Consider this the starter guide for launching your self practice.

Let’s be honest, yoga classes are great, but you must not become dependent on them.

Classes are best used as a supplement to your daily self practice, which I am going to help you develop.

Classes become a thousand times more effective when you have a developed self-practice.

[blockquote text=”My mission isn’t to teach you yoga, it’s to teach you how to teach yourself yoga. And self-practice is one giant leap toward that.” show_quote_icon=”no” background_color=”#f6f6f6″]

The following 5 pillars are are essential to developing a solid self-practice.

Proprioception

Striving to increase this constantly will elevate your yoga practice to new heights. I’ve talked about proprioception in multiple blog posts because it is that important. The general definition of proprioception is being aware and being able to sense your body and limbs in free space.

Developing this skill will allow you to master multiple clusters of poses at time rather than one-by-one.  This is another reason why I talk often about doing yoga poses for the deeper reasons and not simply because you want to look pretty on Instagram, although that may be a motivating factor for some of you.

Every pose or transition that you learn should teach you something new about your body. If you’re doing yoga to impress other people don’t do yoga.

I’ll give you two examples of Proprioception:

1) Being able to sense the positioning of the knee in Tree Pose. Okay, so hopefully you know tree, if you don’t look up a quick picture of it fast and come back. Basically, Tree Pose is your the sole of one of your feet resting on the inner of the opposite leg.

Now it really doesn’t matter where the knee is when its bent, however, there is a couple of ways people like to do it. The first one is lining up the bent knee with the hip. You can do that, its completely valid. Or some people like to create a 45 degree angle with the leg and have the knee facing inward. That’s okay too. And I’m sure there is a million other ways you can place your knee in Tree Pose.

The important thing is not the placement of the knee but being able to sense the where the knee is in space. Practice doing tree with your eyes close and moving the knee into different positions. Then open your eyes and ensure that it’s in the place that you wanted it to be. If this extremely easy for you, don’t worry, it can quite complicated quite fast.

2) A handstand is another example of this. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen people try a handstand and they kick up and their legs are all over the place, flaying around in outer space, shoulders way too far forward over the wrists, and then they come down with a thud and say “I almost had it, I was straight up and down!”  No you weren’t, sorry, and you were no where close. Proprioception at it’s best.

Posture

The way you stand is by far more important than anything else.

Here in Palo Alto, CA, I observe daily all types of people doing yoga, and I mean all types people – corporate executives, professional athletes, your stereotypical tech geek, soccer moms (off topic, I love soccer), the kids of the soccer mom’s, bankers, chefs that cook organic-only meals made with farm fresh ingredients, marathon runners, and rock climbers. Okay, you get my point. And, they are all at different experience levels in their practices. That’s okay too.

However, this is what I see shockingly quite often:

One time, I had a student of mine say to me as he came bumbling into class with his shoulders completely collapsed and sagging together down toward the floor, probably from sitting in front of a computer screen all day and not making an effort to move even once, “Brian, what do I need to do to get to get myself into a solid handstand ASAP?”

I had to tell him, “Slow down, let’s master the very basics first, standing straight.”  He looked insulted, but thats okay, its better that someone tells you your posture is horrific sooner than later, and even better if its a yoga teacher, assuming the yoga teacher can fix it.

Bottom line, you don’t end up being that yogi who successfully runs marathons, who can bend him or herself into a pretzel, and can swim to Alcatraz and back, but can’t stand straight up and down. Not only does it make you look more like a living, breathing zombie, but it’s not a very good endorsement for yoga.

Before you get fancy, start simply.

Strength

There is this other misconception with yoga and that’s that you must be flexible to be “good” at yoga. False for a number of reasons that I’ll talk about in another blog post.

Next time you’re in a public yoga class look around you. People only like to do what they’re good at.

Observe someone doing a Vinyasa, the strong but stiff yogi holds Chaturanga for what looks like an eternity and skips Up Dog altogether and pushes right back to Down Dog.

Observe a highly flexible but “weak-armed” yogi, this persons often skips Chaturanga and elects to go right from Plank Pose into Up Dog and then gloriously basks in the perfectly curved bend looking side to side to make sure people are *actually* watching.

Don’t be either one of those people. You don’t practice yoga to do only what you’re good at already, you practice yoga to master the things you are not good at. You are trying to bring yourself into balance.

This is why you end up injured from a public yoga class, because by only working on things that you are good at, you throw yourself more out of balance and then end up injured. This is another reason why it is essential to develop a self-practice.

The good news is, I can help you, I can help you break out of what I call the “Injury Flywheel” and pull yourself into true balance. True Balance is a remarkable feeling when you get there.

Before you even think about developing an intricate, fancy yoga practice, you must get yourself into True Balance.

Flexibility

This is similar to strength but on the opposite end, I outlined both for you above.

Some notes on flexibility specifically. You can increase your flexibility much faster than you think when done correctly. However, that said, don’t move to fast.

“Make haste slowly”

I should rephrase this slightly, stretch smartly.

I often see people stretching randomly, with no specific order, not stretching enough or opposite stretching way too much. Quick hint, if you’ve never done the splits before, its impossible to do it your first time trying.

You develop flexibility the fastest (this doesn’t mean overnight or 2 days or 3) when you stretch the muscles in the body in the correct order repeatedly.

This is why you can spend years and years in yoga classes and not develop very much flexibility at all. I once had a new student come and to me and she said, “Brian, I like yoga but I’m really bad at it. My hamstrings are tight even though I’ve been practicing for 8 years, and i still can’t do a handstand.”

I laughed.

Turns out we fixed her problem rather quickly. We put together a simple daily routine which was basically just a 15 minute self practice specifically for her hamstrings. She combined that with her regular routine of going to yoga classes 1-2 times a week and lo and behold, her hamstrings opened up a ton over the course of the next 2 months.

A side note, you are not a bad yogi just because you can’t do the splits and a handstand. What makes you a bad yogi is when you ignore the signals your body is sending you and you repeatedly injure yourself in the same way over and over and don’t try to learn from previous mistakes.

When are stretching, don’t focus on how deeply you can go in the stretches that you know, focus on the order that you do the stretches, the order is far more important. Getting the order correct will yield extraordinary results in anyone.

Balance

If you’ve spent time with me you’ve heard me say, “People should work on balance, not balances”.

What on earth does that mean?

You don’t really think about balance until you need it, and that’s the problem. That’s why balances are hard for you.

Headstand, Crow, and Warrior 3 are all balances. If you just practice those, you’ll learn, eventually.

But imagine if you worked on exercises specifically to increase your overall balance in all balances. For example, I’ll give you one exercise that I do and one that I train my clients with. It’s called ‘block hopping’. Essentially what you are doing is balancing on one leg and hopping forward over two blocks stacked on top of each other and hopping backward over the two blocks.

Don’t think ‘block hopping’ helps?  Try doing that simple exercise everyday for a few minutes for just one week and watch how that transforms your Warrior 3.  Try it.