Don't cheat the pose!

Finding the “moment” that will transform your yoga practice.

---

There’s a precise moment in most yoga poses where going deeper in the pose turns useful effort into compensation.

I want you to get good at detecting this moment — like really good at it.

And then back off.

Compensation is when your body recruits other muscles (sometimes called “prime” movers) to shift alignment and maintain the shape of a pose. However, this happens at a cost, as you deny yourself the precious benefits of the pose.

By relying on the prime movers, you fall back into old habit patterns instead of focusing on cultivating new ones. You rob yourself of the opportunity to build fine-tuned strength and flexibility where it’s needed, and instead overload muscles that are often already overburdened.

As you develop awareness, you’ll start noticing the tell-tale signs.

These vary, but some common ones:

• Your breathing pattern changes
• You notice tension rising in other parts of your body, like the jaw, neck, forehead, or lower back.
• Your center of balance shifts, or you redistribute your weight
• Certain parts of the body “shut off” or lose tone — often with a sense of collapse
• Your mind races, gets restless, and starts screaming at you to exit the pose

In my experience, the best part of a pose happens right before crossing this threshold. This is when you are still engaging with the pose from an expansive presence of mind.

Unfortunately, most yoga students get seduced into rushing past this threshold.

The mistake I see most students make is either chasing sensation or chasing an ideal picture of the pose in their head. They want to finally “get the pose” and so force themselves to go beyond what they are ready for.

But they are training stress instead of ease, which is enormously counterintuitive.

Sometimes just because you can go deeper in a pose, it doesn’t mean you should. It is more important to make the pose fit the body than to have the body fit the pose. If you are exhibiting the tell-tale signs listed above, you’ve gone too far.

---

The next time you are practicing yoga, I encourage you to try to take it a little bit easy. Instead of immediately rushing to your end-range, dial it back and explore the texture of the pose at the threshold. It may feel more like a meditation than a rigorous workout — with the challenge now being to endure boredom instead of strain and pain — but give it a chance.

You might find that you paradoxically reach new depths.