A Week of Yoga Practice

by Nina

Is anyone else a fan of the brilliant food writer M.F.K. Fisher? I not only love her beautiful writing, but also her ideas. When I first started reading her work, I remember being struck by a simple but profound of advice she had for eating well:

“Instead of combining a lot of dull and sometimes actively hostile foods into one routine meal after another, three times a day and every day, year after year, in the earnest hope that you are being a good provider, try this simple plan: Balance the day, not each meal in the day.”

(You can read her entire advice on this subject on the Less Is Enough blog.)

What Fisher meant was that you did not have to eat every single food group at every single meal (what we used to call a “square meal,” something American nutritionists used to insist on) but rather you could have grains for breakfast, a salad or soup for lunch, and meat or fish with vegetables for dinner. You'd still get all the nutrition you needed—just not all at once! Thirty years later, I still follow her advice.

I recommend applying the same advice to your home yoga practice. Rather than trying to make every single yoga practice like a balanced “meal” by including some of everything, you can focus each day on one or two of the major classes of poses. And by the end of the week, you’ll have done a very wide range of poses, balancing your body by moving all your joints within their range of motion and reducing problems associated with repetitive stress.

So what are the basic pose “food groups” you could think about trying to cover in a week? Leaving out a few poses that don't fit that well into general categories, they are:

• Standing poses
• Backbends
• Forward bends
• Twists
• Inverted Poses
• Restorative poses

Depending on how many days a week you want to practice (and how long you want your practice to be) you could focus on single class of poses each day, or you could combine two or more in a given day. If there’s something in particular you want to work on (such as balancing or abdominal strengthening), you could add that into your practice on a regular basis. Does this mean that even though your teacher always includes standing poses in every single class, you can skip them yourself at home? Yes. That's exactly what I mean.

A Pose You Can Skip from Yoga: The Poetry of the Body by Yee and Zolotow

It does make sense to do a little balancing, however, by adding one or more counter poses to the end of your practice. After doing backbends, it’s helpful to do a twist, leg stretch or another back releasing pose. After doing forward bends or twists, I recommend doing a gentle back bend to restore the natural curve to your spine. And after standing poses, inverted poses or restorative poses can help calm you down and relax your muscles before Savasana.

I hope this helps you feel more comfortable about starting a home practice because the main thing is just to jump right in. I’ll do another post soon on how to plan a single practice, but in general there are no hard and fast rules, and there is no reason why your home practice has to look like a class.