Category

“DO NOT OVERTHINK YOUR poses.” That’s advice I heard early in my yoga practice – and I shouldn’t have listened. I wound up hurting my shoulder and lower back, and my downward dog felt more like a downward spiral toward painful injuries. As I learned the hard way, thinking about your yoga poses is important. If you’re not, you’re probably doing these common poses wrong: 1. Chatturon

I ONCE THREW OUT MY back practicing yoga. I was a beginner pushing myself to keep up with the hyper-flexible students in a heated power yoga class when it happened. I could hardly stand up, and slowly made my way out of the yoga studio hunched over and hurt. It took me months to fully recover. Now, as a yoga teacher, I make proper technique a priority. I’ve learned that yoga poses will either heal you or hurt y

As a longtime athlete, I used to think soreness and pain were just side effects of progress. I tried to push through the discomfort, only to get injured and sidelined from competing. I put my body through so much abuse that I (unknowingly) couldn’t perform at my fullest potential. Now that I practice yoga, I understand how to listen to my body. I know that if I try to push through pain, it only makes my exercis

Researchers say our chair culture is literally killing us. And they might be right: Because most of us sit at desks in front of computer screens for hours, many of us are in debilitating, chronic back pain from bad posture. What’s more, tilting your head to hold your phone strains your neck and can create permanent imbalances in your cervical spine and shoulders. A sedentary lifestyle doesn’t only destroy

WIDE LEG FORWARD FOLD (prasarita padottanasana) SHAPE PREP (from mountain middle of mat, facing long edge of mat) Take a wide stance—arms parallel to floor, ankles under wrists. Point big toes straight ahead. Make outer heels widest part of pose or outer edge of feet parallel to short edge of mat. SHAPE POSE Place hands on floor between feet—hands shoulder-width apart; round back evenly, place head between hands (mor

The feet are often the literal foundation of yoga poses, yet they are largely overlooked. And for good reason: it’s hard to get aware of the feet, as they’re so peripheral, and our awareness tends to center on our bigger muscle groups. I remember in one of my first yoga classes when the yoga teacher said to lift and spread your toes, and I looked down at my feet and attempted to move my toes, but nearly nothing happe

This is the story of how a very small muscle did some very big things for my yoga practice. If you’ve been in class with me lately, you may have noticed that I have become a one-gal glute med cheering section. That’s because this little muscle helped me find relief from my nagging hip pain, stabilized my inversions and single leg balancing poses, protects my hamstring attachments, and even makes my pigeon pose more e

Last month we started looking at the shoulder joint, and examined some simple observational diagnostics. As I wrote in that article, yogis need to be mindful not to depress the shoulder girdle, and I think many practitioners have misinterpreted instructions that include ‘shoulders down the back’ or ‘shoulders away from your ears.’ But it’s not the structure we were looking at in tadasana last month that causes injury

  In this two-part blog on shoulder alignment, I’d like to clear up a common shoulder misconception I regularly see. I know a lot of us have heard instructions like ‘relax your shoulders away from your ears,’ ‘slide your shoulder blades down your back,’ or even ‘press your shoulders down.’ These are well-intended instructions that I think aim to combat tension in the upper traps a lot of get n the modern world.

The back leg in asymmetrical poses is naturally in a shadowy, hidden location. Since it’s out of our line of vision, it is often difficult to align. Because we can usually see the front leg in an asymmetrical pose, we’ll use our vision to help tune up its alignment, and it is indeed often the first thing we notice in a pose. But here’s the rub: alignment of the front leg is largely dependent upon the back leg’s posit