Yoga instructor Emily Hyland shares 3 tools that help round out her practice

Dumbbells may not be the first tool that comes to mind when you think about yoga, but Hyland considers strength training an essential part of her practice. 

“Yoga is not enough and we need to strength train,” she says. “[It’s the] necessary imperative sister practice to flexibility and mobility practice like yoga.”

“These are the weights I use at my home gym and also at my studio, at my yoga studio, where we also have strength training classes,” she says. 

While she loves how “beautifully beige” her set is, the rubber grip is what makes these especially functional. 

“The grip on them is rubber, and so they're not going to blister and hurt as you're building your grip strength, like many of the metal weights with the traction on them in the gym,” she says. 

The neutral design then caught her eye during a simple “Google search,” as Hyland says, “they looked so cute, so [I] had to get [them].” But another detail made her feel even better about buying from the brand. 

“They're a woman-run company, so it's also really nice to support them and they're leaning into women in the strength world.”

But at the end of the day, adding strength workouts is all about playing the long game for Hyland.

“Building muscle mass and bone density is a vital part of keeping our bodies healthy and durable until the day we die,” she says. “So we can all be doing this when we're 150 [years old].”

What really deepened Hyland’s understanding of yoga and how she practiced was discovering this book by Susanna Barkataki. 

“Yoga is not an exercise modality, it's a holistic philosophical path for living life,” Hyland says. She first learned about Barkataki’s work through a fellow yoga teacher and began digging in to better understand what it means to practice yoga. 

“This woman in particular does super amazing social justice advocacy about what it actually means to practice yoga,” she says. 

Barkataki’s work also helped Hyland better understand a change she had already made in her own teaching: no longer using “namaste” in class. “[It] helped me understand why that sort of spiritual signaling is not something I need or want to be doing,” she says.

And despite fleshing out the deeper questions around yoga’s meaning and practice, Hyland says the book never feels overly academic. 

“This is a great book for either emerging teachers, for long-term teachers like myself to do some professional development, or students wanting to learn about what the concepts are and what it means to practice yoga.”

“It is very approachable,” Hyland says. “It is not super dense. It’s meeting you where you are.”

“It’s asking you to consider yourself and open up to learning. The text is very, very friendly.”

“I like to put this on right before I practice,” Hyland says. “I like to use this if I'm doing some work on folks in a restorative, or if I'm working with someone one-on-one and they like to have touch and have scents, hovering it over their noses, using it as I'm giving them a shavasana assist or whatnot.”

She calls herself “very scent-oriented,” and De Mamiel’s Altitude Oil has been part of her yoga ritual for close to a decade. 

“This is a delicious oil,” she says. “It's a lavender, frankincense, like pine lemony. Really grounding but also invigorating. I cloak myself [with it].”

She discovered the oil through her first yoga teacher, Joanne Silver, and it quickly earned a permanent spot in her routine. 

“She was using it, and then I loved it so much that I started using it, and I've probably been using this for close to a decade,” Hyland says. 

Nowadays, using the oil is one of the ways she signals that it’s time to settle into her practice.

“I find that olfactory connection really, really helpful. So this is like a ritual way to get into that space of moving.”