Why we did 22 push-ups in yoga class this week
Sep 04, 2026
You're scrolling on your phone before the school run, and a man on your For You page tells you that women should be able to do 11 full push-ups. He says it like it's a fact. Like it's the line that separates the women who've got it together from the women who haven't.
You put the phone down. But the number stays with you for the rest of the day.
This is what we talked about at the start of class this week, because it's worth naming out loud. Who decided that number? Who decided any of the numbers we quietly measure ourselves against? The dress size, the step count, the push-ups. None of it came from inside you. It came from a screen, from someone who has never met you, and somewhere along the way we started letting it in as truth.
Yoga has never been about comparing your body to the person next to you, let alone a stranger on the internet. It's about walking your own path and recognising the strength that's already in your body, at whatever stage of life you're in. So this class became a press-up challenge, not to prove a point to the man on TikTok, but to reconnect you to your own power, one rep at a time.
We built the number slowly. Five in table pose to start, then a few more woven through each round of the flow, warrior 2 into extended side angle into triangle, crescent lunge into warrior 3. By the end we'd done 22 press-ups between us, and every single one had a version that worked for the body that showed up that day. Box press-ups with knees down. Half press-ups from a plank. Full press-ups for the days your body wants them. There's no wrong choice here.
What we kept coming back to, cue after cue, was the idea of hugging muscle to bone. Feeling your own strength from the inside rather than reaching for it from outside. Your fingertips pressing into the mat and your power rising to meet them. That's a different experience of your body than counting reps against someone else's benchmark. One depletes you. The other builds you.
This matters more, not less, as we move through our 40s. Muscle mass and bone density both need tending from here on, and press-ups are one of the simplest ways to build real functional strength through the arms, chest, back and core, no equipment required. But the strength we're really after in this class isn't just physical. It's the strength of trusting your own body again, after years of being told it should be doing something different.
By the final round, most of us weren't thinking about the man on TikTok anymore. We were thinking about our own back leg in warrior 3, our own breath in child's pose, our own version of strong.
That's the whole class, really. Not eleven push-ups to meet someone else's standard. Twenty-two, in your own body, on your own terms.
If this is the kind of teaching that speaks to you, the full class is on YouTube now, and we'd love you on your mat with us.
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