How Your Everyday Posture Shows Up in Your Yoga Practice

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I’ve been teaching yoga for more than a decade and practicing asana, or the physical poses, since childhood, so I know how the poses are supposed to look.

But when I began offering on-demand classes and editing my own videos, what I saw surprised me. Even though I knew my alignment was being recorded and was trying to set a proper example for my students, my everyday postural patterns inevitably snuck into my poses.

I realize that yoga is about a lot more than precise shapes. But being surprised by the appearance of my practice got me thinking. Could this experience teach me how to disrupt my default ways of holding myself on the mat? Could it help me establish more awareness and inhabit my body with more discernment?

The answer is yes. Following are the unexpected ways your posture might show up on the mat and what you can do to counter it. You might even find that you’ll learn to be more conscious of how you inhabit your body off the mat.

How Your Posture Shows Up in Your Yoga Practice

You may recognize some of these tendencies in your own practice. When you’re paying attention, you can counter them. But when your mind drifts, it’s easy to slip right back into old habits because it’s the path of least resistance for both body and mind. Remain aware.

1. Leaning Your Head Forward

The not-so-helpful habit of slouching as you sit or leaning forward while looking down at devices or screens is an exceptionally common inclination. Known as forward head carriage, it means your chin juts forward and down. And it shows up in your yoga practice.

How to Fix It

Your head and neck positions in yoga are perhaps the most difficult to notice, let alone counter, because you can’t see it for yourself. Check yourself in a mirror or capture yourself on video in Mountain Pose (Tadasana) or other standing and seated poses that require a neutral spine, such as Warrior 2 (Virabhadrasana) or Hero Pose (Virasana).

This habit is even more likely to force its way onto your mat when you’re in a less familiar orientation to gravity or need to recruit extra strength or balance. That includes…

Holding Yourself Horizontal

Your chin and head might dip beneath the plumb line of the rest of your body in Plank, Low Plank (Chaturanga Dandasana), or Standing Half Forward Lift (Ardha Uttanasana). Imagine reaching through the crown of your head rather than your chin.

Reclined Poses

Your chin might inadvertently jut toward the ceiling in reclined poses such as Bridge (Setu Bandha) and Savasana. That tilts your chin higher than your forehead. Try sliding the back of your head away from your shoulders to bring your chin and forehead level.

Headstand

A kink between the base of your skull and the top of your neck in Headstand (Salamba Sirsasana). From the outside, this looks like the point of contact being more toward your forehead rather than the center of your head. Instead, aim to feel all four sides of your neck lengthen evenly.

2. Slouched Shoulders

Much of how we spend our days requires that our arms reach in front of us or our shoulders slouch—driving, typing, carrying a heavy bag, trying not to draw attention to your height, even an unconscious desire to protect your vulnerable heart. This causes the shoulders to lean slightly forward of the midline of the body and become overly rounded. As a result, we overtrain the chest muscles to contract and undertrain the upper back muscles.

How to Fix It

You’ve likely been told a million times to sit or stand up straight. That message probably echoes through your thoughts when you remind yourself to stand tall in Mountain or sit in Hero Pose. However, rounded shoulders can sneak up on you in other poses as well.

When You Take Your Arms Behind Your Body

You may find that your shoulders round toward your chest in Humble Warrior, Reverse Tabletop or Reverse Plank, and, to a lesser extent, Upward-Facing Dog (Urdhva Mukha Svanasana). Try pausing before entering the pose and squeezing your shoulder blades toward each other. Even more crucially, keep that alignment as you move into these poses.

Your Supporting Shoulder in Side Plank 

Ever notice your bottom shoulder protruding forward toward your chest in Side Plank (Vasisthasana)? Recruiting the muscles on the back of your shoulder help create a more neutral position. You can do this by imagining trying to turn your hand toward its little finger edge without actually moving it. Or, if you’re supporting yourself on your forearm, rather than your palm, try angling it toward the far top corner of your mat rather than keeping your forearm parallel to the long edge of the mat.

Shoulders Dipping Toward the Floor in Chaturanga

Counter the forward momentum of your shoulders by broadening your collarbones and lifting slightly through the base of your sternum as if you were initiating a backbend. It’s tough to create a central shoulder position when gravity is working against you, let alone when you start with rounded shoulders as you do in Plank, so you may need to lower your knees to the mat for a while in Chaturanga to give you the capacity to be more mindful in your alignment.

Reclined Poses

This looks like a gap between your shoulders and your mat in reclined poses such as Savasana or in the trailing shoulder of a supine twist. Try adjusting your arm position to help your shoulders release toward the mat in these poses.

3. Hyperlordosis

Lordosis is an anatomical term used to describe the natural backbend that exists in your low back and neck. Hyperlordosis simply refers to a deeper backbend than normal and usually describes the curve of the low back. It could be due to a simple habit of relaxing your belly or could stem from changes to your biomechanics like wearing high heels or carrying unaccustomed weight in your abdomen, such as during pregnancy.

In a yoga context, the term is sometimes used as shorthand for a larger pattern, including the lower front ribs flaring up and out and the pelvis tipping forward toward the fronts of the thighs.

How to Fix It

Some of the most common cues for Mountain and neutral-spine standing poses such as Warrior 2 are aimed at countering this postural pattern. These include “knit your low ribs,” “lift your lower belly,” or “lengthen your sacrum.” Hear them often enough and you’ll start to adjust your position accordingly.

However, when common teaching cues suggest the opposite tendency from yours, they can overemphasize your habits instead of counter them.

Moving Into Standing and Seated Forward Bends

Think of the transition from Mountain to Standing Forward Bend (Uttanasana) or from Staff Pose (Dandasana) to the Seated Forward Bend (Paschimottanasana), your teacher might cue a “swan dive” or to “lead with your heart” or to “send your sit bones back” to encourage a hinge at the hips rather than a rounding in your spine. But when you already embody this pattern as your default, it’s all too easy to overdo it, losing the support that strong legs or a subtly engaged abdomen can provide.

In standing forward bends, try keeping your weight midfoot, with a slight bend in your knees, and in seated forward bends aim to stay grounded through your sit bones. Then in both versions keep your collarbones broad, but imagine gently drawing your low front ribs toward each other and toward your pubic bone to maintain subtle belly engagement.

Backbends

In Camel (Ustrasana) or Upward-Facing Dog, you may experience pressure or compression in your low back instead of a balanced sensation of shortening along the back body and lengthening along the front body. When you start with an already exaggerated arch in your low back, it doesn’t take long to reach your limit in backbends.

Before moving into back bending poses, deliberately lengthen your sacrum and lift your lower belly to bring your pelvis to a more neutral position and thereby decrease the curve at the back of your waist. This can help distribute the tension of the backbend between the fronts of your hips and your torso, instead of forcing it all into your lumbar spine.

Seated Breathwork or Meditation

Teaching cues intended to counter slouching—such as “open your heart,” “lift your sternum,” “soften your belly,” or even “breathe deep”—can be counter-productive for those struggling with the habit of hyperlordosis.

Instead, build from a neutral pelvic position, in which the front and back of your pelvis are roughly level or parallel, and then center your ribcage directly above. Imagine your back ribs and kidney region are as spacious as your belly and chest.

4. “Locked” Knees

In yoga, we talk about “locked” or hyperextended knees when the legs move beyond a straight 180 degree line to a slight banana or backbend shape. Different students have this capacity to a different extent. In everyday life, it’s not a cause for concern; it’s simply the body’s way of conserving muscle effort when we stand upright. But when you load all of your body weight onto one leg, or move between standing poses, it might pay to recruit the muscles around your knees to support your joints more mindfully.

How to Fix It

Locked knees are likely to appear in Mountain, especially as teachers often take time there to cue alignment from the foundation up. However, habitual knee hyperextension can sneak up on you when your attention is elsewhere, such as when you’re moving between poses, fighting to maintain or regain your balance, or when you increase the weight or load on one leg.

Transitioning from Standing to Forward Bend

In your effort to swan dive in forward folds (as described above), you might lean back into your heels and lock your knees to use the backward shift of your hips as a counterweight for the forward movement of your upper body. In these transitions, instead aim to anchor your weight mid-foot by evenly distributing the weight between the balls of your feet and the heels. Also, take a slight bend in your knees to use your leg muscles instead of momentum.

Standing Balance Poses

This also shows up in Half Moon (Ardha Chandrasana) and Warrior 3 (Virabhadrasana III). When it’s taking all your effort to stay on one foot, you’re even more likely to rely on familiar habits to reduce physical and psychological effort. And in these poses, the stacked bones of a passively straight leg can provide the illusion of stability that the slightest wobble in your foot can dissolve. Once again, aim to keep your weight midfoot and your standing knee slightly bent. A bent standing knee feels less solid and stable, but it will force your leg and hip muscles to engage to provide the structure you feel you lack.

Front Leg in Triangle (Trikonasana)

Your center of gravity shifts forward toward your front knee in Triangle Pose. The well-intentioned cue to “lift your kneecap” to engage the quadriceps on the top of your thigh can actually be unhelpful here as it has the potential to deepen knee hyperextension.

By all means, contract your quads, but at the same time take a slight bend in your front knee and press into the ball of your front foot as firmly as your heel. Imagine trying to drag your front foot toward your back foot to prompt your hamstrings, inner thighs (adductors), and even calves to engage and provide additional support for your knee.

5. “Banana Foot”

What is It?

Many yoga poses stretch your outer ankle. Think about the position of your back foot of Warrior 1 (Virabhadrasana I), Warrior 2, Triangle, Extended Side Angle (Utthita Parsvakonasana), etc. Each of these effectively angles the sole of your foot toward the midline of your body.

You might have heard this position called ankle inversion or foot supination. The opposite position of ankle eversion or foot pronation, in which the sole of your foot turns away from the midline of the body, is actually a more common postural habit, but is so rarely required in yoga that we miss opportunities to create it when perhaps we should.

How to Fix It

You’ve probably been cautioned against banana foot in the back leg of Pigeon Pose (Eka Pada Rajakapotasana) when teachers caution against letting your foot roll off to the side. Creating more engagement in the outer ankle can improve your experience of a pose. Be aware of “banana foot” in:

Easy Pose (Sukhasana)

Banana foot would show up here as your outer ankles curving outward to rest on the mat when you’re sitting cross-legged. There’s no harm in experiencing “banana foot” in this position, but it’s a good place to start cultivating awareness of your tendencies since you can easily see your feet and ankles and feel the contact between them and the mat.

To counteract banana foot, visualize a zipper running from your outer mid foot to your outer ankle bone and zip it up to lift your outer ankles away from the mat and feel your outer ankles and calves contract. Try this right away in Side Plank and you’ll probably fail as there’s just too much other stuff going on. But practice it or teach it here so the engagement becomes familiar and you or your students can apply it later

Side Plank (Vasisthasana)

The strength and stability required by Side Plank can be enough of a challenge such that your attention is spent long before it reaches your feet. But the passive outer ankle of “banana foot” is a missed opportunity for muscle engagement. Since the outer edge of your bottom foot and your bottom hand are your foundations in this pose, the more stable they are, the better. Try using the zipper analogy again to draw your outer ankle bone away from the mat and engage your outer calf, creating a stronger and more active base.

Standing Balance Poses

The challenge of standing on one foot tends to bring out our postural habits. This particular habit is exacerbated by well-intentioned cues to “lift the arch of your foot.” While it is important to recruit your foot and ankle muscles, focusing only on your inner foot can send too much of your weight to your outer foot. Instead, imagine balancing your weight in the junction between your two arches—the one between the ball of your standing foot and your heel, and the second one between your inner mid-foot and your outer mid-foot—to create a more central foundation.

Your asana practice doesn’t need to be a crusade for some elusive idea of perfect posture. But what it can become is a glimpse at your habits, especially where they might might sneak up on you. That allows you an opportunity for discernment as to whether you choose to let them to shape your behavior or not.