthen a bit, but when the body needs to move, it coils up.

That slinky, or muscle spindle, is communicating constantly with the central nervous system. You grab your friend, you pull it out of the box, it’s Christmas time. You tell your friend or your sibling, “Take one end and run away as fast as you can, as far as you can. We are going to pull this slinky apart.” What is going to happen with that slinky? It is not going to come back, especially if you’ve pulled it apart so much.

That’s what happens with muscle spindles. When we stretch, we are pulling those muscle spindles apart. Now, a muscle spindle, especially when you are younger you said to your fiance when she was a gymnast, and she was much younger her muscle spindles would come back. They would bounce back when they were younger but as we get older, as the body has more stress remember, the byproduct of stress is inflammation. All of those things are going to have a negative impact on those muscle spindles being able to recoil up. Over time, we get weaker and weaker with muscles that aren’t working properly.

Bendy Wendys And Stiff Biffs

Let me ask you a question that will have a little bit of a Devil’s Advocate slant to it. Let’s take Stiff Biff and Bendy Wendy. We put them in the world, and they do some physical activity. Maybe they play basketball. Maybe they’re even riding in a car, and the road is very rough, like in Costa Rica. The road could have many holes. Now, there is trauma that’s created. Maybe, playing basketball, somebody pushes the person very abruptly. Wouldn’t Bendy Wendy not be as injured because she has more leeway versus Stiff Biff?

It’s an interesting experiment to make, but I’m going to say I can’t speak definitively. My explanation for Stiff Biff would take a little longer, but Bendy Wendy would be suffering a lot. I have seen a lot of Bendy Wendys in my life. One of my dearest friends is a Bendy Wendy. She has had a hip replacement, she’s had knee surgery, she’s had frozen shoulder issues, and she’s about to go in for possibly another hip surgery. Then there are other issues going on. I remember one time we were hiking. There was a whole group of us. It was a group of yoga students and she got maybe a couple of kilometers into the hike, and her knee just started screaming at her. She had these enormous knee issues.

The problem with people who get that degree of flexibility or any degree. I look at myself. I wasn’t necessarily Bendy Wendy but I had some range of motion. It always leads to instability, which will always lead to injury. You are going to be much more prone to outside stresses that are hitting you. I will give you one other quick little example. I was leading a yoga teacher training. This was in 2012. At that point, I was pretty flexible. I was leading this training. It was towards the end, and I was participating and doing a lot of the practice with them.

I remember, like, one of the last days, I demonstrated this pose. It was an arm balance pose. It was a pose I was used to, but I remember I went into it after sitting for a long time. I was stressed out from leading the training. I was about to leave for vacation. I did this pose, and I felt something in my neck, and I was like, “Huh,” and then shrugged it off.

The next morning, I’m in the shower, and I reach up for the shampoo bottle, and my whole upper back sits up on me, tightened up. That action of reaching up my system was so compromised. I was left completely depleted. What did my body do in response? It tightened up. Again, muscle tightness is a sign that the body is trying to protect itself and stabilize itself. That was my body’s response to so much instability in it.

Something here is not intuitive about it because, again, let’s say I have a flexible person and a very stiff person, and I push them. They are not anticipating my push. We are playing basketball, and I inadvertently push them. The flexible person’s shoulder can give more. The very stiff person there’s no give. They get hurt sooner. It’s not intuitive to me.

I would have to dissect how Stiff Biff would be, but Bendy Wendy would become very hurt. If her muscles are not able to respond and contract on demand remember, muscles stabilize joints even if you get pushed a little bit, you’ve got to stabilize yourself. If you don’t have that ability to stabilize yourself, then you are going to be injured at some point, somewhere in the body. Something is going to happen. It’s much easier to injure somebody who has a lot of flexibility than it is for somebody who doesn’t.

Episode Wrap-up

Let’s talk about resources. Not only are you located in Costa Rica, but people in general now are much more inclined to buy books on Amazon, to buy courses on the web. There’s a website, you said it’s YogiAaron.com, and then we can go there. There’s a book that you wrote, which I bought with very nice illustrations. The courses we can take are also local teachers that one may find. Let’s say you are in Los Angeles, is there such a thing?

One of the movements I’m working on creating is to start certifying more people around the world who have done these courses and studied with me, so people can start accessing teachers in their local neighborhoods. That is a project that’s going to be happening. My goal at the end of 2024 is to have this directory live and happen. I’m going to say no, but yes.

I love the way that you break the conventional way of looking at this. This is very fascinating. I, myself, will go deeper into learning and understanding this, and I hope that many people who are reading this will use these resources. I want to thank you so much for taking the time. Especially since I know that right out there, there’s the beautiful Costa Rica coastline, and here you are in the studio. Thank you for taking the time.

Thank you so much for having me on. I appreciate it.

Thanks a lot.

Important Links

• Yogi Aaron
• Stop Stretching!
• Yogi Aaron YouTube
• Blue Osa Yoga Retreat

About Yogi Aaron

One of the most sought-after teachers today, Yogi Aaron, is trailblazing a new path in the world of yoga. Known for his unorthodox perspectives on stretching and flexibility and how both cause more harm than good, his teachings aim to help as many people as possible live a pain-free life so they can realize yoga’s true intentions.

He is the creator of the revolutionary approach to yoga — Applied Yoga Anatomy + Muscle Activation™ (AYAMA). AYAMA focuses on activating and engaging muscles rather than stretching them — and it isn’t being taught by anyone else! This yoga and movement methodology reduces pain and risk of injury while increasing range of motion, muscle strength, stability, and alignment.

Students study with Yogi Aaron in person at Blue Osa, his breathtakingly gorgeous beachfront Yoga Retreat in Costa Rica, or become certified through his online AYAMA™ Certification Program, making it possible for anyone to study with him from anywhere in the world — and be trained to teach this pain-free approach to others!

His online platform, The Yogi Club, expands his reach, making living a pain-free life accessible to all with a vast on-demand library of classes and courses. Yogi Aaron’s sense of humor, contagious laugh, courageous and adventurous spirit, and his own healing journey of overcoming pain and discovering and living his life’s true purpose make him a stand-out and favored leading yoga teacher today.