Your first yoga class

Your first yoga class is an hour long and almost none of it is what people fear. You take your shoes off at the door, put a mat down, sit on it, and for the first ten minutes you rotate ankles, wrists, knees, shoulders and neck while somebody counts. Then about thirty minutes of postures, most of them standing, held for fifteen or twenty seconds each, with the teacher saying your name and the correction in the same breath. Then ten minutes of seated breathing. Then ten minutes lying flat on your back in savasana with nothing asked of you at all. Then it ends, and you put your shoes on, and that is the whole thing.

Every page you will read about a first class was written about an American studio with wheels, bolsters, blocks and forty mats packed together. A class in a residents' association hall in north Bangalore is a quieter and plainer event than that, and the plainness is the point. There is no music, no heating, no incense, no sequence you are expected to keep up with, and nobody at the back who has been practising for nine years and can put a foot behind their head.

The single most useful thing I can tell you before you walk in is that a first class is not a test of flexibility. It is a teacher watching how your particular hips, knees and shoulders move, so that the second class can be built for them.

This is the shape of the class, in order, with what is asked of a complete beginner in each part. It is not a secret and it does not vary much, because a class that changes its structure every week teaches nobody anything.

Notice what is not in that table: no headstand, no lotus, no sun salutation at speed, no held plank, nothing inverted, nothing timed against anybody else. The full surya namaskar is a wonderful thing and it does not belong in an hour where I have not yet seen your shoulders move.

The honest list is short, and the shortest version of it is a towel and some water.

• Clothes you already own. Any cotton kurta, track pants, leggings or loose trousers. Two rules only: nothing with a belt or a hard waistband, because you will be lying on your stomach, and nothing so loose at the neck that a forward bend becomes a problem. There is a longer version of this in what to wear to a yoga class.
• A small towel. Not for sweat, mostly. It goes under the head in savasana and folds under the sitting bones for breathing, and both of those make the hour considerably more comfortable.
• Half a litre of water. Drink it after, not during. Sipping in the middle of a class is the single most common way people interrupt their own breathing rhythm.
• Nothing else. Spare mats are kept in the hall. Do not buy a mat before your first class; buy one after you have decided you are coming back, and read choosing a yoga mat first so you do not buy a ten millimetre foam mat that makes standing balance impossible.

What to leave at home: a phone anywhere near the mat, a fitness watch you intend to look at, socks, and any expectation about what your body should be able to do. Bare feet are not a tradition for its own sake. The foot has to grip the floor, and a sock on a hard floor is how people slip out of a standing posture.

One thing to arrange rather than bring: an empty stomach. Two hours after a normal meal, or half an hour after a cup of tea and a biscuit, is right for a first class. The physiology behind that number is set out in how long to wait after eating, and it matters more than any piece of equipment on this list.

This is the section I wish the American studio pages carried, because the anxieties people actually arrive with are specific, and every one of them can be answered no.

• Nobody will put you upside down. Not sirsasana, not sarvangasana, not a shoulder stand against the wall, not in the first month. Inversions are the posture group most often reported in yoga injury surveys, and they are the last thing a beginner should be given, not the first.
• Nobody will ask you to sit in padmasana. The full lotus is a knee and hip position that a great many perfectly healthy adults will never have, and forcing it is how knees get hurt in Indian classes specifically. Cross legged, or on a chair, or with the legs straight out, all count as sitting.
• Nobody will touch you without asking first. If a teacher walks up behind you in your first hour and pushes you deeper into a bend without a word, that is a bad teacher, and you may say no in the middle of a class and be entirely within your rights.
• Nobody will make you chant. Om chanting happens in some classes and it is optional in every class worth attending. Sitting quietly while others chant is not rude and nobody will remark on it.
• Nobody will ask you to reach your toes. Hamstring length is genetic to a large degree and irrelevant to whether you can practise. Bent knees in every forward bend, permanently, is a legitimate way to do yoga for thirty years.
• Nobody will compare you to the room. The person next to you at a residents' association hall is likely to be twenty years older than the person next to you at a studio, and considerably less interested in what you look like.

Five minutes of conversation before your first class prevents most of what can go wrong in it. Say these things out loud, even if they feel like too much information, and say them before the hour begins rather than in the middle of a posture.

1. Every surgery, with the year. Knee, shoulder, abdominal, spinal, cataract, caesarean. A twelve year old knee replacement still changes what I will ask of you.
2. Blood pressure, and whether it is medicated. This decides whether you go head down at all, and it is the reason yoga with high blood pressure is written as a separate page rather than a footnote.
3. Any back or neck pain, and where it goes. Pain that travels down a leg is a different instruction from pain that stays in one place, which is the distinction the whole of yoga for back pain turns on.
4. Dizziness, vertigo, glaucoma, retinal problems, or an ear condition. All four change the head position I will give you.
5. Whether you are pregnant, or think you might be. This is not a class you should sit through quietly wondering about.

The reason this matters more in yoga than in a gym is that a yoga injury is usually not dramatic. In a national survey of 1,702 practitioners, 21.4 per cent reported at least one acute problem and 10.2 per cent reported a chronic one, and the chronic group recovered fully only about half the time. The same survey found that practising only by self study, without supervision, was associated with higher risk. Both halves of that finding point the same way: the slow injuries are the ones worth preventing, and somebody watching you is how they get prevented.

An online first class is a genuinely different hour and it is not a worse one, provided three things are arranged in advance.

The camera has to see you sideways. Set the laptop about three metres away, on the floor or on a low stool, so that the whole mat is in frame from the side. A camera pointed at your face is useless to a teacher. Almost every problem with online classes is a camera problem, not a yoga problem.

Clear a rectangle two metres by one. Then walk around it barefoot once, looking for the table leg you are going to find with an arm later. A wall within reach on one side is an advantage rather than a nuisance, because a wall is the best prop a beginner has.

Keep your microphone on. Students mute themselves out of politeness and then breathe wrongly for fifty minutes in silence. I need to hear the breath, and you need to be able to say that something hurts without typing it.

What online genuinely loses is the hands. I cannot move your shoulder blade with a fingertip through a screen, and for two or three specific corrections that is a real loss. What it gains is that you practise in the room where you will actually practise every other day of the week, on your own floor, at your own wall, which is where starting yoga at home either works or quietly fails. For a first class, either is fine. For the first month, one hour in the hall is worth two on a screen if you can get to the hall at all.

The evening of a first class, most people report two things: unusual sleepiness at about nine o'clock, and a lightness across the shoulders that is hard to describe and does not last. Both are ordinary.

The following morning, expect the sides of the trunk, the front of the thighs and the upper back to be mildly sore, in the way a long walk makes you sore. That is muscle, it is normal, and it goes in two days. What is not normal, and what should stop you rather than be pushed through, is pain in a joint rather than a muscle, any pain that woke you in the night, tingling or numbness anywhere, or one sided pain in the lower back. Those four are the ones I want to hear about before the second class, not after the fourth.

The second class is usually harder than the first, because the novelty is gone and the arithmetic starts: this is a thing that now has to fit into a week. That is the real decision point, not the first hour, and it is why how often you should do yoga is worth reading before you commit to anything. The short version is that fifteen minutes on five days beats an hour on one, and that a taught class once a week plus short home practice on the other days is the arrangement that survives.

What will not happen in the first two days is any change to your weight, your flexibility or your blood pressure. Three weeks is roughly when people start reporting that sleep is different. That is the first honest marker, and it arrives before anything visible does.

Everything above is a description of an hour, and a description of an hour is not the hour. You cannot find out from a page whether you will like being told to breathe more slowly by an eighty nine year old man, or whether your knees will object to sitting on a floor, or whether the room feels like somewhere you want to be on a Sunday. Those are the only three questions that matter and all three are answered in sixty minutes.

So the sensible way to use this page is to stop reading it. Book a free class, come fifteen minutes early with a towel, and tell me at the door what hurts. I will give you an hour built around whatever you tell me and no part of it will be upside down. If you would rather not be in a room full of strangers for the first one, the same first hour is available on a video call, and if you would rather it be nobody but you, ask about a single private session instead.

Nobody will ask you to sign anything, and nobody will telephone you afterwards to ask why you have not come back. If it turns out not to be for you, that is a fact worth having for the price of one hour on a Sunday. If it turns out to be for you, then the weekly batches and the fees are the next thing to look at, and not before.