It’s Okay if You Learn Yoga Slowly

“Yoga is a light, which once lit will never dim. The better your practice, the brighter your flame.” ― B.K.S Iyengar

Practicing yoga consistently can do incredible things for your mental and physical wellbeing, but only if it's practiced with care. Yoga is meant to improve your health, but there were 29,590 yoga-related injuries reported in hospital visits from 2001 to 2014. This was a few years ago, but it’s still a lot. The Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine shares that 45% of those injuries are sprains or strains.

These are very preventable injuries if you take your time learning yoga and work up to more challenging postures. Yoga can and should be safe. The very nature of yoga encourages gradual, contemplative learning. After all, yoga isn’t all mountain pose and forward fold — these are just the basics.

Despite that, there are some very different outlooks that we have on yoga today.

Some people think it’s very simple and easy enough to become a master. In reality, there’s a lot of detail and nuance that goes into even poses that seem simple, like adho mukha svanasana, more commonly known as downward dog.

Some practitioners want to dive in and try to learn everything as fast as they can, but it takes a lot of learning to truly master yoga postures.

Even simple poses have a lot of tiny adjustments you can do to make them safer and more effective.

Let’s chat a little bit about downward facing dog and its many one-legged variations. Some are simple, some are harder, but they're all tricky for most beginners. It's easy to get lost in wanting to keep up with a class and overdoing it.

Even though it’s sometimes considered a resting posture, it’s really not very restful at all. A perfectly aligned and engaged downward dog can be incredibly taxing. Yoga Journal gives a detailed summary of all the different muscles you should be engaging when doing this pose.

You often need to do some extra reading on all the details of how to properly perform a posture.

I’ve been lucky enough to learn from a lot of fantastic yoga instructors. But if you’re in a large class, there might be some minute details you miss.

You can follow along with the flow of your class, but you might not know every little muscle you should be engaging in any given pose.

I’m certainly not perfect — I’d been practicing yoga from quite a while before I realized that I ought to be engaging my fingers while doing a downward dog. It’s important to be mindful of what your body is doing and what you’re feeling when you’re in any posture. That element of mindfulness is a big part of why I practice yoga.

Learning proper alignment of different postures will protect you from injury.

Rushing into fast-paced vinyasa classes and doing difficult flow sequences when you don’t have a solid grasp of the basics actually puts you at risk of injury.

The popularity of yoga has been on the rise for years now. As practicing yoga becomes increasingly mainstream, people will jump into difficult classes that they may not be ready for. This is where learning slowly comes in. It’s okay to slowly expand your portfolio of postures and variations of postures.

If you’re careful in your practice, you’ll be completely fine.

You might make mistakes; the important thing is learning to improve your practice.

I recently had to say goodbye to my yoga studio, something that absolutely broke my heard since they had incredible teachers. Part of why I’m so sad to leave is because they had incredibly kind and helpful teachers.

I’d been practicing yoga for over six months and I was making a rather rudimentary mistake during vinyasa sequences. I wasn’t keeping a flat back when going from a cobra or upward dog into a downward dog. One of my instructors took me aside after class and took the time to do a one-on-one demonstration with me to show me how I should keep my back straight to avoid potential injury.

It was quick, it honestly didn’t take her that long to demonstrate. Even so, the fact that she was paying close attention to see that I was doing something risky and that she took the time to help me out meant a lot to me.

There’s no shame in taking your time to learn.

Be proud of taking the time to learn yoga and take better care of your mind and body. Don’t feel pressured to learn everything as fast as humanly possible. Don’t feel like you’re bad at doing something if it takes time for you to learn balance.

Graphs and statistics seem disconcerting when we’re talking about yoga, but it’s important to remember that injuries can happen. If you make yourself a sponge for knowledge and truly aim to master poses before taking on more complicated ones, you can honor your body as you work on strength, flexibility, and mindfulness.

Learn your limits and grow with care.

“When you listen to yourself, everything comes naturally. It comes from inside, like a kind of will to do something. Try to be sensitive. That is yoga.” ― Petri Räisänen

If you want to push yourself forward, take it slow — enjoy the journey. Learn at your own pace in a way that honors your body and your practice. We all want to improve, yes. But if you want to learn new things safely, then it’s perfectly fine to do that slowly.