Real Body Yoga

What if we treated our bodies like athletes? 🏋️‍♀️

Not because we need to optimize ourselves.

But because our bodies are valuable.

Most of us don’t have a professional athlete’s team of chefs, physios, trainers and nutritionists. But we can borrow the mindset: my capacity matters, and it’s worth taking care of.

10 ways to start treating yourself like a life athlete:

1. Prioritize sleep.
Don’t treat it as the thing you sacrifice when life gets busy.
2. Eat before you’re running on empty.
Food is fuel, not something you have to earn.
3. Pay attention to your total load.
Work, parenting, exercise, commuting, teaching, emotional stress—it all counts.
4. Schedule recovery before you desperately need it.
Rest doesn’t have to be a reward for exhaustion.
5. Adjust your training to your life.
Some weeks your body can handle more. Some weeks it can’t.
6. Take your boundaries seriously.
“This is too much” is useful information.
7. Invest in your body when you can.
A massage, physio, good shoes, a class, whatever genuinely supports you.
8. Stop using exhaustion as proof that you’re doing enough.
Being depleted isn’t a badge of honor.
9. Notice what helps you feel capable.
Not what makes you look the most disciplined.
10. Ask yourself: “What does my body need to do the things that matter to me?”

Because this isn’t about becoming a perfectly optimized human.

It’s about recognizing that your body is the thing that allows you to live your life.

You don’t have to be a professional athlete to treat it like it’s valuable.

Yoga teacher hat on for Hip Hinging. 🧢

Why do we even care about hinging well in this pose?

Because yoga poses are opportunities to learn how to push and pull through your body while staying aware of what everything else is doing.

Parsvottanasana is a great example: your legs are asymmetrical, but you’re working to keep the pelvis relatively square and the spine long as you fold.

And the goal isn’t how far down you can go. It’s whether you can stay connected to your legs, pelvis and trunk as you start to feel a pull in different parts of your body.

That awareness and coordination can translate into other poses, too — like Standing Split and Revolved Triangle.

✨ This is also how I approach Chaturanga: using props and awareness to work with gravity, rather than just trying to brute-force your way to being stronger.

Want to learn how? Grab my free Chaturanga Stability Secrets through the link in my bio.

Sometimes the most life-affirming thing you can do is change the environment instead of changing yourself.

I felt like I should be practicing Ashtanga. And I learned so much from it — especially about breath, concentration, discipline and moving with intention.

But for my particular body, the jump-throughs/backs and binds were a constant obstacle course.

I had two choices:

Change my body to fit the practice.

Or adapt the practice so much that it wasn’t really Ashtanga anymore.

Neither felt right.

And that’s when I realized: there are different practices, different teachers, different ways of approaching the body. And finding the one that allows you to actually be yourself in it can be transformative.

This isn’t an Ashtanga-bashing post. Plenty of people find a deeply affirming practice there. I just didn’t.

And that realization shaped the way I teach.

I want my students to leave feeling like they’ve arrived — not because they’ve finally become the “right” kind of body, but because they’ve found a place to start.

And from there?

We can get curious about what’s possible.

In yoga, we’re obsessed with making poses feel light.

But sometimes, the path to lightness goes through heaviness.

And I don’t mean pushing harder, suffering, or forcing your way through a pose.

I mean noticing where you habitually move away from an appropriate challenge—and gently inviting yourself to stay there a little longer.

Maybe that means slowing down.
Maybe making the movement smaller.
Maybe shifting your weight a little more.
Maybe allowing yourself to shake without immediately escaping it.

The goal isn’t to make everything harder.

It’s to stop automatically avoiding the load your body needs to experience in order to build capacity.

Because eventually, what once felt heavy can feel light.

If Chaturanga is one of the places where you want to explore this, Chaturanga Stability Secrets is my free 3-part mini-course on building the strength and stability behind the pose.

✨ Comment “STEADY” to receive the link to the FREE COURSE in your bio!

Yoga has more to do with geometry than you think. 📐

In a press, the basic problem is simple: you need to shift your weight so your hips can get over your base.

How you do that depends on your position, your proportions, and which levers you’re using.

In Pincha, for example:

→ Lean: shifting the shoulders forward moves your center of mass toward the base. It also changes the relationship between your elbows, shoulders, hips and legs, which can reduce the amount of compression you need.

→ Split: the top leg can act as a counterweight, helping you shift your mass without relying entirely on the shoulder lean. But you need more compression to get the hips through the space between the legs.

→ Longer legs: whether that’s your natural proportions or a little block under your feet, changing the leg length changes the geometry — and can make it easier to get the hips over the base.

And if you press from a pike, you lose that counterweight from the top leg, so you’re working with a combination of lean + compression.

Move to handstand, and the geometry changes again. Your base is now your hands, and your hips are much farther from the floor. That means you may need more compression, a deeper split, more shoulder lean — or some combination of all three.

So there isn’t one “correct” way to press.

Your body is solving a geometry problem. And your proportions determine some of the variables you have available.

And whatever your geometry looks like, you still need a stable foundation underneath it.

If your Chaturanga stability isn’t there yet, these more advanced shapes are going to be much harder to organize. And even if you’re already working on arm balances, refining the foundation can make a huge difference.

💪 Want to work on yours?
My free Chaturanga Stability Secrets mini-course is linked in my bio.

We often treat standing split like a flexibility test:

How high can you get your leg? How close can you get your chest to the floor?

But you can improve your standing split without getting more flexible first.

Opening the hip isn’t inherently a problem — it depends on what you’re trying to do. But if more height means opening the hip, dumping into your lower back, or letting the top leg become a passive weight, you’re missing an opportunity to build something else:

Containment. Connection. Reach.

Standing split can teach you how to make a limb that’s difficult to ground feel lighter and more expressive.

The internal rotation and active reach of the back leg in bird dog.
The work of the standing leg in the reaching forward fold.
The counterbalance between your torso and back leg as you enter the pose.

Together, these teach the top leg to participate rather than hang there.

And when that leg becomes lighter, you can create a stronger opposing reach — from the crown of the head through the standing leg and out through the lifted heel.

That’s a skill in itself, and one that transfers beautifully into inversions.

And sometimes, when we learn to create more containment, we gain access to more range later — not because we forced ourselves deeper, but because we became more capable of using the range we already had.

⭐️ This is the same practical, anatomically sound, and compassionate approach I take in Chaturanga Stability Secrets — building the capacity to do the pose rather than forcing your body into it.

It’s free — link in bio.

Does Revolved Triangle feel like it’s twisting you rather than you being in control of the twist?

There are things you may not be able to change today — your hamstring flexibility, your available rotation, the amount of range you have in your hips and spine.

But there are also things you can change today.

You can elevate the floor with a block or a chair instead of waiting until your hand reaches the ground.

You can bring your pelvis back toward the midline instead of letting the butt swing out to the side. It might feel harder at first, because now you actually have to use your adductors to keep the legs connected.

And you can actively press your bottom hand into the floor instead of using your top arm to drag yourself into the twist.

Those are actions you can create today.

You don’t have to wait until you’re more flexible to start practicing the mechanics of the pose.

And often, when you give the body the right support and the right actions, the pose starts to blossom from there.

If you want this same degree of biomechanical precision — with just as much compassion for where your body is today — in your Chaturanga practice, you can find Chaturanga Stability Secrets through the link in my bio.

Wild Thing isn’t the problem. Your entry is. 👀

The top arm can look like it’s just floating there, but it’s actually part of what helps create the shape.

When we reach the arm forward and organize the shoulder into the right rotation, the arm becomes a lever that helps the heart open.

Instead of muscling the chest open or trying to force ourselves deeper, we can use the whole body to move into the shape.

And that’s often where the lightness comes from: not doing less, but distributing the work better.

This is Part 2 of my Wild Thing breakdown.

In Part 1, we looked at what the bottom arm is doing to support the transition and create stability.

And there’s one more piece: the legs. 👀

Part 3 is coming soon, where we’ll bring the whole thing together and look at how the lower body contributes to the shape.

This is also the kind of biomechanically sound approach I use in my Chaturanga Stability Secrets — because understanding how your body organizes itself can unlock so many more possibilities for your upper body.

It’s free — link in bio. 🤍