How I've hurt myself practicing yoga

& how it's improved my teaching

Dec 04, 2024

∙ Paid

Dear Humans,

I was sixteen when I walked into the yoga studio for the first time.

As a young woman, I was always very flexible. I had a “bendy” back and a lot of length in my hamstrings. This is fairly typical for a young person and it meant that I could do many of the deeper yoga postures right away. I could easily drop back into wheel; half-pigeon was no problem for me; I progressed in full splits and middle splits easily; and once I built some strength, I was arm balancing left and right.

But when I was young, I wasn’t listening carefully to my teachers’ cues. Or, perhaps they weren’t cuing with the same anatomical awareness we tend to find in good classes today. Either way, I was literally “throwing myself” into postures, without the proper muscular engagement. This seemed fine when I was young, because, well, I could do the poses and they didn’t seem to hurt. I wouldn’t realize my mistake until years later, when I got older and the injuries started to appear.

Yoga is often thought of as a restorative practice. But even gentle yoga, when done repeatedly, without proper engagement or awareness, can lead to injury.

So here are the injuries that I’ve personally sustained throughout my 15 years of yoga practice, which have taught me really important things about the human body and have impacted how I teach as a result.

My injuries started with my wrists. As my yoga practice progressed, I started practicing with a lot of teachers who favored arm balancing, and whose practices were extremely focused on weight bearing in the wrists. It got to a point where I almost always had sore or tender wrists. It wasn’t until a long break from weight-bearing, which was hard to enforce, that I healed, and then transformed how I practice on my wrists.

How I teach as a result: I’m super wrist-cautious in my teaching and practicing because of this chronic wrist pain. If I teach a heavy wrist weight bearing class, then I always do at least 2 wrist warm-ups before the flows. (Here are my go-to wrist warmups.) I also talk to my students about shoulder protraction and retraction, how to grip with the full hand, and how to engage the core properly so weight isn’t being dumped onto the wrist joint. I’ve also told my students many times about the importance of wrist health in yoga, and I advise them to do their own wrist warm-ups before class starts, just in case the teacher doesn’t cue it for them.

Next my knees started to give me issues. Though it’s hard to say if yoga was the main or only cause, I noticed that after a long weekend of teaching and practicing my knees would sing with pain. I came to realize that I had overstretched my leg muscles, and under-trained my glutes in particular, which was affecting my knee joints.

How I teach as a result: Focusing on muscular activation in the legs during asana practice is huge for me now. A few cues I always throw in have to do with engaging the glutes and outer hips, especially in lunges and postures where you hinge from the hip joint, like forward fold and even triangle. I also am sure to cue engagement in the antagonist muscle when stretching. (If the hamstring wants to stretch, then we want to engage the quad). I often remind my students that a strong body includes both strength and flexibility. We want to be wary of leaning too far in either direction, seeking a balance of both.

After years of deep backbending, I started to notice tweakiness in my low back. It got to the point where I’d avoid backbends entirely.

How I teach as a result: Now, in backbends I’m cognizant of stretching the hip flexors, which are an important part of creating space in a backbend. I also show my students the difference between flaring the ribs in a backbend, and keeping the ribs hugged in and the core engaged. This might limit depth in a backbend at first, but it will keep students from collapsing into the low back. Backbends / heart openers can be done safely, but we are looking for engagement and expansion, not just depth.

Currently, my elbow is giving me issues. I’m guessing it’s to do repetitive strain and perhaps my form in chaturanga, but I need more time to inquire. Once I’ve understood what’s causing the issue, I’ll be sure to modify how I’m practicing and teaching.

I guess that’s the truth of it, really. That our yoga practice morphs and changes as we age and this means that we’ll always be modifying, learning, and adapting. My practice today looks different than my practice did in my twenties, and certainly in my teens.

I used to be resistant to my yoga practice changing. Now I understand that it’s an inevitable part of a life long practice. It’s actually one of the beautiful things about yoga: that there are so many expressions of it, and through our lives we can continue to find the right yoga, and the right teachers, for us in our bodies and in our lives.

My practice and your practice won’t look the same, for good reason. That’s okay. Remind yourself that it’s okay for different people to have different expressions of yoga asana. Strong yoga is beautiful. Soft yoga is beautiful. Flowing yoga is beautiful. Still yoga is beautiful. Safe yoga is the only really important thing. Remind yourself of that. Remind your students of that. Let your teaching be expansive enough to hold many expressions.

And even though I’ve experienced injury in my yoga practice, I’ve almost always been able to identify and remedy it. I’ve simply had to be willing to look at it.

An expansive topic like this one deserves more words than I’ve given it here, but we’ll keep revisiting this one. If it’s a topic you want to chat more about, leave me a comment! I’d love to hear about how your practice has evolved and what you’re thinking about these days.

Izzy

Izzy Martens

author, yoga teacher, sequence enthusiast

www.yogahumans.com

the sequence write-up

three legged dog
fallen triangle OR hovering fallen triangle
figure four downward facing dog
figure four table top (I demoed this for my students before class started)
cat / cow
unwind to three legged dog
low lunge
easy twist
open arm twisted crescent lunge
exalted
star
half-moon (back of mat)
star
extended side angle (front of mat)
high side lunge (back knee)
extended side angle (front of mat)
high side lunge (back knee)
extended side angle (front of mat)
easy twist
*grab big toe
bound side plank
unwind to vinyasa or downdog *I’ve been skipping my vinyasa because of my elbow hurting :)

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Let me introduce myself! My name is Izzy Martens and I’m just a human who teaches yoga, writes, hangs out with her two cats, hikes around Colorado, and enjoys creating yoga sequences.

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One more flow! This is the “mini flow” that I taught first, to foreshadow the “main flow” I taught about. This mini flow does some really important work in the body. It also gives just a few “teasers” for the more complex transitions we see above. I hope you enjoy it!

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