Why is Proper Alignment Important in Yoga Asana?

Now that we’ve discussed what yoga alignment is, it is important to discuss why it is so valuable to include it in your yoga practice. Aligning your body properly based on your own anatomy, strength and flexibility is the best way to have a safe and effective practice that will give you optimal results.

8 Reasons Why Alignment is Important When Practicing Yoga:

1.     Creates a Safe Practice
Yoga injuries are on the rise— don’t be a statistic! Using proper functional alignment can help prevent injuries and make you less susceptible to sprains and strains. Being aware of how your body feels with different movements and in certain positions is critical to understanding how to align yourself in a posture. Working with a qualified instructor or implementing key principles are good starting points to educate yourself and increase your bodily awareness. To keep your body protected from possible harmful movements, avoid forcing yourself into a posture and instead use props. Though it’s a learning process, backing off or changing your movements when feeling pain or discomfort will make you a better yogi and greatly reduce your risk of injury.

2.     Creates a Stronger Connection with Your Body
Increasing bodily awareness is something that takes time to develop, but can have tremendous positive effects on your overall wellness. Practicing yoga with alignment in mind can help speed up and deepen this process. It is essential to find movements that work best and feel right for you as an individual and this may require some experimentation. To really understand the difference between what feels right vs what feels wrong does require trial and error, but that’s all part of the journey of building this connection. Paying attention to your alignment also helps to foster the relationship between your body, mind and breath because it requires you to breathe and move mindfully.

3.     Maximizes The Benefits of Yoga Postures and Practice
The main reason we practice yoga asana in the first place is to reap all the benefits it has to offer! When performing yoga with proper alignment, you will achieve even more benefits from the practice than you otherwise would. Some benefits could include increasing strength, flexibility, mindfulness, energy flow, circulation and balance. Alignment helps you engage and stretch the right areas of the body so that you can maximize the physical benefits. We also benefit mentally and spiritually from creating mindful movements and practicing “in the moment”. If you lack proper alignment, you may only obtain marginal benefits from each pose and your practice as a whole.

4.     Helps To Become More Present
Whether you’re practicing at a yoga studio or in your own home, sometimes it can be difficult to fully focus. Thoughts can pop up in your head at any time about what you’re planning on eating for dinner, something you forgot to do or even a reminder to yourself that plays in your head throughout your practice. While implementing cues and principles as you move, the mind will aim towards positioning your body and utilizing your breath instead of diverging to outside thoughts. Once positioned in a posture, you can really focus on maintaining that position and breathing with a clear mind. Being present will give you the ability to deepen the connection with yourself during your yoga practice and the need for these outside thoughts will greatly diminish.

5.     Helps to Practice Efficiently
By arranging your body in its anatomically correct positions, it helps increase the flow of energy and create more efficient movements. Sometimes this can help make poses easier to perform. An example would be stacking your shoulders over your wrists in Plank Pose to create better balance and stability. Using proper alignment can also make poses seem more difficult to perform. An example would be in Mountain Pose / Tadasana, where you would line up and engage every part of the body instead of standing passively. You will get more out of your practice by using proper alignment techniques because the right areas will be lined up and activated.

“ If you practice with proper alignment, you may find that you get the same benefits with a shorter practice than you otherwise would in a longer practice. ”

6.     Builds a Better Foundation
Want to move through your modifications and into more difficult variations or poses? Building strength and creating flexibility in the right areas is essential to creating a strong foundation. By aligning yourself properly, you will learn to target the right muscles and connective tissues so that you can progress faster in your practice. It’s never a good idea to force yourself into any pose when your body is not ready for it, so incorporating the use of props can be extremely beneficial. Props can help to connect two areas without forcing them, or give the right support when you need it, thus creating a stronger, more flexible and stable body. Being able to perform a pose correctly with modifications and proper alignment is more important than being able to perform the full expression of the pose incorrectly. The latter may actually set you back further in your practice. 

7.     Corrects Developed Unhealthy Habits
If you have already been practicing yoga without any awareness of proper alignment, it is likely that you may have developed some unhealthy movement patterns. By learning the key principles of alignment and using them to reposition your body in your practice, it may help to relieve pain or discomfort that you may feel in certain poses. Focusing on how your body aligns itself will make you more aware of how certain movement patterns affect your body for better or worse. You will, in turn, develop healthier movement patterns and this will positively impact your practice and your life outside of yoga.

8.     Benefits Your Life Outside of Yoga
Correcting unhealthy movement patterns will not only change your yoga practice, it will also change how you generally move and perform your day-to-day activities. Once you realize how your body aligns and moves optimally, you can transfer this mindfulness into your everyday life. Examples would be lining up the neck with the spine while working on a computer and keeping your back straight when you bend your knees to pick something up.
Bonus: These principles are also transferable to many other forms of exercise!

“Understanding alignment cues and principles using yoga as a base will
help you to align yourself in many ways on and off the mat”

xx

Yoga Alignment

What is Yoga Alignment?

Yoga alignment describes how the body is arranged in yoga postures (asanas). This mainly includes creating straight lines and stacking bones - but it can mean so much more. Alignment isn’t a rigid structure about making a perfect angles and creating that picture-perfect shape. On the contrary— it’s about aligning each individual in a pose, utilizing their bodies’ physical abilities and maintaining certain key principles in an adaptable way. Using key principles, modifications and props (yoga straps, blocks, etc), alignment can be achieved no matter what level of flexibility or mobility, and no matter the individual’s shape or size. The main goals of alignment are to maximize the benefits in each asana and reduce susceptibility to injuries, but it can also relate to creating certain angles and idealist pose shapes with the body that are considered beautiful.

“Alignment is not about perfection,
it’s about what works for each individual and their bodies ”

Not every body will look the same in every pose meaning that alignment isn’t universal, but some of the core principles are. Alignment in yoga can be both functional and aesthetic which is why it’s important to know and understand the differences.

There are two aspects of Yoga Alignment

1.     Functional: Alignment for functional reasons is concerned with biomechanics of each muscle or joint and how they will function optimally. Biomechanics relates to the structure of these body parts and how they inherently move. We use this type of alignment to arrange the body so that each area is not going beyond its own limitations or performing movements that it can’t inherently perform. Functional alignment focuses on safety and optimal performance.

An example of functional alignment would be to keep the head, neck and spine all in one straight line. This example would describe how the spine should inherently line up. This is important for the integrity of the body and for long-term health and mobility. This type of alignment will help maintain stability, increase the flow of energy and allow efficient activation of specific areas of the body. In this example, there is a functional reason for why we align in this particular way.

Another example would be having the arms up overhead while in a standing position. Many individuals may not be able to make a straight line from their wrists all the way down to their ankles. If the arms create a 45 degree angle from the shoulders instead of being perfectly straight up, this does not mean that they are not aligned properly and that it will affect the body negatively. This would be a misconception of functional alignment. For this particular individual, having a 45 degree angle from head would be functional for them and is perfectly okay.

In functional alignment we take into consideration the shape of the bones and muscle tension that may enable or disable us from performing certain movements. A yoga pose using this principle may not always look perfect.

“It is important to note that functionality
is more important than how a posture looks. ”

2.     Aesthetic: Alignment for aesthetic reasons doesn’t concern itself with safety or injury prevention, it is simply concerned with looking attractive. Right angles and perfectly straight lines are not absolutes when practicing yoga. Although many yogis strive to achieve the “full expression” of a pose as they were handed down from ancient yogis, this does not necessarily mean that these shapes are healthy or obtainable for every individual.

An example of aesthetic alignment would be creating a 90 degree angle in the front knee during Warrior 2 (Virabhadrasana II). Being incapable of creating this angle won’t hurt your body or make you any less adept to practice, but it looks good. If the angle is above 90 but the knee still sits over the ankles, we would consider this great functional alignment!

Another example of an aesthetic alignment in Warrior 2 (Virabharasana II) would be a common cue of lining up the heels of both feet or having the front heel lined up with the arch of the back foot. Performing this may be easy for some individuals but may actually cause pain or discomfort for others. This alignment cue is strictly for aesthetic purposes and may be impossible for some to perform based on their bodies. The solution would be to widen their stance instead of lining up the heels. In this case, it doesn’t mean it’s right or wrong— it’s about what is accessible and feels right.

Some yogis may push themselves beyond their bodies’ limits to achieve these sometimes unrealistic shapes, which could definitely lead to long-term issues. Aesthetic alignment plays into the artistic expression of yoga than what is actually required or helpful- but it is still used in many styles of yoga and taught by many instructors.

Now that we’ve discussed the two aspects and understand the differences between them, we should mention that many yoga practices encompass both aspects. It’s not always about functional alignment and it’s certainly not all about aesthetic alignment. Every individual has a different body shape, a different anatomical makeup (think bone structure and muscle length) and different physical capabilities. It’s important to understand and become aware of your own body, what your restrictions are (hint: when/where you feel pain), and where you excel.

Does alignment matter in yoga? Check out this article for further information about alignment and its importance. How do you find out if you’re aligned properly? This article gives great tips!

“Honor your body and be respectful of its limitations. Back off if you feel pain. If you feel ready to move to the next level- do so slowly and mindfully.
This is where the most growth takes place. ”

xx

Yoga Alignment Team