Viniyoga

Viniyoga is an approach in which the tools of yoga are adapted to the condition, the needs and the interests of the individual, rather than the individual being adapted to a standard form of the practice.

The word is taken from the Yoga Sutras and is glossed by its own teachers as differentiation, adaptation and appropriate application. In practice that means a viniyoga teacher will change the shape of a posture, the way you move into it, how many times you repeat it, how long you stay, and what your breath does inside it, all in order to produce a particular effect for you. Two people in the same room may be given visibly different practices and both be doing the same thing.

Of all the modern schools, this is the one closest to how the classes on this site are actually taught, and that is the reason it has a page here. It is also the school least interested in being a school: T.K.V. Desikachar, who developed and taught it, later abandoned the name and asked that what he taught simply be called yoga.

Almost every well known school of modern posture yoga runs back to one teacher in Mysore, and this one runs back to him through his own family.

Tirumalai Krishnamacharya is the pioneer of modern yoga as exercise, and taught in Mysore in the 1930s. The Mysore lineage guide on this site sets out that period and the students who came out of it, among them B.K.S. Iyengar, who became Iyengar yoga, and Pattabhi Jois, who became ashtanga.

T.K.V. Desikachar, 1938 to 2016, was Krishnamacharya's son and studied with him for decades. In 1976 he founded the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram in Madras, now Chennai, with A.G. Mohan, as a non profit public charitable trust and a yoga therapy clinic. The Mandiram describes its own approach in exactly these terms: the multiple tools of yoga are adapted to suit individual needs and capabilities. Desikachar is remembered for demystifying yoga, and the later renaming request is of a piece with that.

Gary Kraftsow founded the American Viniyoga Institute and is the reason the name is known in English. He describes the approach as evolved from the teachings transmitted by Krishnamacharya and Desikachar of Madras, and it is his institute that states the four characteristics in the form most people learn them.

One point of confusion worth clearing up. Because the name was set aside by Desikachar and because the emphasis is on individual practice rather than on a syllabus, you will find teachers doing recognisably this work who never use the word, and you will find the word used loosely by people who mean only that they modify postures. Both are ordinary in a tradition whose founder asked for his own label to be dropped.

The American Viniyoga Institute names four characteristics, and they are worth taking one at a time because each has a practical consequence you can feel in a single session.

• Function over form. The effect intended for this person governs, and the shape may be altered to get it. If the point of a forward bend is the back of the legs, then bending the knees is not a compromise, it is the practice. This is the principle that most annoys people who have been taught that there is a correct version of a posture.
• Breath as the medium for movement. The breath initiates the movement and leads it, and the breathing pattern is altered on purpose to change what the posture does. Ujjayi and the long three part breath, Dirga, are the usual tools, and lengthening the exhalation is the commonest adjustment.
• Repetition and stay. Moving into and out of a posture several times is treated as a full practice in its own right, not as a warm up for holding it. Six slow repetitions of a shape with the breath is a different medicine from one hold of ninety seconds, and this school uses both deliberately. It is also the single most useful idea in it for older or stiffer bodies.
• Sequencing. Practices are built, with an intention, in an order, for a person, and the order is taught as a craft rather than assumed.

What follows from all four is a session that looks unremarkable. A handful of postures, most of them plain: Tadasana, arms overhead, Marjariasana on all fours, Setu Bandhasana with a short range, a twist, and a rest, with the breath doing most of the work. You are usually sent home with five or six things and asked to do them daily, which is where the results come from.

This approach turns up in the research literature more often than its size would suggest, because a standardised therapeutic practice is easy to deliver in a trial.

The best known example is Karen Sherman's second randomised trial, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine in December 2011. It enrolled 226 people with moderate, uncomplicated low back pain and compared a twelve week viniyoga programme, a stretching programme designed by a physical therapist, and a self care booklet. Both active groups did better than the booklet, reporting reduced medication use and improved function. Between yoga and stretching, the trial found no meaningful separation, and the author's own summary is the sentence to remember: physical activity involving stretching, whether achieved through yoga or through more conventional exercise, has moderate benefits for people with moderately impairing low back pain.

Read that as a compliment with a limit attached. A viniyoga practice is as good as a physiotherapist's stretching programme for an ordinary bad back, and no better. That is the same shape of finding as the wider evidence on yoga for back pain, and the back pain page on this site sets that out with its sources, as does the yoga therapy page, whose territory this school overlaps most.

What no trial can tell you is the thing this approach is actually for. Its claim is not that adapted yoga beats other exercise on a questionnaire. Its claim is that a practice built around one person's limitations is one they can keep doing, and adherence over years is precisely the thing trials of twelve weeks cannot measure.

The useful question is whether you need a practice designed for you, or a class you can attend.

• You have an injury, an illness or a limitation that makes standard classes frustrating. This is exactly what the approach is for, and one to one is how to get it.
• You are older, or stiffer than the room, and tired of being told to do a modified version. Viniyoga does not have a modified version, because it has no standard version. That difference in framing matters more than it sounds.
• You want somebody to hand you a short daily practice you will actually do. The written home practice is the heart of this school, and it is the part I would steal if I had to steal one thing.
• You want precision and support around a structural problem. Iyengar, whose props do the same job by a different route.
• You have a diagnosed condition and a doctor involved. Then what you may want is yoga therapy, and the certification question on that page is the one to ask.
• You mainly want an affordable class twice a week. Then this is scarce and expensive per hour, and a plain slow hatha class with a teacher who watches you gets you most of the way.
• You want to get fitter and you have no complaints. Not this. Vinyasa or power yoga.

My verdict. Of all the schools I have read about in about forty years of teaching, this is the one whose principles I recognise in my own hall, and I want to be careful about how I say that, because I hold no certification in it and I am not going to borrow its name. What I recognise is the four ideas. Function over form is what you do when a woman of seventy five with a replaced knee is in the same room as a man of thirty. Breath leading the movement is how you stop a beginner from straining. Repetition rather than long holds is what I give almost everybody in their first month, because moving in and out of a shape six times teaches a stiff body more than one long hold does and it hurts less. And sending somebody home with five things rather than fifty is the only home practice anybody keeps. If you can find and afford a good viniyoga teacher, I think you would be well served. If you cannot, the four ideas are free, and any teacher who watches you closely is applying them whether or not the word is on the door.

Viniyoga is not taught here and it is not claimed. No style is: the classes here are not labelled by style, and this teacher holds no certification from the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram, from the American Viniyoga Institute or from anybody else in that lineage. The classes are one teacher, about forty years of teaching, one hall at the residents' association in MSR Nagar in north Bangalore, in person there or live online, all ages and all levels, and the hour is asana, pranayama and relaxation, taught slowly.

What is honest to say is that the working method is similar and it arrived by a different route, which is watching people. It is a group class rather than a one to one session, so nobody is given a written personal practice, and there is no assessment and no prescription. Within the hour, though, the shape is changed for the person rather than the person urged towards the shape: a chair appears if a knee will not kneel, the postures that load a neck are left out for whoever cannot turn it and something else is given instead, and a stiff back gets six slow repetitions rather than one long hold.

If you want a practice built around your own limitations and you would rather start on your own, the seven day beginner plan is deliberately small, how to start yoga at home explains the order to work in, and chair yoga is where to begin if standing is the problem. The classes page has timings and costs.