Our community is evolving.

The props we integrate into our practice  — whether you practice at a studio, your home, or with your clients  — should help you feel more in your body — the reason you love yoga just got better

The props we have in our studios should emulate our own understanding of what it means to be resilient, strong, and supported while in the flow of our lives.

Too many times, we “settle” or “adapt” props into our practice, but they never seem to really fit into the new paradigm shift we’re experiencing in the yoga world.

Yoga straps have been around a long time but they just don’t give us the feedback we need in our evolving understanding of what the body needs.

So we started experimenting with resistance bands teaching people how feel clear and resilient boundaries.

As we know now many long time practitioners in the yoga world are saying that going too deep into poses can cause instability, this happens over a long period of time, it can cause pain that is hard to diagnose.

I wanted to find a way to help yoga people feel more in their bodies, to know for themselves their own boundaries and to not be reliant on the teacher or the ideal image of a yoga pose.

I was searching for more information not only outside of my body but more importantly inside my body.

It seems that all those years of yoga had made me insensitive to healthy boundaries, I went too far, I got injured and my journey became all about coming back to my body and establishing my own healthy boundaries.

Five years ago, I was teaching a very busy class with my latex resistance bands

One of the bands broke and snapped one of my newest students in the head.

It was a horrible moment, the whole class froze – some people laughed nervously, the women who was hit in the head was shaken up and I felt terrible.

There was nothing I could say other than sorry.

I can already picture the anxious feelings in the class the next time I ask participants to use the resistance bands.

I wanted my students to be as happy about movement as these ladies were back from one of my classes in 2016.

See those confident smiling faces? That’s what I wanted.

These latex bands weren’t ideal for yoga practice. As much as I loved them I also hated them.

I opened my laptop and searched for something new. I wasn’t fully aware what I was looking for, but I was open to ideas and allowed inspiration to guide me through my research.

I found countless varieties of resistance bands, most made out of latex and sold by out-of-country manufacturing companies or large gyms. They usually came in a variety of bright colours and packaged 10-20 at a time.

I read reviews and the same comments kept repeating: “broke easily”, “smells awful”, “not enough resistance”,  “aren’t really made for my body type”, “they hurt my skin”, “they roll up and don’t stay in place”.

I experienced similar frustrations when using resistance bands.

I liked the feedback from resistance bands, and the durability of yoga straps, but couldn’t find a prop that gave me the best of both worlds.

So I called my longtime friend Riki Richter with my dilemma and quickly realized that she felt the same way!

We felt like the odd women out with our frustrations towards resistance bands and latex elastics.

Both Riki and I felt that there wasn’t a prop made for us, designed specifically with an understanding of the movement in yoga and pilates.

With our combined experience of over 20 years of teaching each, the time spent owning and managing our own studios, our 1,000 of hours in education and training — we were well placed to inspire these ideas to grow.

We decided to implement these ideas and design a new resistance band specifically for Pilates and Yoga.

We spent over 5 years developing and testing our ideas with friends and colleagues we’ve grown with over the last 20+ years of teaching yoga, Pilates and movement.

There were so many design items that we wanted to address – the latex breaking, needing 20 bands to accommodate the range of tensions and body styles, the abrasive “pulling” of the bands across your skin, the way bands roll up and don’t stay in place, and the smell…that awful latex smell left on your hands after using them.

The bands used in the gym were not well designed for yoga or Pilates.

We designed what we wanted in a resistance band: comfortable and gentle, well-made, durable and washable, adaptive and flexible, strong and resilient.

We launched The Body Loop Resistance Bands a few months ago. 

After 100’s of hours in testing, it’s ready to be your go-to prop.

That’s a photo of our first shipment of Body Loop bands.

Opening the box and seeing the bands was overwhelmingly exciting for us!

The Body Loop encourages more movement within a traditional yoga practice. It inspires a more dynamic relationship to the yoga poses, instead of just going into the pose and staying there, the Body Loop encourages exploration and contains the end ranges of the pose.

I like the way my friend Madeleine Shen Lopez puts it:

“…it allows you to turn up the dial on what your body already has, as intrinsic properties, and allows you to experience the elasticity and bounce that those properties already offer you.”

The Body Loop will inspire you to move with more diversity.

I like to say that “the key to longevity is diversity”.

I’m done with doing the same poses the same way every day, we all know that leads to boredom and repetitive strain, so if you want  to keep doing yoga into your later years the Body Loop will fill you with new ideas bringing a sense of renewal every-time you practice.

Yoga is a living tradition, we the practitioners are guiding its evolution into the future.

And it’s not just Yoga, The Body Loop is diverging into other modals of movement as well.

Here’s a short clip from Jane Clapp – Embodied Resilience Coach – talking about the ways she uses The Body Loop to help her clients:

We joined some of our friends together and recorded videos to demonstrate the uses and versatility of The Body Loop.

This is the best way to get up to the most of The Body Loop.

We started our journey looking to design a better resistance band and yoga prop. But we ended up developing a new way for us to get more out of our practice, movements and poses.

Today, we’re using The Body Loop to weave resistance feedback into our movements and help us explore new boundaries for our bodies.

By now, you’re probably curious to see how The Body Loop works. I knew you would be.

Click the button below to checkout a the Body Loop Set Offer page and scroll down to see a few preview videos.

The Body Loop Set Offer

Thanks for reading through our story and I hope you’ll join us in helping us evolve our movement.

Diane Bruni – co-founder of The Body Loop

PS.

We’re going to be presenting several workshops at the Toronto Yoga Show on March 28th and would be thrilled if you came by and said hello.

PPS.

Thank you for being part of this amazing supportive community that we call ‘home’.