In this wide-ranging conversation Scott Johnson talks to Wade Oakley, Ashtanga yoga teacher, strength coach and long-time Ashtanga practitioner, about what it means to tend a practice across a whole life. Wade came to yoga sideways, through a back injury, a free class at the University of Virginia, and a teacher who told him to open his eyes. He wasn’t looking for a spiritual path. He was looking for relief. What followed was thirteen years of showing up anyway, eight trips to Mysore in India, a corporate career navigated around that quiet pull, and eventually a serious knee surgery that asked him to learn his body again from the beginning.
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Wade Oakley on The Long Game of Yoga, Strength and Devotion
Wade is someone who has moved honestly between worlds. He has practiced advanced Ashtanga under Sharath Jois, worked as a management consultant and in biotech, and more recently woven gym and strength training back into his life, not as a replacement for practice but as a different kind of listening.
This conversation explores what happens when those things are held together with care rather than conflict.
Scott and Wade talk about the early years at UVA, where a small yoga program was finding its feet, and about what it felt like to arrive in Mysore at twenty years old and realise that life didn’t have to follow the tracks laid out for it. They talk about the injury that interrupted Wade’s practice and how rehabilitation became, unexpectedly, a way of feeling his body in new detail. And they talk about the question that runs quietly through everything Wade shares: not how to do more, but how to do this for a long time.
Wade reflects on the resistance that can live alongside real commitment, the part of you that keeps a little disbelief in reserve. He speaks carefully about strength work not as something added onto yoga but as a different tool in the same shed, useful for some people, unnecessary for others, worth exploring without dogma. And he closes with something simple: when you find friction in your practice, something that makes you want to turn away, that is probably worth moving towards.
Not because discomfort is virtuous, but because there is usually something real on the other side of it.
About Wade Oakley
Wade Oakley began practicing Ashtanga Yoga in 2012 at the University of Virginia under Certified teacher John Bultman. He went on to study directly with R. Sharath Jois in Mysore, India across many extended trips, receiving Level 2 Authorization in 2018 and learning Advanced B before Sharath’s passing. In honour of his late teacher, Wade strives to practice and teach in the spirit and tradition Sharath conveyed in Mysore and around the world.
As a teacher, Wade seeks to instil curiosity and a sense of personal ownership in each student’s yoga journey. His own path has led him into deep exploration beyond the mat, across strength training, injury prevention, nutrition and recovery, areas he sees not as departures from practice but as ways of expanding what practice can hold. He believes an Ashtanga yoga practice can be a boundlessly enriching part of anyone’s life.
You can find more about Wade here:
“Wade is someone who I really connected to when we met last year after recording the Sharath podcasts. We really connected and I loved his approach to longevity in yoga. What I appreciate most is his honesty. He’s not selling a system. He’s sharing what he’s actually found, in his body, over years of real practice and work. If longevity in practice matters to you, I think this conversation will resonate.”
Scott Johnson – May 2026
If you enjoyed this podcast then you might also enjoy Scott’s conversations with Tim Feldman and Simon Borg Olivier.
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