Hatha yoga

Hatha is a Sanskrit word. It is usually broken into two syllables, ha and tha, read as sun and moon: the two opposing currents in a person, and the work of bringing them into balance. The word itself also carries the plain sense of effort or force, which is honest, because the classical practice is not a soft one.

In its original sense hatha yoga is the whole physical branch of yoga. Asana, pranayama, the cleansing practices, the seals and locks, all of it sits under that one word. By that definition almost every posture class in the world is hatha yoga, including vinyasa, including ashtanga, including whatever your gym calls its Tuesday class.

There is a second, newer sense, and pretending it does not exist only confuses people. Over the last few decades, on studio timetables in the West and increasingly in Indian cities too, hatha has come to mean one particular thing: a slower general class where postures are held rather than flowed through. Both meanings are real. When this site says hatha it means the classical practice, taught slowly, which happens to sit comfortably inside the newer meaning as well.

The practice is older than any book about it, but the texts that describe it are specific and you can read them. The best known is the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, a manual compiled in the fifteenth century that sets out postures, breathing, cleansing practices and the conditions for practice. The Gheranda Samhita and the Shiva Samhita cover similar ground. Earlier still, the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali give the eight limbs that the physical practice sits inside, and devote remarkably little space to posture itself.

Two things are worth saying plainly. First, those texts describe far fewer postures than a modern class uses, and a great deal of what is taught today was systematised much more recently. Second, this page is a description of the style, not a claim about anybody's pedigree. No scholarly authority is being asserted here, and no lineage story is offered, because a lineage story is exactly the sort of thing that is easy to write and impossible for a reader to check.

A hatha class usually runs about an hour, and the better ones run in the same order every time. The order is the teaching. You are not meant to be kept guessing.

• Settling and loosening, five to ten minutes. Sitting, noticing the breath, then simple joint movements: neck, shoulders, wrists, hips, ankles. This is not a warm up in the gym sense. It is a check of what the body brought with it today.
• Surya namaskar, five to ten minutes. Slowly, with the breath, usually a small number of rounds. Read the full surya namaskar sequence if you want to know exactly what happens in it.
• Standing postures, fifteen minutes. Tadasana first, because everything else is built on standing well, then triangle, warrior, the standing balances. Held, not flowed.
• Floor postures, fifteen minutes. Forward bends, gentle back bends, a twist, sometimes an inversion for those who are ready for one. Each posture is followed by its counter posture.
• Pranayama, eight to ten minutes. Seated, upright, breathing taught as a subject in its own right. Bhramari is often where beginners start.
• Savasana, five to ten minutes. Lying still. Not optional, not a reward, part of the practice.

Nobody should be asked to do everything. In a well run class a good part of the room will be doing a modified version of the posture being taught, and that is normal rather than a concession.

The table sets out the differences item by item. The short version in prose is this.

Vinyasa links movement to breath continuously, so the class becomes a flow. It is enjoyable, it raises the heart rate, and it is genuinely good exercise. Its weakness is that speed hides error. When you move on after two breaths, nobody, including you, has time to notice that your shoulder is doing the work your hip should be doing. Repeat that for a year and you have practised a fault a few thousand times.

Yin goes the other way. You take a small number of passive floor shapes and stay in each for three to five minutes, letting the deeper connective tissue release slowly. It is a superb complement to a fast life and it is not a substitute for a full practice. There is no standing work, no strength work and no real breath training in it.

Hatha sits between them and is the least fashionable of the three, which is exactly why it is worth defending. You hold a posture long enough to feel what it is asking of you, but you hold it actively, so there is strength as well as length. There is time for a correction to land. Pranayama gets its own place in the hour instead of being squeezed into the last two minutes.

These are not rival teams. Someone doing vinyasa three mornings a week and hatha twice is doing well. The mistake is only ever to assume that one of them has to be wrong.

Hatha suits you if you are starting from nothing and want to learn the postures properly before you learn to move fast. It suits stiff bodies, desk bodies, and bodies over forty that have decided to take themselves seriously again. It suits people coming back after an injury, a pregnancy, an illness or a decade off. It suits anyone whose real complaint is a nervous system that will not switch off, because the slow tempo and the breath work are the actual medicine there. And it suits people who want to understand what they are doing rather than follow along.

It frustrates people who want a workout. This must be said clearly. A hatha class will not give you a cardio session. Your heart rate will rise a little in the standing work and in surya namaskar, and then it will settle again. If your goal this year is cardiovascular fitness, hatha belongs in your week alongside walking, running, swimming or cycling, not in place of them. The World Health Organization asks adults for at least 150 minutes of moderate activity a week, and a gentle hatha class only partly counts towards that.

It also frustrates people who are bored by repetition. The sequence barely changes. If novelty is what keeps you turning up, hatha will feel like the same hour on a loop for the first month. The people who stay are usually the ones who discover, somewhere around week six, that the same hour is not actually the same hour at all.

The classes here are not labelled by style. One teacher, one hall in MSR Nagar in north Bangalore, and about forty years of teaching behind it. What fills the hour is asana, pranayama and relaxation, taught slowly, and it is left at that rather than given a name off a timetable. This page exists to help you read the landscape and work out what you are looking at elsewhere.

• The order does not change. You are not entertained with a new sequence each week. You get the same frame, so that what changes is you rather than the class.
• Nothing is held before it is understood. A posture is shown, then broken into what the feet do, what the pelvis does, what the breath does. Only then is it held.
• Correction is given by name and out loud. Not adjusted silently from behind. You should be able to fix the same fault yourself at home the next morning, which is the point.
• Breath is taught, not mentioned. Pranayama has its own place in every class rather than being an afterthought.
• Modifications are offered before anyone struggles. A chair, a wall, a shorter hold. Nobody has to ask for one in front of a room.

All ages and all levels, in person in north Bangalore or live online from anywhere. The classes page has the timings and what each option costs.

Week one. You will be more aware of your breath than of the postures, and you will probably find sitting upright for pranayama harder than any of the standing work. Expect some stiffness the next day, mostly in the hips and the backs of the legs. Nothing sharp.

Week two. The order of the class starts to become familiar, and following stops taking so much attention. This is usually when people first notice that they are sleeping better. Better sleep is one of the commonest things people report from a slow practice, well ahead of flexibility.

Week three. The dangerous week. The novelty has gone and the visible results have not arrived. Almost everyone who quits, quits here. If you can treat weeks three and four as simply turning up, you are past it.

Week four. Something small and specific gets easier. Reaching the floor a little further down the shin. Standing on one leg without the wall. Getting up from the floor without a hand. The changes are unglamorous and they are the real ones.

If you would rather begin at home before joining a hall, the guide to starting yoga at home sets out a first week you can do in fifteen minutes a day.

That it is the easy option. Holding trikonasana properly for a minute is harder than passing through it for two breaths. Slow is not soft. What hatha removes is momentum, and momentum is what was doing a good deal of the work.

That it is only stretching. Standing postures held actively are strength work, particularly for the legs, the hips and the muscles along the spine. Nobody calls it that because there is no equipment involved.

That flexibility is the point. It is a side effect. The point is steadiness: a body that can be still without strain and a breath that stays even while the body works. Flexibility arrives on its way to that, and it arrives more slowly than the internet suggests.

Styles are argued about in the abstract and taught in the concrete. Here is the concrete: this is the material a hatha hour is built from, and every one of these has a page of its own.

The standing work starts at Tadasana and grows out of it into Trikonasana and Vrikshasana. The floor work is a gentle backbend, usually Bhujangasana, with Balasana as the rest between attempts and Marjariasana to warm the spine before either. Surya Namaskar belongs to this tradition rather than to any modern school, and it is where the flowing part of a hatha class comes from.

The breathing is usually Anulom Vilom or Bhramari, sitting upright, at the end. The class closes in Savasana and does not skip it. If you want the ten minute version of that shape at home, the morning routine is the same order compressed, and how to start yoga at home explains why the order is what it is.