Your Body is Not as Fragile as Your Yoga Teacher Tells You It Is
Let's bust some yoga myths and feel better about moving our bodies
Before I get into the piece, I want to make clear that yes, there are bodies that are more fragile than others. There are people who need more significant support and instruction when it comes to yoga and movement. The purpose of this essay is not to discount or ignore those folks. It’s to bring to light language and instruction that is used primarily in western yoga classes that doesn’t support anyone and more often than not, makes bodies (in particular female bodies) seem delicate, fragile, and something that needs to be managed.
As always, I welcome feedback if you feel this essay misses the mark in any way and happy to chat about it in the comments or privately.
Thank you for reading.
Have you ever been in a yoga class and you heard the yoga teacher give some really weird instructions?
“Step back into a lunge but make sure your knee doesn’t go past your ankle,” says the nice person in spandex leading you through a series of yoga poses. “Keep your knee in line with your second and third toes. Don’t let it drift in too much or out because you’ll injure your knee if you don’t keep it at a 90 degree angle.”
Wait, what? You didn’t realize that geometry was part of yoga. You’re just here to move your body and relax, but now you’re worried that if you move your knee wrong in a lunge, you’ll tear your ACL.
Great.
A little later you’re in downward facing dog. “Take your shoulders down your back,” the teacher says. Whatever that means. You’re sort of wondering where else they’d go, other than on your back but then the teacher says, “if you let your shoulders collapse you’ll wreck your rotator cuff muscles.”
That doesn’t sound good, you think, so you try to figure out how to keep your shoulders “down your back” out of self-preservation.
A bit later, you’re in tree pose, thinking this pose should be safe and then the teacher says, “make sure you don’t put your foot on the side of your knee. The side of your knee cap is not designed to bear that much lateral pressure.”
Good grief. Ok. Don’t put foot on knee, you think, starting to sweat from moderate panic. Even though it does sort of feel like the arch of your foot fits there really perfectly and you can’t really get your foot all the way up to your thigh like the teacher. But ok. Your teacher says that your knee can’t handle that pressure and you believe them.
Later you’re in a forward bend and just trying to touch your toes when you hear the teacher say, “ok, bring your hands to your hips and come up to stand with a long spine. Chest forward, hips back, knees bent to protect your low back. Because if you’re not careful, you could hurt your back.
I had no idea yoga was so dangerous, you think to yourself.
**
When I went through my very first teacher training, 20 years ago, many of the instructions I wrote above were ones I was taught to give.
Every pose had contraindications — ways you could get hurt if you did the pose incorrectly and verbal cues, as well as alignment instructions, intended to keep our students safe.
The vibe was, “if you move the wrong way, you could get hurt. These instructions will keep you and your students safe. Deviate from them and bad things will happen.”
On top of that, I studied within a school of yoga that had 5 principles of alignment that we were meant to teach in every class. The founder of this school of yoga taught that if our students always did these 5 principles within every single pose, they’d always be in “optimal alignment” and wouldn’t be in pain during their yoga practice or even off of their mats. And in addition, these 5 principles could help them go deeper into more challenging poses because they were in that optimal alignment.
It’s a pretty wild claim, when you really think about it, but at the time, I believed most of it.
I was young, just 23 when I started my first YTT. I had no frame of reference other than the anatomy and physiology we were taught along the way in that yearlong training program.
I was a little suspicious of the idea that there was one right way of alignment for every single person and every body on the planet, but if I’m honest, I liked the idea that it could be true.
So I told people they couldn’t take their knees past their ankles in a lunge and that they had to put their foot above or below their kneecap in tree pose, for the sake of knee safety.
I also told people that they shouldn’t round their spine in a forward bend to protect their low back. In fact my instructions frequently included a lot of statements like, “keep the top of your thighbones moving back to keep your low back happy.”
I micromanaged the hell out of where my students femur bones were in most standing poses, as well as where they kept the head of their upper arm bones — as if they could be in any other place than the hip or shoulder socket.
I told people not to do inversions when they were menstruating, although for some reason that did not include downdog or standing forward folds, which are also technically inversions.
For a brief period of time, I told my students that yoga was good for healthy bones (spoiler alert: it’s not).
And although I am not proud of this, I most definitely told my students that twists were good for digestion and detoxing your body.
As I write these out, I am shaking my head at my past self. And also, I didn’t know what I didn’t know.
Teaching yoga is a little bit like a game of telephone.
In most yoga traditions and schools, there are teacher trainings which cover a wide range of material, not limited to the actual teaching of yoga poses and classes. Plus, there is no standardization of what is taught in yoga teacher trainings because there are so many different styles/schools of yoga that it would be difficult to try and make a set of rules that everyone follows.
So there’s a general structure and trainings wedge themselves into that structure, which leaves quite a lot up to the individual instructors leading them.
All this is to say that the language we use to teach is often passed from one teacher down to their students. This can include mannerisms, speech patterns, jokes, and alignment rules. And many of those were passed down from their teachers and their teachers before them — and many of those teachers read Light on Yoga, which has some truly wild claims in it about what yoga poses can do for our bodies.
Some of it is useful, while some of it is lost in translation. And some of it is actual garbage with no basis in physiology or evidence to back it up.
This is particularly true when it comes to some of the weird yoga rules about how you should and should not move your body.
I think it’s important to say that alignment itself isn’t necessarily bad, nor are some of the informal rules you’ll hear in your typical yoga class. There are many basic structural tips that actually do make certain poses easier or feel better in a wide variety of bodies. It’s more that most of the alignment rules and reasons to do or not do a pose a certain way are based on superficial characteristics.
Then those rules are weaponized to make us, as students, feel fragile and like we cannot be trusted with our own bodies.
And that is real problem.
I’d like to think that these rules, both the structural (relating to bones or muscles) and the energetic (relating to body processes like menstruation or digestion), were offered from a place of care and wanting to be helpful.
Certainly for me as a newer teacher 20 years ago, I came to yoga wanting to help others the way yoga had helped me. I wanted to make a difference in the world and I wanted to do that through movement and at the time, yoga specifically.
I think I assumed that the poses alone would do that because that’s sort of how it worked for me. What I didn’t entirely realize at the time is that how we talk about bodies matters.
I wanted my students to feel powerful and strong. I wanted them to feel at home in their bodies, not disconnected or afraid of them. I wanted to be able to give answers to people and give them more agency in their bodies through those answers.
Giving people simple answers to simple “problems”, like how to stand in tree pose, and that made them feel good about what they were doing or how they were doing it — giving them a sense of control over how they moved their bodies — that’s what the alignment rules felt like.
When it comes to alignment in yoga practices, yoga students and teachers like it for similar, but slightly different reasons.
On a basic level, lots of folks want simple answers to complex things. We want the ability to fix some things with relative ease in a world that feels increasingly out of our control and where we feel like we have little actual impact as individuals.
In a yoga or movement class, you have a reasonable amount of control and alignment or form-related instruction can feel like you have the tools to move in ways that will both keep you body safe, while also making you stronger.
This is really appealing, right?
We also tend to be very “fix-it” oriented, especially when it comes to our bodies and especially if we identify as female. There’s always something wrong that needs adjusting or fixing or that can be made better. Our bodies are ground zero for personal home improvement projects and adhering to alignment rules in a yoga class is a lot easier and cheaper and quite possibly more in line with our values than extreme dieting and plastic surgery.
I remember once a student hired me for private lessons so I could tell her “everything she was doing wrong in her yoga classes.”
On the other side of this, for yoga teachers, having a rule for everything gives us a lot of power. I don’t necessarily mean this in the nefarious way it might sound.
However, it does mean that if I am holding the keys to the alignment kingdom, you need me to tell you how to move. You can’t be trusted in your own body. I need to give you the script for how to hold yourself in any given pose.
There’s something profoundly problematic about this which is that it gives you the opposite of what yoga, at it’s most basic aim is trying to give you, which is agency and awareness.
One of the fundamental ideas of yoga is to open a wider connection between mind and body. Most yoga teachers will remind you in every single class that your personal awareness — increasing that mind body connection — is key.
The strict adherence to nonsensical physical cues and alignment rules that have no evidence to support them, actually strips you of that awareness because you are constantly hearing someone else’s voice in your head.
When there is no room for personal experience there, what you end up doing is paying attention to that voice instead of really listening to how your body is feeling.
So much emphasis on alignment and specific, but silly rules also sounds a lot like a body vigilance that borders on perfection. It requires you to exist in a heightened state of body awareness at all times.
That feels like the opposite of agency.
Another reason teachers tend to prefer general and vague but still legit-sounding physical cues is that it’s a lot easier to make blanket statements about knee safety or low back pain than saying, “well, it depends.” Especially when you’re teaching a class of 30 people.
When you’re trying to keep a room full of people safe, whose medical histories or current physical abilities you might not know, it’s better to err on the side of caution, right?
Well, yes. But also, yoga isn’t football. It’s not a full contact sport. It’s a low impact, bodyweight movement practice that doesn’t really stress your bones enough to increase bone density and doesn’t stress your muscles enough to increase their capacity for load (meaning, yoga won’t help you build lots of muscle).
In most yoga classes and for many bodies, your physical risk is fairly low.
More importantly, the human body isn’t so fragile that letting your knee go past your ankle in a lunge or putting your foot on your knee in tree pose, could cause serious damage to your knee.
Yes, there are exceptions. For example, if someone is hypermobile or has a condition that impacts joints and soft tissue, like Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, yes they should probably avoid most things that put extra pressure or stress on their joints. But most folks with EDS aren’t going to go to a vinyasa class.
When we, as teachers, use blanket statements about the body that are not evidence based, we start to pathologize the body.
Our bodies become something we fear, not something we trust.
I spent years not trusting my body, separate from yoga. In fact, yoga as a mind-body practice is a big part of what helped me start to feel at home in my body again after years of destructive behavior that left me disconnected from my body.
So I’m not interested in fearmongering about how breakable our bodies are or telling my students that if they move the “wrong way” they could hurt themselves.
Instead, I’d rather give them tools to understand their bodies more clearly. Not all cues are bad and the way we use language to communicate them matters.
I can tell my students to engage their leg muscles in a backbend without saying that if they don’t, they will have back pain.
I can tell them why we might be keeping knees over ankles in one version of the pose and then teach knees moving “out of alignment” in another to demonstrate hip mobility actions vs holding a pose for endurance purposes.
I can give my student only the cues they really need, not just extra stuff that is primarily superficial and doesn’t benefit their poses or bodies.
I can explain what I’m doing and why when I’m sequencing in a certain way. And further, I can be thoughtful about my sequences and technique so I’m not just teaching what was taught to me.
And I can continue to educate myself with non-fear-based anatomy trainings and evidence-based practices to better support my students.
I don’t think all alignment is bad or unnecessary. But I do think we can micromanage our students less, while still giving them the support they need.
We can teach poses without scaring our students into thinking they are weak or incapable.
So let’s deconstruct a few of the big myths:
To keep your knees safe:
Your knee has to stay at a 90 degree angle at all times in standing poses and lunges. When you’re in standing poses or squatting, your knees cannot tip in or out. Your knees must point directly out over your toes at all times.You also cannot place your lifted foot on the outside of your knee in tree pose. And in virasana, as well as child’s pose, your knees must point straight forward; never out.
Whew. That’s a lot of knee fear. Your knee is a hinge joint, which means it’s mainly meant to bend and straighten (flex and extend). It can also move slightly side to side and rotate a bit, as well.
Can your knee get injured? Yes, of course. But probably not in a yoga class, unless you’re physically pushing your knee to move in a direction it does not want to go — for example, forcing your legs into lotus. Pressing your foot into your knee is not significant lateral pressure. Compare that to a massive human, running at top speed, slamming into your legs over and over to tackle you (hellloooo, football).
There are 2 key things to keep in mind about your knees.
First, when you’re descending into a lunge or a standing pose, think more about moving from your hips.
Second, the bigger issue with knees in a lunge or any other standing pose, is where your weight is located. If your weight is all in your front knee, it’s not going to feel great, most likely. But it’s also not necessarily going to hurt you. That has a lot to do with everything else that happens off of your mat; not just the action of a single yoga pose.
In lunges and bent leg standing poses, typically you want your weight distributed evenly between your 2 legs because it’s both more comfortable and easier to support yourself that way.
To keep your low back safe:
Don’t do twists. Don’t do backbends. Don’t do forward bends. Don’t come up to stand rounding your back. Don’t turn your feet out.
Wow. That’s a lot of don’ts. Sort of suggests that if you have back pain, whether it’s chronic or triggered by a specific action, you shouldn’t move. Ever. Maybe just stay in a hermetically sealed suit so nothing moves and you’ll be ok.
Except that’s not true. Your body needs movement. Especially when you have low back pain.
Back pain comes in a lot of varieties, so I won’t go into great detail here. But for the more low grade back pain or stiffness in your spine, there are 2 things you should probably do. The first is more mobility work (which I’ll get into a few paragraphs down) and the second has to do with strengthening your legs and glutes to help support your spine. This is less a yoga thing and more a strength training, lift heavier thing. Deadlifts, squats, lunges. There is both anecdotal and scientific evidence that strength training will improve general low back pain.
Are there exceptions? OF COURSE THERE ARE. For example, you will have less spinal mobility if you have disc herniation or any fused vertebrae.
But, doing mobility work for your hips and shoulders can help with both generalized low back pain and sometimes more specific low back pain. It’s not a fix. But not moving can be worse than moving when it comes to many types of low grade back pain.
A few points: the idea that you can’t round your spine is silly. Your spine is meant to move. Consider, too, that cat/cow is often suggested for low back pain but you can’t come up to stand from a forward bend rounding your spine? Make that make sense. (You can also read the caption of the images above, where I explain it and do, in fact, make it make sense)
Also for some people, twists and backbends actually feel great for their backs. Because when you increase the movement your entire spine does, it keeps your spine healthy.
What matters more than alignment, when it comes to knees and low back alike, is the action of your legs. Engaging the muscles. Sometimes giving more of a bend to the knees when it comes to supporting the low back. The point is that it’s not usually a one-size-fits-all answer.
To keep your shoulders safe:
Don’t let your shoulders come off of your back.
This usually refers to lowering down from plank into chaturanga or down dog, although in that style of yoga that I started in, shoulders were meant to stay on the back all of the time.
Teachers will use this cue because when you are weight bearing on your hands especially, keeping the head of your arm bones moving into the back plane of your body can give you more support. But you’ll also hear them say that you don’t want to “dump weight into your wrists.”
While this isn’t necessarily untrue, it depends on a lot of things. How many chaturangas you’re doing and how often? If you’re doing mysore-style ashtanga and you’re doing this, yes you will probably make your wrists very unhappy because of the absolutely excessive amount of chaturangas in this style of yoga.
However, in chaturanga, if you lower all the way to the floor, you will get to a point in which the head of your arm bone (and with them, your shoulders) will have to tip forward. This isn’t dangerous; it’s a natural movement for your shoulder.
The reminder is that your shoulder joint has a great deal of mobility because it’s a ball and socket joint that’s connected to your scapula and your clavicle. So you want your shoulder joint to be able to move through it’s entire range of motion, not just a small range of motion. By requiring your shoulders to only stay “down and back” you are limiting the range they can move in, which is more problematic than giving them the opportunity to bear weight in more than one plane.
**
There are so many others I haven’t addressed here, including yoga during menstruation or pregnancy — which have some of the most wildly inaccurate claims about what our bodies can and should do during each experience. Those are such big topics, I’m going to write completely separate essays for each of them. So stay tuned.
If there is something I’ve missed here that you have a question about, please feel free to ask in the comments and I will do my best to answer them.
Lastly, I’d usually footnote a lot of the stuff I share, particularly when it comes to scientific evidence. In this case, I did not — in part because I have been teaching yoga and movement for 20 years and have a wealth of anatomy training under my belt. However, I also continue to learn with people who are sharing more evidence-based yoga and movement practices, among them Laurel Beversdorf and Sarah Court who have a fantastic podcast called Movement Logic, where they share much of this information. I’ve linked their website to the tutorials they share above and you can find their podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. If you’d like more of the resources and teachers I pull from, send me a direct message here on substack.
Thank you for this! I got back into yoga recently, as well as group exercise classes, and I was just talking about how anxious I feel because I am always anticipating that the instructor will correct me. I can understand why this may be helpful sometimes, but most of the time, it seems unnecessary. As a result, I can never really relax. I had avoided yoga for the past several years because of this. I would rather raise my hand or something if I need help.
Yes yes! Can relate 100%. It’s been equal parts learning and unlearning in my own movement journey. The myth of body fragility and the gatekeeping of knowledge is such a wide cultural phenomenon in the western world too. It is insidious. Feels all the more important to encourage my son to question absolutist statements and rules.