How to Avoid Doing B.A.D. Yoga.

What led me to write this blog is observing my students closely throughout the 18 + classes a week I teach and time and time again observing and adjusting the same mistakes. In my mind there is an easy way to address all the mistakes we make in yoga and it starts with reprioritizing. The following 3 priorities apply not just to the asana practice of yoga but any and all physical movement or exercise practice. Breathe, Alignment and Depth in my opinion are the most essential elements of the physical practice of yoga. These principles may seem to be common sense but we must work to make them common practice.

In order of priority…

Breathe

Simply put if you are not breathing you are not doing yoga. If you spend an hour only breathing and focusing on the breath that would be doing more yoga and benefit to you than an hour of wiggling around on your yoga mat with no attention or care for the breath. Having an undercurrent of consistent, unbroken, and unbound breathing is what feeds your blood, your muscles, and your asana practice. It is essential not just to live but to move, build muscle, unblock the channels in the body, and ground the mind to the present.

Alignment

Alignment is inextricably connected to the sustainability of a practice. Your physical alignment in yoga is defined by the cues given and interpreted from teacher to student that will make or break a student’s posture, endurance, and structure of a pose. Alignment is how we hold our body in safe, strong, and sustainable ways and then how we recruit the most efficient and effective muscles to support that alignment. Sustainability is in relation to alignment is short-term and long-term. Can I sustain this posture for 5 to 10 breaths without slouching or compensating? Can I sustain this practice over a lifetime? Alignment must be paired with breath in order to move on.

Depth

Depth encompasses an increase in demand whether that is weight, speed, or challenge. This must be the last priority. You would not go to the gym and pick up a 50-pound weight and try to muscle through bicep curls with slouching shoulders, terrible posture, be barely breathing, veins popping out your forehead, and a clenched jaw… Why not? Because first, if you carry on this way you are on a fast track to injury. It is simply not sustainable, safe, or realistic to do such a thing to our joints and our body. Instead, all exercise science has proven that in order to grow you must gradually increase the demand or challenge. This gives the body time to (while being able to breathe well and maintaining good postural alignment) plateau before increasing the depth. So in the example of the bicep curl, you would lower the weight and align the spine, the shoulders, and the arm to carry out the exercise efficiently. When the body adapts to that demand then and only then would you try increasing the load or complicating the movement. When you increase the depth you watch closely and see how the body adapts, ensuring that you have not sacrificed alignment or breath to be there.

KEEP IT SIMPLE. Simply speaking, if the simple version of the pose is falling apart - do not encourage your students to increase the demand or challenge of the pose! For example, if your student’s knees-down variation of chaturanga is rounded in the shoulders and collapsing and/or dumping into their rotator cuff muscles, please first address the alignment of the spine before increasing the demand. ie lifting the knees. Address the structure first. Depth Follows Structure!

Nonetheless, I see these structural sacrifices being made every single week. Unfortunately, this last priority can quickly and easily be moved to the top. Why? Well for starters the biggest culprit is The EGO!

The ego is our identification with anything outside of ourSELF, with a capital S. The Self is the part of us that as yoga teachers we discuss the potential of connection toward by way of being present. The Self is our connection to the divine, the connection to peace and unconditional love. Practically, the Self is our best version of ourselves that is brought forward when we muck through all the distractions, the expectations, the labels, and the thinking mind of the Ego. The Ego is all our identification with things, people, our body, our thoughts, and our tendency to get caught in the past or future in our heads. The ego is not bad by itself, it is simply part of being human. By identifying it we can see how it creates a majority of our mental and emotional suffering and see how it sneaks into many parts of our lives.

So how does the ego play a role in depth? Regularly I see students willingly sacrifice sustainable alignment and breath to get into a pose that is bigger, deeper, and perhaps more “desirable” than the one they are in. We look at social media, Yoga Journal, the person on the mat next to us and of course our teacher, and thus the desire to fit into that pose, no matter the sacrifice prevails. We sacrifice our stability and strength for our egos. Instead of honoring our body’s boundaries, strengths, and weaknesses, desire takes over and we jam our body into a place it cannot handle. The body is not always ready for the increase in demand and then we run into a slew of issues. We replace stability for instability; sustainability for temporary satisfaction. Pursuit of depth without proper alignment places pressure on the discs, soft tissue, and cartilage, ligaments and tendons. It is unsustainable.

But, we have a choice. To stay where we are, and work for proper alignment that allows the body to naturally move on; or to push forward with disregard to limitations and risk injury.

Ahh… Here is the rub. When to push and when to pull back. Taking risks is healthy BUT must be done intelligently. If we do not try we cannot know. You are in class and your teacher or coach says, “Looks good! If you feel you can handle a little more intensity do this…” So you decide “yes I think I can handle more,” and then your posture and balance fall apart, so you back off. You should never stay and suffer if the body is telling you “this is too much for me right now”. Instead, watch your body closely as it adapts to change and listen to the body's cues to stay or go. Trust your body, let go of your ego lingering in the notion of “I have failed” and instead modify, move out or backpedal to where you began. Take a block, or a prop and come into a place you can manage. If you try to increase depth and can manage it well, then you can stay! Depth without alignment and stability is a recipe for injury.

If you take a peep back up at the top of this article and look at the picture I am in, it is not honoring these principles. This is a great example of the ways in which I was encouraged and pushed to practice with no support, breathe control, or sustenance. My pelvis is off centered, I cannot breathe, I am compressing my low back. Sure it’s pretty, but it would always result in back aches, and a feeling as though I have overstretched my hip flexors (because I was) post class. So why continue to do it? My biggest challenge in a yoga class is knowing I can do a pose like this when the teacher invites me into it, but choosing not to because I know my body will suffer for it. My biggest struggle is the ego not my body, because if I am paying attention to my body it is telling me what I need in any given moment but the want to compete and go bigger although tempting is not the goal of yoga. This leads us into responsibility.

Responsibility

We may regularly slide depth up to the top of the list of our priorities because we were poorly instructed to do so and/or we do not know better. After reading this article, you do know better so you can empower yourself to do better. Listen as a student, to your bodies signals to stay or go. Am I straining to breathe? Is my pelvis, my spine, and my body maintaining neutral alignment? If I do not know what neutral alignment is can I ask someone who does? Can I let go of my ego’s desire to look better and give way for my body to feel better before I move to depth? Just because you can, does not mean you should.

Teacher responsibility

As yoga teachers, we need to take responsibility for the ways in which we encourage and praise depth over alignment and breath! This is a big deal! As teachers, we must stop not carrying on the tradition that more = better. That the goal of yoga is to turn the body into Gumby, or a circus act, practicing extremes and contortions. We must collectively synchronize our priorities and in this way honor the human body in our own practice and in-class sequencing, cueing, and teaching. Depth is safe IF you can breathe and maintain alignment, outside of that it is cause for injury. We must as teachers encourage the person who takes a block, who rests in childs pose, who stays when you give the option to go deeper or bigger or add more challenge in the class. You may ask a student several times to back off or take a block or to lift up or to engage their core and they may not hear, understand, or listen to you. Do not give up. Be persistent, but not pestering. Be patient and give them a choice. If you really feel a student is putting themselves in danger and they aren’t hearing your queuing, talk to them after class and try to break down and explain why you were queuing them in the way you were. Do not worry about offending anyone. This is a great service to your students that you are giving in order to keep them safe. If they do not respond positively try a different approach, or language or simply let them go. They will return to you when they are ready.

It is perfectly fine to encourage the student who is in “a more challenging place” but is doing it with intelligence and alignment. I use quotations because all challenges are relative. Everyone will be challenged and should be challenged holding a pose that their body can manage to maintain alignment for, but the posture will look slightly different for each of them and that is the beauty of this practice.