How to start yoga at home

Partly. And the useful thing is to know exactly which part, because most pages will tell you either that it is all fine or that you must have a teacher for everything, and neither is true.

You can safely learn alone: standing still and finding your own alignment in tadasana; simple joint loosening; gentle standing side bends; lying twists; cat and cow on the hands and knees; the easier seated forward bends taken only as far as comfort; bhramari, the slow alternate nostril breathing of anulom vilom, and simple observation of the breath; and savasana. That is already a real practice. Done daily for a month it will change how you sleep and how you sit.

You should not learn alone: headstand, shoulderstand and any other inversion; deep back bends such as full wheel or full cobra; strong pranayama involving breath retention or forceful breathing such as kapalabhati and bhastrika; any practice at all if you have glaucoma, uncontrolled blood pressure, a disc problem, a recent surgery or a pregnancy. Those are not places for a video to be your only teacher.

The gap between the two lists is not about difficulty. It is about whether a mistake is self-correcting. If you round your back in a seated forward bend, your body complains and you adjust. If you load your neck wrongly in a shoulderstand, nothing hurts today and something is quietly wearing out.

You need a patch of floor a little longer than you are tall, and a wall you can stand next to. That is the whole list.

A mat is useful and it is not urgent. On a hard floor, a folded blanket or a bedsheet folded four times does everything a mat does for the first fortnight: it keeps your heels from slipping and it stops your spine complaining about the tiles. On carpet you often need nothing at all. If you do buy one, buy a plain thick one and ignore everything printed on it.

You need clothes you can bend in, and bare feet. Socks slide, and half of standing work is the feet gripping the ground.

Do not buy props on day one. Not blocks, not straps, not a wheel, not a bolster. Every prop has a household equivalent that is free and, on day one, better because you already know where it is:

• Block: a thick hardback book, or two.
• Strap: a dupatta, a bath towel or a belt.
• Bolster: a rolled blanket or a firm pillow.
• Chair: a chair. The most underrated prop there is, and the one that makes half the standing postures available to a stiff beginner.

What you do not need at all: an app subscription, a course, a certificate, incense, or a decision about which style you are going to be loyal to. For the record, what almost every general class in India teaches is hatha yoga, held postures at an ordinary pace, and that is what the plan below is.

Morning, before you eat, is the classical instruction and it is a good one. The stomach is empty, the mind has not yet been handed anything to worry about, and nothing has come up to displace it. The body is stiffest first thing, so you will be less flexible in the morning than in the evening. That is not a reason to move the practice. Flexibility is not what you are there for.

If mornings are genuinely impossible, evening works. The only firm rule is to leave a gap after eating: about three hours after a full meal, an hour after something light. Practising on a full stomach is uncomfortable in forward bends and twists, and it is one of the commonest reasons a beginner decides that yoga makes them feel unwell.

The same time matters more than the same place. This is worth understanding, because most advice gets it the wrong way round and tells you to build a corner. A dedicated corner is pleasant and it is fragile: the day you travel, or a relative visits, or the corner is being painted, the practice has nowhere to live and it stops. A time survives all of that. Six twenty in the morning exists in a hotel room, in your parents' house and in a hallway. Fix the time, let the place be whatever is available, and the habit stops depending on your furniture.

About fifteen minutes a day. Do it in the order given. If you have ten minutes rather than fifteen, cut the middle, never the savasana.

• Day 1, learning to stand. Two minutes of joint loosening, then tadasana for five rounds of a minute each, with attention on the feet and the breath. Five minutes lying in savasana. That is the whole day. It will feel like too little and it is the correct amount.
• Day 2, adding the arms. Repeat day 1, then add standing arms overhead and a gentle side bend to each side, three times per side. Savasana.
• Day 3, the first floor work. Loosening, tadasana, then on hands and knees: cat and cow, eight slow rounds with the breath. Then a lying twist, one minute each side. Savasana.
• Day 4, rest day, breath only. Sit upright on a chair or on the floor. Watch the breath for five minutes without changing it. Then six rounds of bhramari. Nothing else. Rest days are part of the plan, not a failure of it.
• Day 5, everything so far. Loosening, tadasana, side bends, cat and cow, lying twist, five minutes savasana. This is now your basic practice and you will use it for months.
• Day 6, first look at surya namaskar. Read the surya namaskar sequence and walk through it once, slowly, stopping to check each position. Do not try to do rounds. Then your basic practice, shortened. Savasana.
• Day 7, two rounds and a rest. Basic practice, then two slow rounds of surya namaskar, then a long savasana of eight minutes.

In week two, keep the same shape and add one round of surya namaskar. In week three, add nothing at all. Just repeat week two. If you want the reasoning behind six short days rather than two long ones, it is set out in how often should you do yoga.

These are the faults that appear in almost every self-taught beginner who later walks into a class. None of them hurt at the time, which is precisely why they persist.

• Holding the breath. The moment a posture gets difficult, the breath stops. You will not notice. The test is simple: if you cannot speak a short sentence out loud from inside the posture, you are holding your breath, and the posture is not yet yours. Come out a little until the breath returns.
• Forcing the forward bend. Reaching for the toes by rounding the upper back and yanking. The back of the knee complains, the lower back takes the load, and nothing useful is stretched. Bend the knees as much as you need to, keep the spine long, and let the hands land wherever they land. Touching the toes is not an achievement, it is an accident of proportion.
• The knee past the toe. In any lunge or warrior, look down. If the knee has travelled forward past the ankle, the joint is taking a shearing load it is not built for. Shorten the stance or lift the hips. This one is invisible from the inside and obvious from the side.
• Practising on a full stomach. Nausea in a twist, cramp in a forward bend, and a conclusion that yoga does not suit you. Leave three hours after a proper meal.
• Doing too much on day two. The first session feels wonderful, so the second is twice as long, and by day four something in the hamstring or the lower back is sore and the whole thing stops. Enthusiasm on day two is the single largest cause of a home practice ending in week one. Keep day two identical to day one.

You are working alone, so this judgement is yours to make. It is learnable and it comes down to four questions.

• Where is it? A stretch is felt in the belly of a muscle, in the middle of the fleshy part. A warning is felt at a joint, in a tendon near a joint, or as a line down a limb.
• What is it like? A stretch is broad, warm, dull, and it eases as you breathe into it. A warning is sharp, hot, pinching, or electric. Anything that tingles or shoots is a warning without exception.
• What does the breath do? If you can keep breathing evenly, you are within range. If the breath catches and will not settle, you have gone past it.
• What happens tomorrow? Even, dull soreness across a muscle group the next day is normal and passes in a day or two. Pain in one specific spot, pain in a joint, or pain that is worse on the second morning than the first, means stop and get it looked at.

The rule that covers all four: come out of anything you cannot breathe evenly inside. You lose nothing by leaving a posture early. You can lose months by staying in one.

A home practice built on the list above will take you a surprisingly long way. There are, though, points at which continuing alone stops being sensible.

• When the same thing keeps hurting. One sore morning is information. The same knee, the same shoulder, the same spot in the lower back three sessions running is a fault you cannot see, and no amount of reading will show it to you.
• When you want inversions or strong pranayama. Shoulderstand, headstand, kapalabhati, bhastrika, any retention of the breath. These need eyes on you. This is not caution for its own sake.
• When you have a condition. Pregnancy, high blood pressure, glaucoma, a disc problem, a recent surgery, a joint replacement. Not a reason to avoid yoga. A reason to be taught rather than to guess, and to ask your doctor first.
• When you have plateaued and cannot say why. Three months in, nothing is getting easier, and you have no idea what you are doing wrong. An hour with a teacher usually finds it in the first ten minutes.
• When you are past forty and starting from a long gap. Not fragile, simply less forgiving of a fault repeated daily. See yoga for beginners over 40.

One session of correction is often all it takes. A free first class costs nothing and will tell you more about your own practice than a month of videos. If you are not in Bangalore, the live online classes work over a video call, which is enough for a teacher to see what your hips are doing.

Almost nobody stops in week one. They stop somewhere in weeks three to five, when the novelty has worn off and nothing visible has happened yet. Knowing that in advance is most of the defence. Here is the rest of it.

• Make the minimum embarrassingly small. Your rule is not fifteen minutes. Your rule is: stand on the mat and do one round of tadasana and one savasana. Four minutes. On a bad day you do exactly that and the streak survives, which is the only thing that matters.
• Never miss twice. One missed day is life. Two missed days is the beginning of stopping. Go back the next morning even if it is the four minute version.
• Write one line a day. Date and one sentence, on paper. "Hamstrings tight, slept badly." After six weeks you can read backwards and see change that is far too gradual to feel forwards. This is the single most effective trick there is.
• Do not add anything in week three. The instinct when it goes stale is to make it more interesting. Repetition is the practice, and staleness is a stage in it rather than a signal.
• Put one class in the week. Something outside your own head, at a fixed hour, where someone notices whether you came. Practising alone is easy to start and hard to sustain, and a single weekly class is the usual difference between the people who are still practising in a year and the people who are not.
• Watch for the unglamorous signs. Sleeping through the night. Getting off the floor without a hand. Sitting through a long meeting without shifting. These arrive well before anything you can photograph.

Fourteen days, planned. Six practice days a week and one genuinely empty one. The last column is what to do on the day it does not happen, which is the column that decides whether there is a third week.

Week three adds nothing. Repeat week two exactly. Repeating the same thing is the method rather than a shortage of ideas: a pose you have done six times is a pose you can be corrected in, and a pose you have done once is a shape you copied.

Six things, in this order, and nothing else for the first month. Every one of them has its own page here with the mistakes written out.

1. Tadasana, two minutes. Standing still, arranged deliberately. This is the reference the rest is measured against.
2. Marjariasana, six rounds. The safest way to move a spine that has just got out of bed.
3. Uttanasana, with the knees clearly bent, thirty seconds.
4. Adho Mukha Svanasana, twice for thirty seconds, knees bent, wrists checked.
5. Bhujangasana, low, three breaths, three times, with Balasana in between.
6. Savasana, three minutes, which is the part everybody skips and the part that makes the rest stick.

Once that is comfortable, the ten minute morning routine is the same material timed, and the seven day beginner plan spreads it across a week with a rest day. Add Bhramari at the end when you want a breathing practice, and read yoga for back pain first if your back is the reason you are here.

Every page tells you what to do and almost none of them tell you what it will be like, so people assume that whatever they are feeling is a fault. Here is the honest report from forty years of watching first fortnights, and it is remarkably consistent.

• Days 1 to 3 feel like nothing is happening. Fifteen minutes of standing and cat and cow does not feel like exercise. It is not supposed to. The work in the first week is on the nervous system and the habit, and neither of those announces itself.
• Day 3 or 4, the soreness arrives, and in the wrong places. Not the hamstrings. The upper back between the shoulder blades, the front of the shoulders, and the outside of the hips. Those are the muscles a sitting life switches off, and they are the ones that complain first. Even, dull soreness across a muscle group is normal and passes with movement.
• Around day 5 the breath changes before anything else does. People notice they are breathing lower down, and they notice it while sitting at a desk rather than on the mat. That is the first real sign the practice is working.
• Day 6 to 8 is when the boredom lands. This is the genuine danger point, not the difficulty. The practice is repetitive by design and the mind reads repetition as failure. Do not make it more interesting. Make it shorter on the bad days and keep it identical otherwise.
• Somewhere in the second week, sleep moves. Falling asleep faster, or waking once instead of three times. It arrives before flexibility, before strength and before anything visible, which is why the habit of writing one line a day matters: you would otherwise miss it.
• What should not happen: pain in a joint rather than a muscle, pain in one specific spot, pain that is worse on the second morning than the first, or any tingling down a limb. Those are not part of the process. Stop and get looked at.

Two small practical instructions that come from the Ministry of Ayush protocol used for International Yoga Day and are worth keeping: practise according to your own capacity rather than the plan's, and leave twenty to thirty minutes after practice before a bath or a meal. Both are old instructions and both hold up.

On the correction question, one number is worth knowing. Yoga sends very few people to hospital, but the emergency department data from the United States for 2001 to 2014 found that the injury rate was about three times higher in people aged sixty five and over than in younger practitioners, and that nearly half of the injuries involved the trunk, mostly sprains and strains. That is not an argument against practising after sixty five, which is the best time to be practising. It is an argument for having somebody watch you early rather than late, and it is why neck and shoulder pain is the complaint most often traced back to a self taught downward dog.

That is the whole case for treating your first taught class as lesson one of your home practice rather than as an alternative to it. Come to the free first class in whatever you own, tell the teacher you have been practising on a blanket in your hall for a fortnight, and ask him to watch you stand. Ten minutes of that is the part of this guide that a page cannot give you.