If you have decided to start practicing Yoga, congratulations! You have just made a decision that will hopefully improve the overall quality of your life. Your ultimate goal in your first few sessions should be to have fun. At the end of the day, the greatest benefits Yoga can bring to you will be reaped with consistency and the best way to ensure for that is to make this journey an enjoyable and engaging one.
With that being said, it might do you good to be aware of some common mistakes new Yoga practitioners make. I spoke to various Yoga instructors and am highlighting 3 common themes that keep recurring. To be clear, I am not looking to highlight mistakes within practice parameters or poses, this article is meant to address more macro and meta trends.
Chances are, your first few sessions will be done in a studio with other practitioners. Unless offered, it is unlikely that the whole class will consist of new practitioners who are roughly in the same stage of their Yoga journey.
It is also not uncommon for long time Yoga practitioners to attend classes seemingly more ‘basic’ in nature. Yoga is not a linear progression whereby you ‘graduate’ from a class type with no need for revisitation.
With that being said, while you are in a class with more seasoned Yoga practitioners, it is natural to look to them in addition to an instructor to take cues on your practice. Whilst this is understandable, do try to avoid using these practitioners as a benchmark for yourself for the here and now. You might see someone moving into a pose seemingly with minimal effort and constraint. What you do not see is the amount of time and effort expended by an individual to reach the stage he / she is in to do so.
Instead, the own benchmarks you should be setting should be personalized. Looking to improve incrementally and sustainably from your current level of practice is more important and beneficial than trying to catch up to perceived levels of others.
As you go through your first few Yoga sessions, your instructor will probably introduce a few poses that have different variations. Variations in Yoga poses largely exist to 1) either focus on different parts of your body or to 2) make the pose more accessible to individuals who might otherwise struggle.
It is not uncommon to see new Yoga practitioners attempt to do ‘final forms’ of poses without slowly going through escalating variations. I would recommend your first few Yoga sessions to be focussed on self discovery as opposed to pose / form discovery.
A large part of your Yoga journey would be to understand yourself and how your body works in a deeper way. Everyone’s body is built differently. For example, when I first started practicing Yoga, I had relatively open shoulders but very tight hamstrings and calves. I could barely touch my toes and I struggled immensely with my forward folds + halfway lifts. I quickly learned that whilst I was able to access shoulder stretch poses relatively easily, I needed to be very deliberate and intentional about any pose that involved my hamstrings and calves.
Many Yoga poses can work deeper muscle tissues and micro muscles that might be neglected in day to day living or other sports. Discovering your own current strengths and weaknesses will set you up for an easier and more rewarding journey ahead.
If you enter a Yoga journey with an expectation that Yoga is easy to do, without having an intimate and holistic understanding of how your body reacts in different circumstances, you might be setting yourself up for disappointment or worse, injuries. Combining this with a tendency to compare yourself with experienced practitioners usually leads to a loss of motivation to continue a practice that can otherwise be very beneficial to you.
Remember, the ultimate goal of Yoga is to not do handstands simply for the sake of it. You should instead focus on improving your physical and mental states in a sustainable way that is also enjoyable and fun.
Granted, this is not exclusive to Yoga or beginners! Being present is something that we all probably could do better with, across all facets of life. However, there are some tips and tricks that can help with this relating specifically to Yoga.
You might be attending a Yoga session on the back of a long and stressful day at work. You might be distracted and finding yourself not being as immersed within your practice as you like. The most helpful tip I can give here is to always focus on your breathing throughout your practice.
A simple beginner practice is to count the length of your inhales and exhales if you find your mind wandering. This will help you ground back to your mat and hopefully prevent external influences taking away your from your experience on the mat.