Forrest Yoga is a physically intense, emotionally focused style of yoga created by Ana Forrest. It combines deep breathwork, long-held poses, and serious core engagement to address both physical tension and emotional healing. Unlike styles that prioritize flexibility or relaxation, Forrest Yoga is built around four guiding pillars: Breath, Strength, Integrity, and Spirit.
Ana Forrest and the Style’s Origins
Ana Forrest developed this method out of her own experience with significant emotional trauma. She found that a conventional yoga practice wasn’t enough to address what she was carrying, so she built a system specifically designed to help people identify and work through physical and emotional pain on the mat. The result is a style that treats yoga as a healing practice first, not just a fitness routine. Every element of a Forrest Yoga class, from the breathing techniques to the sequencing, is intentionally designed to help practitioners confront areas of their body and mind they may be avoiding.
The Four Pillars
Everything in Forrest Yoga ties back to four core principles.
Breath is the foundation. The practice uses a deep, controlled breathing technique (Ujjayi breath) to bring awareness into every part of the body. The goal is to use breath to create what Ana Forrest describes as “aliveness in every cell,” which in practical terms means you’re actively directing your attention and energy through breathing rather than just moving through shapes.
Strength refers primarily to core strength. Forrest Yoga connects you to your center through heat, vigorous movement, and deep breathing. The idea is that a strong core creates both physical stability and emotional grounding. You’ll sweat in these classes.
Integrity means practicing honestly. Rather than pushing into a pose that looks impressive but hurts, you learn to work at your genuine edge. Over time, this builds self-awareness and the ability to deal with fear, struggle, and breakthroughs, skills that carry off the mat.
Spirit is the internal dimension. Forrest Yoga encourages you to access your intuition and connect with your authentic self. This isn’t abstract. It plays out practically as learning to notice what emotions surface during challenging holds, what your body is telling you, and what patterns you tend to avoid.
What a Class Looks Like
Forrest Yoga classes follow a specific structure. Every session begins with a short breathing exercise to settle the nervous system. From there, you move into a codified warm-up sequence that typically includes intensive abdominal work. This isn’t a few token crunches. The core exercises are designed to get blood pumping, warm the body from the inside out, and allow a deeper, more easeful breath throughout the rest of class.
After the warm-up, the sequence progresses into standing poses or “vignettes,” which are connected sequences of standing poses that build toward at least one peak pose. The class then moves through a warm-down phase and finishes with a cool-down. One distinctive detail: poses are practiced on the left side of the body first. The reasoning is that most people live in a right-hand-dominated world, so starting left helps create more balance.
The room is typically kept at around 80 to 82 degrees. That’s warm enough to promote sweating and looseness without reaching the extreme heat of a Bikram-style class. Sessions are physically demanding. Expect long holds, repeated core engagement, and a focus on building heat through the breath and sustained effort.
Unique Physical Cues
Forrest Yoga uses a set of eight foundational movement cues that show up across most poses. Four of the most distinctive are “active hands,” “active feet,” “relaxing the neck,” and “lengthening the tailbone down.” If you’re new to the style, you’ll hear these constantly.
Active hands and feet mean you’re spreading your fingers and toes wide, pressing them into the ground with intention rather than letting them go limp. This creates engagement through the entire limb and helps distribute effort more evenly. Relaxing the neck is exactly what it sounds like: in a style this physically intense, practitioners tend to grip their jaw and clench their neck muscles. Forrest Yoga teachers specifically cue you to let that go. Lengthening the tailbone down creates space in the lower back, which is especially important during the deep backbends and core work that define the practice.
Props and the Rolled Mat
One of the most recognizable tools in Forrest Yoga is the “roll,” a tightly rolled-up yoga mat secured with rubber bands. You make one by folding a mat into three long sections, folding each section into the middle, then rolling it up tightly. It ends up roughly the size of a yoga block but with a bit of give.
The roll gets placed between the thighs during abdominal work, bridge pose, chair pose, and other positions. Squeezing it activates the inner thigh muscles, which are difficult to target otherwise but play a critical role in deep core engagement and lower back health. The squeeze also encourages you to tuck the tailbone and create length in the lower spine. Beyond thigh squeezes, the roll can be placed under the knees, sacrum, or upper back during supine poses for support and release.
Core Work as a Central Feature
If there’s one thing that sets Forrest Yoga apart from other styles, it’s the emphasis on abdominal exercises. Most classes begin with an extended core sequence before any standing work. A typical exercise involves lying on your back with feet lifted toward the ceiling, the roll squeezed between your legs near the pubic bone, and hands clasped behind your head. You press your low back into the floor, squeeze the roll, reach actively through the balls of your feet, then curl your head and shoulders up on the exhale while pulling your lower belly down.
This isn’t just about building a strong midsection. The abdominal work gets blood flowing quickly, generates internal heat, and opens up the breath for the rest of class. The inner thigh engagement from the roll also helps strengthen deep core muscles that support the spine, which is why Forrest Yoga is often recommended for people dealing with back pain and stiffness.
Emotional and Trauma-Informed Elements
Forrest Yoga is explicitly designed to address emotional holding patterns, not just physical ones. The deep breathing techniques combined with repetitive sequences generate significant heat, and the practice treats sweating as a way to release tension stored in the body. Long holds in intense positions often bring up emotional responses, and teachers are trained to create a space where that’s expected rather than something to push past.
The practice gives you tools to identify what’s happening internally during difficult moments. Rather than just enduring discomfort, you learn to notice where you brace, where you hold your breath, and what feelings surface when you stay in a challenging position. This process of honest self-observation is built into every class through the pillar of Integrity. For people who carry stress, anxiety, or unresolved emotional pain in their body, Forrest Yoga offers a framework for working with those patterns directly.
Who Forrest Yoga Is For
Forrest Yoga suits people who want a physically challenging practice with a deeper emotional dimension. It’s particularly well suited for anyone dealing with chronic tension from sitting (the sequences are specifically designed to unwind the effects of desk-bound life), lower back pain, or a sense that they’re carrying stress they can’t shake through conventional exercise alone.
It’s not a gentle or restorative style. The core work is intense, the holds are long, and the room is warm. But because Integrity is a core pillar, good Forrest Yoga teachers will encourage you to modify rather than push through pain. The practice meets you where you are, it just asks you to be honest about where that is.
Teacher Training and Certification
Becoming a certified Forrest Yoga teacher starts with a 200-hour Foundation Teacher Training, which meets Yoga Alliance requirements for registering as an RYT-200. After completing the full course, graduates receive a Level 1 certificate and can enroll in a mentorship program that continues their development toward full Forrest Yoga certification. The training emphasizes not just the physical sequences but the healing philosophy and emotional awareness that define the style.