What comes to mind when you see the words “yoga alignment,” I.e., arranging your body in specific ways (or instructing others to arrange their bodies in specific ways) when practicing particular asanas?
Maybe you think about safety. After all, many of us were taught (and many are still being taught) in teacher training that proper alignment prevents injury.
Or maybe you’re in the camp that thinks alignment is overrated. Perhaps you practice or teach other forms of movement where you regularly perform actions that many yoga teachers caution against (“never jump back into your plank”? Okay, but have you heard of a burpee?) Or maybe you’re an anatomy geek who keeps up on the latest movement science research and knows that common percussions given in yoga class often don’t stack up to the science. You know enough about force and load and biomechanics to understand that resting your foot on your knee in tree pose is probably just fine, and that there are perfectly valid reasons for a person to substantially round their upper back in a forward fold or turn their toes out in urdhva dhanurasana (upward bow pose).
I’m someone who leans more toward the latter, though at one point leaned very much toward the former. As a teenager in the 2000s, my hyperfixation with yoga started with alignment-based styles. I like patterns and formulas, and the then-popular idea of “universal alignment principles “really appealed to me. Memorize them, apply them, and you’re for sure doing yoga right, right?
Well, yes, it felt that way at first. But after a while, all those rules started to feel stifling, arbitrary, and frankly, made yoga less fun. As much as I love a good rule if the rule makes sense to me, I can’t stand an arbitrary rule. Is it a big deal if my chaturanga isn’t a perfect 90-degree angle? Or if pigeon feels better when my hips aren’t square? Do I need to keep hounding the person in my class who bends their knee past their ankle in warrior II, even if they assure me it feels fine?
Alignment Was an Era
Back in 2014, I wrote an article called “Ten Alignment Cues Yoga Teachers Need to Stop Giving.” (Remember how everything was a listicle in the 2010s?) This was right around what I think of as the “yoga is very dangerous” media era, fueled in part by the 2012 publication of William Broad’s The Science of Yoga: Risks and Rewards and lots of corresponding think-pieces. Which is to say that my focus at the time, in this particular article, wasn’t so much on calling out unnecessary cues, but cues that were “wrong” or “injurious” (a word that I thought made me sound very smart when I was in my 20s). In other words, stop telling people to stack their bottom shoulder over their wrist in vasisthasana (side plank) and instead tell them to bring their wrist slightly in front of their shoulder. Never mind the many factors that could play a role when choosing one version of side plank over the other, surely, I assumed, there has to be a singular correct way to side plank, and I was confident that I knew it because teachers who had a lot more training and experience and impressive-sounding titles than I did told me so.
Of course, as was customary in that golden age of Buzzfeed-style listicles and online opinion pieces, a few people wrote counterpieces explaining why I was wrong about a particular point, or why I was right, but for the wrong reasons. Eventually, I had to stop reading the comments on the original for the sake of my mental well-being since every time that article resurfaced, a stomachache would also resurface for me.
It wasn’t just that I didn’t love people telling me I was a bad teacher who was slowly killing my students by way of misunderstanding scapulohumeral rhythm, and also dumb and probably ugly too; it was that eventually, I didn’t even think I agreed with myself anymore. Like sometimes, when preparing for some arm balances, it made sense to stack my joints in side plank. Did this make me the worst kind of hypocrite? And I began to suspect that maybe I didn’t need to mention the “outer border of the scapula” every time I told people to reach their arms overhead. After all, most of us seem to manage just fine when reaching to grab a box of cereal from a high shelf without analyzing the movement of our shoulder blades or fretting about how deeply the head of the humerus is sitting in the shoulder socket.
It was also around that time that I discovered yoga teachers like Jenni Rawlings and Bernie Clark (both of whom you’ll hear from later in this article), who were a lot more knowledgeable about movement science than me. They spoke and wrote about asana in ways that reignited my excitement about it. Eventually, I was fortunate to work with both of them and learned more in the process of fact-checking and copyediting articles they’d written than almost any yoga anatomy training I’d taken.
Considering this new information, I started to think that maybe your typical yoga class was more low-risk than the then-trending conversation had led me to believe. As I learned about all the interesting ways that human bodies can differ, it became obvious that different people need different things, even when it comes to the same pose.
Recently, in a conversation with my friend Alex Guardado, a fellow yoga instructor who specializes in mobility and functional movement, he mentioned the positive imprints this ongoing conversation has left on the yoga world when it comes to how we approach alignment. “Coming from bodybuilding and Olympic weightlifting before discovering yoga,” he explains, “I’ve noticed a shift toward more individualized, body-positive alignment cues rather than rigid one-size-fits-all approaches. I appreciate how more teachers incorporate functional movement principles rather than forcing everyone into identical poses. There’s a growing recognition that optimal alignment looks different for everybody.”
While my own movement background differs from Guardado’s, my feelings were, and largely still are, similar. Though initially, as separated from an “alignment-based” perspective, I’m pretty sure my reaction was less nuanced than his. I went from a die-hard alignment advocate to viewing it as needlessly prescriptive, hierarchical, and outdated. What I didn’t realize, though, was that I was still very much using alignment, just in a different way.
Why Did We (or Do We) Care So Much about Alignment in Yoga?
The history of asana, let alone yoga itself, is fascinating and complicated and well outside the scope of this essay. But I think I can generalize and say most scholars would agree that yoga alignment as we know it today wasn’t really a thing until around the 20th century. Of course, asana itself goes way further back, and it’s technically possible that 15th-century yoga practitioners (the general time frame of the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, which includes references to familiar asanas) fiercely debated the angle of the back foot in virabhadrasana I ( warrior I). But probably not, since that pose isn’t even in the Hatha Yoga Pradipika. There, and in other early hatha yoga texts like the Gheranda Samhita and the Shiva Samhita (which also do not include warrior I, for the record), alignment of the subtle body seems to be the focus, not so much “protecting our joints.” That’s not to say that we shouldn’t care about healthy joints, or that centuries-old writings are perfect, infallible, or above scrutiny just because they’re centuries old. I’m just saying that in the grand story of yoga, a lot of our now-common alignment rules are recent, and very much a product of their time.
In his 2015 forward to Bernie Clark’s Your Body, Your Yoga, Paul Grilley asks readers to consider the question “When did the ‘rules of alignment’ in yoga classes become ubiquitous?” Grilley goes on to argue that common ideas about alignment, including the idea of universal principles, may in part be connected to the rise of yoga teacher trainings in the late 20th century. He writes:
…[T]eachers needed to be mass-produced in 200-hour chunks of time. None of this was a cynical manipulation—it was motivated by a genuinely felt need. But how to produce a teacher in 200 hours? The education had to be systematized to be time-efficient, and students needed to be assessed unambiguously. Both needs were met by creating manuals with strict and memoizable “rules of alignment” on how postures should be taught.
Grilley also notes the prominence of the very alignment-based Iyengar School of Yoga, which predates the explosion of 200-hour trainings in the 1990s and 2000s:
Iyengar teachers prided themselves on having exact rules of alignment; in this very significant way, they stood out from other styles of yoga and from yoga TT programs. Mr. Iyengar had already developed many “levels” of certification. This is important because the manual first used by Yoga Works in Los Angeles was written by Iyengar and other alignment devotees.
But he goes on to remind:
… [E]very style of yoga that seeks rapid expansion does the same. Bikram yoga turns out cookie-cutter teachers by the hundreds, and their “training” is largely the strict memorization of a script of alignment instructions. Anusara yoga used to bill itself as “the fastest growing style of yoga in the world!” and its rules of alignment have been described as “Iyengar with spirals.” And almost monthly, someone trademarks their “brand” of yoga, which is essentially trademarking their alignment rules. Alignment is not a “Western corruption” of yoga tradition. Mr. Iyengar is an Indian from an Indian tradition. But there are many Indian schools of yoga without rigid alignment, and Pattabhi Jois’s Ashtanga yoga is one of them. There are also Western schools of yoga that are not alignment rigid, such as Kripalu yoga. So, alignment rigidity is not Eastern or Western or universal; it is a consequence of TT programs trying to make it simpler to mass-produce teachers. Any time an art is constrained to mass production, it will be simplified, codified, and rigidified. This is true in yoga, in dance, in the martial arts, and in religion. Simpler is easier to teach and absorb, but it also leads to inaccurate generalizations and intolerance of individuality. Yet it must be said that the impulse to embrace rigid rules of alignment is not motivated only by TT necessities. It is one part of human nature to codify and rigidify, just as it is another part of human nature to break with tradition and create something new. We cannot teach effectively without some generalizations, but we haven’t reached maturity until we have outgrown generalizations and can competently focus on the unique needs of every student in every pose.
(You can read the rest of the excerpt here.)
When I asked Clark, who has been teaching yoga and meditation since 1998 and has authored of many books on yoga, about his own early experiences with alignment, he prefaced “my first yoga teacher came out of the Sivananda tradition, and I do not recall her ever giving alignment cues. Once I started experiencing other styles,” he shared, “such as Ashtanga and Power Yoga variations I began to hear more and more cues about where to place hands, feet, knees and butts. Whenever I asked ‘why?’ the answers were usually some sort of warning about the dangers of not being aligned. Improper alignment would lead (not could lead) to damage to the joints.
“As a new teacher,” Clark reflected, “I enjoyed collecting dozens of unique phrasings to describe alignment options, such as ‘hide your heels behind your ankles,’ in down dog, to ensure your feet are properly aligned, hip-width apart, and pointing straight forward.’ Cool…I loved these cues…until I met Paul Grilley. He blew my world apart. He introduced me to a functional approach to yoga practice, and all my beloved alignment cues became as useless as horse whips in the era of motorized cars.”
Functional, in this case, is more than a trendy fitness buzzword. I like it because when we’re talking about yoga alignment, it forces us to reflect on the why that Clark was talking about. As yoga teachers, if we ask someone to do something, we owe them the reason why. And if we don’t have a good answer, is it really that important?
I was also surprised by how Clark’s early experiences with alignment, initial questions, and early “ah, ha!” moments seemed so like my own experience. It made me wonder if the trajectory of Cool! Alignment cues! to but why? to functional! was a common one among many yoga teachers. Maybe it’s not just that our collective conversation around alignment is changing, but that if you teach yoga long enough, eventually you start to ask some questions about what you once took for granted as objective truth. And then maybe, if you’re lucky, you run into other people who’ve been there, who encourage you to see yoga and movement in a new light. Maybe the internet makes this more possible.
But practically speaking, how do we teach from a functional approach to alignment? Clark emphasizes that it’s not that yoga alignment doesn’t matter, but that the yoga alignment that matters is the alignment that’s appropriate for the person in front of you. For the individual. He emphasizes that “Human variation makes it impossible to give alignment cues that will be safe and effective for every student. The challenge for a teacher is not to dictate how students should look (aesthetics), but [how to appropriately] describe the intended experience we want the student to have (functional). This was the motivation for writing my Your Body, Your Yoga trilogy,” he adds, “to provide a resource that documents the wide range of human variation and the implications of taking a functional approach to your yoga practice.”
A New Understanding of Alignment
I asked Jenni Rawlings, who is an E-RYT® 500, YACEP®, and yoga educator specializing in anatomy, biomechanics, and movement science, the same question about her initial experience with alignment. “When I first started teaching,” she said, “alignment was predominantly framed as a strict set of ‘correct’ positions – the right knee goes exactly here, the tailbone tilts just so, the back foot turns to a precise angle – with the main goal being to prevent injury. All the yoga anatomy trainings I took back then reinforced this same approach,” she recalls, “presenting alignment as the key to keeping students safe.”
I’ve started teaching yoga around the same time as Rawlings, and while I related to her experience, what she said next was something I hadn’t considered yet. “In reality,” she explains, “even at that time, movement science already recognized that the human body is adaptable and resilient, and that the relatively low loads we experience in yoga aren’t inherently dangerous. What has shifted is the yoga world’s awareness of this science.” She reminds that “yoga tends to be an insular space, with most teachers learning about the body and movement solely through yoga teacher trainings. It’s taken time for insights from exercise science, biomechanics, pain science, and related fields to filter into the yoga community – and, as is often the case, for scientific knowledge in general to reach the broader public.”
I constantly forget that not everyone exists in my yoga bubble. Rawlings provided a much-needed reality check that just because I learned something in a yoga context, it doesn’t mean it only exists in that context (expanding my awareness in a way that ironically, seems pretty yogic).
She then added, “But today, I’ve definitely noticed that the traditional ‘alignment for safety’ approach is not as staunchly and broadly supported as it was 10+ years ago – which is encouraging!”
An important reminder that “big yoga alignment” isn’t out there trying to trick us all into 90-degree angles. We’re mostly all just doing the best we can. (So maybe pause on that Classpass review ripping to shreds the new teacher at your local boutique studio who’s probably making less than minimum wage when you count commute and prep time, just because they told you to relax your glutes in bridge pose “to protect your low back.” Just saying.)
Learning From Other Forms of Movement
Rawlings also reminded me that stepping out of our yoga bubbles—especially when it comes to updating our knowledge about alignment- doesn’t just mean exploring peer-reviewed research or watching lectures about biomechanics on YouTube. (Though I do definitely recommend diving into the archives of her “Yoga and Movement Science” podcast.) We can learn a lot about asana from exploring other movement disciplines.
Rawlings offers strength training as an example. “In lifting, alignment isn’t always about a single ‘right’ position,” she says, “but about selecting a setup that suits your goal – whether that’s maximizing load, changing the muscle recruitment emphasis, or working around an injury. That mindset applies well to yoga, where the ‘best’ alignment depends on what you’re trying to accomplish in the moment.”
In other words, it’s about the individual and their unique needs and goals.
To offer a personal example of learning from other forms of movement, a few years ago, I started teaching barre classes in a very particular style with very particular alignment guidelines. This at first seemed like an odd fit for me, a yoga teacher who was pretty “over” alignment at the time, but barre was so much fun—the choreography, the music, finding new ways to challenge myself and others that I couldn’t stay away. And in this fresh, new, non-yoga environment, I noticed how adhering to specific alignment made certain exercises more challenging. It was empowering to see myself become stronger and unlock new challenges, and I loved seeing clients experience those same feelings of success. It reminded me a lot of how I felt when I first started practicing yoga. I recalled how I felt the first time I was able to balance in half-moon with my standing leg foot remaining in a parallel “mountain pose” position. As a long-time dancer, I could balance with a turned-out standing leg foot all day, but this new skill was hard won, and I felt so proud of myself when I finally “got it.”
And speaking of yoga “goals,” despite writing a book about how to handstand (shameless plug for 2023’s Yoga Inversions: Your Guide to Going Upside Down), I didn’t attempt handstands with any regularity until I was in my mid-20s. Along with regular, consistent practice, it was little alignment tweaks that got me there: Remembering to stack my shoulders over my wrist creases (as opposed to keeping them behind them like in a typical downward dog) when I set up, shifting my weight to different parts of my hands, “pushing the ground away” to engage my core, and so on. Continuing to hop on one foot from a full-length down dog with my shoulders a foot behind my wrists wouldn’t have been especially “unsafe” (I’m not talking about overuse injuries here. Obviously, you can “overdo” anything even a “perfectly aligned” handstand), but it also most likely wouldn’t have gotten me into a handstand.
A few years ago, I started to notice a disconnect in what I was experiencing in yoga and the way I taught a typical class. Though my intention in being the super-chill about alignment teacher was to make everyone in my class feel welcome, and to assure them (as I would and still do often say) “it’s very hard to do yoga wrong,” my own experiences made me wonder if maybe by being so laisse faire about alignment I was cheating people out of the chance to progress—to try new challenges and experience new accomplishments. Maybe there was a way to teach alignment and offer some helpful suggestions without being a jerk about it. People are more important than poses, and I’m pretty sure I’ll die on that hill. If you feel great in your knee-over-ankle lunge or love turning out your toes in wheel pose, I won’t say a word. But what happens when a person wants to learn to do a particular pose in a particular way? Just like I wouldn’t want my hairstylist to say “no, your hair is beautiful as-is” and refuse to touch up my roots, if someone comes to me to learn a handstand, I’m going to use my knowledge and skills to help get them there, and to celebrate each milestone with them along the way.
More Than an Exercise Class
But wait, you might argue, this is yoga we’re talking about. Isn’t the only goal we should focus on is samadhi, or moksha, or something beyond the physical? To which I’d say, Wow! Thanks for reading this far. And while I don’t think I’m qualified to unpack the meaning of existence, it’s important to note that conversations around alignment in asana contain nuances that other movement disciplines may not. Because unlike dance, yoga is not a performance or competition, and unlike most group fitness classes, it’s not just about physical fitness either.
In so many ways, I’m approaching this conversation as someone who’s practiced yoga longer than I’ve done almost anything else at this point, and as such, I know I can feel jaded or “over it” at times. That’s why studying other forms of movement has helped reignite my enthusiasm. But what about someone who’s coming at it from the other direction?
Take Guardado. “Coming from a sports and weightlifting background,” he offers, “I initially approached yoga with a very goal-oriented mindset: wanting to perfect handstands and pigeon pose. Now I understand alignment as a tool for sustainable movement patterns rather than achieving aesthetic targets. It’s about creating a conversation between your body and the pose, not hitting rigid benchmarks.”
And that’s such an incredible benefit of yoga. Sure, it feels wonderful to achieve a goal, and our achievements should be celebrated. But the real magic of yoga, as Guardado reminded me, is the knowing that we’re worthy of celebration just because we’re human. That our value lies in who we are, not the feats we achieve. “Your body’s needs on any given day are valid, and honoring those needs IS proper alignment. As someone with ADHD teaching multiple classes while working full-time and running a business, I know some days my body needs different things – and I try my best to listen,” he says.
Probably the most important yoga alignment is the alignment with that inner listening. Some days that means going hard, and some days it means being soft with yourself. That’s still difficult for me, but the wisest, kindest, best part of me knows I don’t have to be perfect, or even attempt, the most challenging version of a pose in order to advance in yoga. That comes with showing up, tuning in, and learning to make the best choices for myself each day. It’s, like Guardado said, about the conversation.
Alignment is a Tool in Yoga, Not the Totality of Yoga
“I’ve moved away from thinking about alignment in terms of ‘good’ vs ‘bad’ or ‘correct’ vs ‘incorrect,” says Rawlings. Instead, I see alignment as a tool – not to keep us safe in a one-size-fits-all way, but to help us target the body intentionally, work around pain, and give shape to our poses. I still teach alignment, but I focus on broader, macro-level cues and leave space for students to find their own micro-level adjustments.
Alignment Works When It’s Adaptable
Rawlings explains that alignment is useful when we have a loading goal in mind. “For example, in chair pose,” she says, “shifting the knees forward targets the quads more, while shifting the hips back loads the posterior chain more. In bridge pose, moving the feet forward targets the hamstrings; keeping them under the knees emphasizes the glutes and adductor magnus. If we want to mobilize or stretch a particular area, alignment can help with that too – for instance, if the goal is to stretch the hamstrings, lifting the tailbone (a.k.a. a pelvic anterior tilt) can help facilitate that. In short, if we have particular loading or mobility goals for a yoga pose in the moment, we can use alignment to help achieve them.”
Additionally, Clark brings up that a focus on alignment, which may be essential under load, can also be counterproductive at times. “Weightlifters may practice perfect alignment when lifting a light load purely to perfect their form, not to protect their spine,” he says. “If we are not bearing a heavy load, it may be beneficial to not align our joints so that the joints get a healthy amount of stress. We do not always have to be aligned.”
The Future of Yoga Alignment
Ten years from now, will I read this essay and 100 percent agree with my 2025 self? Unlikely. But I think I’d rather look back with a “yeesh; how’d I miss that?” than stay stagnant forever and never learn or grow. Maybe it comes back to the “beginner’s mind” thing we talk about in yoga. To get the most out of our practice and our lives, we must be open to changing our minds.
Rawlings’ hope for the future is that “we’ll be past the ‘alignment always matters’ vs. ‘alignment doesn’t matter at all’ dichotomous debate. I think both of these extremes oversimplify alignment in an unhelpful way,” she says. “My ideal is a nuanced approach where alignment is recognized as a versatile tool—sometimes highly relevant, sometimes less so—and used in a way that’s evidence-based, empowering, and adaptable to the individual.”
Guardo echoes the hope for nuance and integration, replying that “The future should see more collaboration between yoga teachers and other movement professionals rather than working in isolation.”
When I asked Clark how he thinks we’ll approach this alignment conversation ten years from now, he offered this analogy: “In the 1600’s there was a belief that mice came spontaneously from straw. We look back at such an idea today with wry bemusement. I hope one day we will similarly look back at the time when yogis thought all it took to be a good teacher was ensuring every student looked identical in all poses and that everyone must have their knees over their ankles in warrior pose. Unfortunately, this universal alignment approach is still being taught in many yoga teacher training programs because it is easier to explain than a functional approach. I suspect it will take longer than 10 years to get past this era of alignment.”
Clark’s response gave me yet another much-needed reality check. I sometimes forget that things don’t always change as quickly as I hope they will, or think they should. But also, as a yoga teacher, I can be part of that change. I can listen with curiosity and compassion, share the helpful things I’m learning, and acknowledge when I’m wrong. And I am ever optimistic about the future.
1. In the 1600s, Jean Baptiste van Helmont wrote, “If a soiled shirt is placed in the opening of a vessel containing grains of wheat, the reaction of the leaven in the shirt with fumes from the wheat will, after approximately 21 days, transform the wheat into mice.” See Louis Pasteur, “On Spontaneous Generation,” an address delivered by Louis Pasteur at the “Sorbonne Scientific Soirée” of April 7, 1864, available at Pasteur Brewing, https://www.pasteurbrewing.com/on-spontaneous-generation/; translation by Alex Levine.
Responses
Thanks for this thought-provoking article! I haven’t been teaching as long (since 2015). My main teacher came out of the Anusara tradition, and as a student, I loved that style, particularly appreciating learning about my body through aligning it in certain ways. But as a teacher who is influenced by my background as a clinical psychologist, I’ve moved more and more away from offering alignment cues. This has stemmed in part from my increasing love of yin yoga (no surprise that several of the teachers you quote here are from the yin tradition), plus it has felt like the right thing do from the perspective of treating students as individuals who have agency over their bodies (also important from a trauma-informed perspective). But to be honest, there are ways in which I miss teaching alignment and still believe it has utility, so I love your approach of using alignment as a tool and allowing it to be more adaptable.
Thanks..this is a very interesting essay. For me it was a little bit triggering because I have concerns around some of the styles and people you refer to in your essay and I think the idea of traditional alignment is problematic for a number of reasons.
Firstly, as yoga teachers our safety and the safety of our students is paramount. Inclusion and accessibility are paramount. Remember we are playing the long game and teaching people how to live better over the course of their whole life. Most of the discussion around alignment cues are based on an approach that is reductive and joint oriented while the movement world has shifted into a whole body biotensegric approach.
The traditional alignment cues are often couched in a male pedagogy of command and control and the idea that students often need to be adjusted to fit this projection is a complete nonsense. Too much force, too many injuries. This approach leads to students ending up with an external style designed to suit some teachers’ ego projection of ‘perfection’. And as we know, there is no correlation between asana ability and virtue. See numerous scandals in the yoga world. As well, these contemporary approaches are often elitist, do not accommodate normal people and are bio mechanically non-sensible.
I’m going to go straight of the end of your essay. In 10 years’ time yoga culture will be focused on encouraging individuation and the cultivation of proprioception and interoception. Given safety concerns are met, students will be taught that it’s how you feel, not how you look. The process of learning yoga will be individuated and internalised and will not require external approval. The point of alignment will be so students can learn safe bio mechanics around the feeling of whole body biotensegrity rather than old fashioned joint focused alignment cues. Remember that style is ultimately limiting and freedom and liberation comes from within.