Quamay "i3" Sams

Meet the newest expert on the Glo teacher roster, @eye.three Quamay Sams! He’ll be teaching live on Glo from NYC on Mondays and Thursdays at 6 AM PT / 9 AM ET. Hit the link in our bio to sign up for Quamay’s first class, which airs live on Monday, January 16th at 6 AM PT, 45-Min MLK Day Flow, in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Quamay has experience using the magic of yoga discipline to help aid his mental health and developmental trauma, which drives his mission to engage individuals in the study of the self via yoga for personal growth. Plus, Quamay’s primary teacher is our very own @jason_crandell 🙌 🙌 🙌 In Quamay’s Vinyasa classes, expect thoughtful cues that will ignite your yoga practice holistically, engaging your mind and body in new ways.

Some things don’t get fixed in a yoga class. I’ve been working through something chronic for a long time. And I noticed something — every time I looked for a quick fix, the problem stayed. It wasn’t until I started looking at what I do every day, not what I do once a week, that things started to shift. The same daily habits that built the pattern are the same daily habits that can correct it. That’s not a yoga class. That’s a lifestyle. When students come to me saying yoga is hurting them — I don’t argue. I just ask them to think bigger than a single stretch fixing what took years to build. The answer is usually hiding in something unconscious. Something repeated so many times it became invisible. That’s where the real practice starts. Which pattern are you carrying to the mat? 1 — Long and fatigued: I stretch and it never releases 2 — Short and gripped: I stretch and it grips harder 3 — Both, depending on the day Save this. It changes what you come to the mat for.

Just worked with a teacher training. Sixteen people in the room. Different practices, different years on the mat, different teachers. Same chaturanga. I watched the same pattern roll through every one of them. The arms working. The cuff resting. Shoulders carrying years of force the joint was never trained to hold. Here’s what I think is happening. People practice chaturanga as a passage, not a position. The descent looks clean. But the joint is spending more than it earns. Years from now it shows up as tendinitis. As impingement. As a shoulder that aches without an injury to point at. In my body, chaturanga is a stop. Not a movement. I lower until the shoulders meet the elbows, and then I stay. The strength to pause is the strength that keeps the shoulder. Watch the next one. The pose is honest. It will tell you exactly where you are.

*I’ve injured myself from being too far on one side of the spectrum.* Too short and tight — the range wasn’t available. Too long and weak — the range was there but nothing was holding it. Both cost me. Most of us live somewhere in that spectrum without knowing it. And most yoga practices only train one direction. We stretch to get longer. We rarely ask whether the muscle can actually work at that new length. A muscle that can only get long is visiting the range. A muscle that is strong where it’s long is owning it.

I used to think the fidgeting in class was a focus problem. It’s not. It’s the nervous system running a pattern it never got the chance to interrupt. The pose is the interruption. Save this if you’ve ever felt like you can’t settle inside a shape.

There’s a moment in every bind where I can see who earned the shape and who just closed the gap. The hand finds the hand, the room reads it as the pose, but the shoulder never actually moved. The fingers did the job the joint hasn’t built yet. If your shape only exists with the squeeze, you weren’t in the shape — you were holding a knot. Holding ≠ owning. See what it feels like to bind without the grip. Notice what your body actually has, and what it’s been borrowing.

*The practice was always supposed to be the antidote.* My classes aren’t slow. But they’re paced. Holds. Pauses. Spaces where the movement stops and something else is asked of you. And almost every student — at some point — fights those moments. Not because of what they’re doing to the body. Because of what they’re doing to the nervous system. Here’s what I’ve come to understand about that resistance. We live at a pace that doesn’t stop. Notifications. Transitions. The next thing always arriving before the last one settled. The nervous system gets trained to expect constant movement — and when it doesn’t come, when there’s a pause or a hold or a space between poses, it reads that as a signal that something is wrong. It pushes us to fill the gap. Speed up. Get to the next pose. We’ve brought that conditioning onto the mat and called it flow. But moving fast through a sequence isn’t strength. It’s momentum. Momentum carries you through ranges you haven’t earned the stability to control. The joint absorbs what the muscle should. And over time — not dramatically, but gradually — one fast transition at a time — that’s how the body starts to break down. When you slow down, momentum disappears. The muscle has to do something it wasn’t doing before: control the movement through its full range. That’s eccentric work — the muscle lengthening under load, resisting gravity, managing the transition instead of flying through it. Eccentric strength is the most important type of strength for joint protection. It’s what catches you at end range. It’s what the isometric holds are building every time you stay in a position instead of rushing through it. Slower is harder. Every student who’s been in my room confirms this. That’s not a coincidence — it’s the nervous system alarm going off because the pace stopped. Staying through that alarm is the practice. That’s what the pauses are for. The mat should be the one place where the pace is yours. Not the world’s.

The shoulder is the most mobile joint we have. That’s the gift and the liability. It wasn’t built like the hip — no bony stop, no architectural floor. It runs on soft tissue and a nervous system that’s paying close attention. So when a chest opener feels stuck, a bind feels miles away, or when the overhead reach pinches at the same spot every time — the nervous system isn’t being mean to you. It’s doing math. Mobility minus stability equals threat. So it rations the range. What you feel as tightness is guarding. And here’s the part that took me years to actually understand in my own body. Stretching a guarding joint doesn’t release it. It confirms the threat. You’re walking closer to a guard dog and asking it to stop barking. It barks louder. The fix isn’t more range. It’s more trust. Find the edge of where the shoulder feels safe. Load it there. Hold. Don’t push past, don’t pull deeper, don’t chase. Just teach the joint that you can hold yourself in this position without falling apart. That’s what isometric work at end-range actually is. A conversation with the nervous system in a language it understands. Strength is the only thing that earns range back. If your shoulders keep getting tight no matter how much you stretch — that’s not a flexibility problem. That’s a signal. And the signal is asking for load, not length. Save this if it landed. Share it with the yogi who keeps stretching the same shoulder for years and wondering why nothing’s changing.

I practiced yoga for 10 years. The thing that connected me to it wasn’t flexibility. It was the first time in my life I didn’t have to deal with the crazy talk in my head. I learned I didn’t have to identify with the voice. Or listen to it. Or perpetuate it. I felt some space from it. Then I got lost in the attachment. The collection of shapes. The ability to do them in a really grand way. I measured my practice by how far I could go. My SI joint eventually humbled me. When I was forced to slow down, I was able to study more of the texts. Patanjali wrote 196 sutras. Three of them mention asana. Three. Reading that re-ignited my belief in why I initially started. *Sthira Sukham Asanam.* A seat that is steady and comfortable. Not a performance of range. A body stable enough to sit still long enough for the mind to quiet. I stopped chasing depth. I started building capacity. The practice became what it was when I first found it — a tool to create space from the voice. Somewhere along the way, I lost the thread. This is how I found it again. What did yoga teach you that had nothing to do with flexibility? Drop it below.

Stretching isn’t the problem. Stretching a back body that has nothing holding it up — that’s the problem. Desk. Phone. Car. Sometimes our back is loaded for hours and never asked to contract. By class time it isn’t short. It’s tired. A tired muscle in a long position doesn’t need more length. It needs something underneath it. What you feel as “tight” is probably a brain that doesn’t trust the floor you’re standing on. So add the floor. Glutes. Spinal extensors. Lats. Then the folds you already love start to land. Stretch all you want. Just stop asking your back to do a job it was never built for.

I’ve built so much strength from my yoga practice. Not all the strength we can benefit from; but it is pretty damn good. Asana can build an absurd amount of strength — not because the shapes are magical, but because the leverage is long, the angles are awkward, and your whole system has to coordinate under load. You can’t hide in a machine. It’s just you and gravity and whatever your nervous system does when things get real. And if you’re flexible? That’s where it gets good. Building strength at end range can actually create so much stability the end and almost every pose presents an opportunity. So the question isn’t “can I get into it?” It’s: can I make it mine? Next time you’re in a shape you can “hold forever,” choose one clear action and commit to it for 20–30 seconds. Not dramatic. Not maximal. Just honest. That’s where the strength is.

**My first injury as a teacher happened mid-class.** Lotus. Full hot room. I’d done that shape a thousand times, so I wasn’t thinking. Crossed the bottom leg. Forced the knee to twist to fit the shape. The knee is a hinge. I asked it to rotate. Pop. I kept teaching. Finished the sequence. Demo’d more shapes. Called it professionalism. It was ego. That night I couldn’t bend the knee or straighten it. The story I’d been running on … “the teacher who can demo Lotus” ..got up and left the room. What was left was just a teacher. Scared of his own mat. Here’s what the knee taught me: your authority isn’t the shape your body can make. It’s whether you can teach the choice. Entry. Load. Exit. What to do when the body says not today. Couldn’t lean on the body, so I had to lean on the words. Cues got sharper. Progressions got honest. Students don’t need to see you in the pose. They need to know how to build toward it without blowing a knee. Injury doesn’t make you less of a teacher. It makes you a different kind.