Yoga is an ideal quarantine workout: It can be as relaxing or physically punishing as you like, and all you need to get started is your body and a reasonably soft surface. But as with any exercise, you won’t get much out of practicing yoga with bad form—so before you hit the mat (or carpet) for the first time in a while, take a moment to think about yours.
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You probably have a rough idea of how poses should look to an observer, but it’s way more important that you know how to get your body into and out of them correctly. In yoga, this is known as alignment, and it’s not easy to pick up on your own—the best way to learn it is by having an instructor physically adjust your body. With yoga classes cancelled for the foreseeable future, your next-best option for alignment tips might actually be Instagram.
Alignment diagrams exist for every yoga pose from the simplest to the most advanced, and they’re super easy to find. I follow @inflexibleyogis and @howtopracticeyoga on Instagram, both of which mostly repost content from individual yoga teachers, and save the most relevant posts so I can come back to them later. It might sound goofy, but diagrams like this one have been infinitely more helpful and encouraging to me than any instructional video:
Full disclosure: I’m neither a yoga expert nor a fan of video workouts, which I think is why I like these diagrams so dang much. (If you do love videos, pretty much everyone I know strongly recommends Yoga with Adriene on YouTube, especially for beginners.) The differences between the left and ride sides of the photo are immediately obvious to me in a way that verbal or written instructions aren’t, and they stick in my brain better, too. Ever since I learned that bending my knees is totally fine—and preferable to wrenching my back forward to touch the floor—I get a lot more out of my forward folds. Also, who knew that the secret to standing backbends is furiously clenching your butt muscles? Well, now I do.
Whenever I feel like adding a new pose to my very laid-back bedtime yoga routine, alignment diagrams are my first stop. You don’t even have to wade into yoga Instagram if don’t want to; just Google “[pose] alignment” and see what pops up. Whether you’ve been practicing yoga for years or just a few days, for once, there’s something to be said for taking advice from the Internet—at least in this specific case.
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