Vinyasa yoga

Vinyasa yoga is any class in which each posture is joined to the next by a movement taken on a single breath, so that the hour becomes one continuous sequence rather than a series of separate postures. On a timetable it is often written as flow.

The word itself is more interesting than the class. Vinyasa means a deliberate placing, a step arranged in a particular order, and in the older usage it referred to the counted movements that carry you into and out of a posture rather than to a style of class. The modern sense grew out of the school of Krishnamacharya in Mysore in the twentieth century, and the immediate parent of every flow class you can attend today is ashtanga, whose fixed series was loosened into something a teacher could improvise.

That is the crucial difference and it is the one people get wrong. Ashtanga is one fixed sequence repeated for years. Vinyasa is the same grammar with the sentence rewritten every week. If the class is different each time you attend, you are in a vinyasa class whatever the poster says.

A led vinyasa class runs sixty or seventy five minutes and almost always has the same skeleton, even though the postures change.

• Centring, three to five minutes. Sitting or lying, finding the breath, usually with an instruction to keep it audible for the rest of the hour.
• Warm up, five to ten minutes. Cat and cow on the hands and knees, which this site covers as Marjariasana, then a few rounds of Surya Namaskar at increasing speed.
• The build, twenty to thirty minutes. Standing sequences repeated on both sides, lunges, warriors, Trikonasana, balances such as Vrikshasana, with Adho Mukha Svanasana used as the punctuation between everything.
• The peak, five minutes. One harder posture the whole class has been quietly preparing for. A deep backbend, a bind, sometimes a headstand.
• Cooling, five to ten minutes. Floor work, a twist, Paschimottanasana or a hip opener.
• Savasana, five minutes. Lying still in Savasana, often shorter than it should be.

The breath used throughout is usually Ujjayi, a soft audible breath through the nose. In a good class it is genuinely the timekeeper. In a poor one it is mentioned in the first two minutes and then forgotten while the music takes over the job.

Vinyasa is most usefully understood against the two practices it is least like: a slow held class and a long passive one.

The honest summary is that vinyasa is the best of the common styles at making you fitter and the worst of them at teaching you a posture. Speed hides error. When you leave a shape after two breaths, nobody in the room, including you, has had time to notice that your shoulder is doing the work your hip should be doing. The full argument is set out on hatha vs vinyasa, and the question of where the fixed series fits is on ashtanga vs vinyasa.

Harder than most styles and easier than its reputation suggests, depending entirely on the teacher.

The numbers are worth knowing because this is the one style where the fitness question has a real answer. A systematic review of the energy cost of yoga put the average across all practice at about 3.3 metabolic equivalents, with individual postures averaging 2.2 and breathing practices 1.3, which is why a slow class does not count as exercise in the way walking does. Flowing practice measures considerably higher, at the top of that reported range rather than the bottom, and vinyasa yoga meets the published criteria for moderate intensity physical activity, which is the band public health guidance is written around. The World Health Organization asks adults for at least 150 minutes of moderate activity a week, and unlike a slow held class, two strong vinyasa classes make a real contribution to that total.

There is a smaller finding I like because it is so ordinary. In a crossover trial, an hour of vinyasa lowered systolic pressure by about eight millimetres of mercury five minutes afterwards compared with sitting still, and the effect had gone by an hour later. That is roughly what you would expect from any bout of moderate exercise. It is a real effect, it is short lived, and it is a good example of why a single class is a good afternoon rather than a treatment.

The risk side is straightforward. The repeated lowering from plank, the shape most classes call chaturanga, is the single most common source of shoulder trouble in modern yoga, and a fast class gives you no window in which to notice that your elbows have flared. If you have a shoulder, wrist or lower back complaint, read the avoid lists on yoga for neck and shoulder pain and yoga for back pain before you book a flow class rather than afterwards.

Read this as a list of situations rather than a verdict on the style.

• You are already active and want yoga to be your exercise. Vinyasa, two or three times a week. It is the style that will actually raise your heart rate.
• You have never done yoga. Not vinyasa first. Give it four to six weeks of a slower class, learn the shapes, then flow through them. Hatha is the obvious place to spend those weeks.
• You are stiff, over forty, or coming back from a long gap. Not yet. See yoga for beginners over 40 for the honest version of why.
• You get bored by repetition. Vinyasa. A different sequence every week is its whole selling point.
• You want to be corrected. Not vinyasa. Go to Iyengar, where being corrected is the entire method.
• You are anxious and want the practice to settle you. A strong flow will tire you into calm, which works and is not the same thing. Yoga for anxiety and restorative yoga take the slower route.

My verdict. I like vinyasa more than my students expect me to. It is honest exercise, people enjoy it, and enjoying it is why they are still practising in five years, which matters more than any argument about alignment. What I will not agree to is that it is a good first class. In forty years the single commonest thing I have had to undo is a habit built at speed: a knee that tracks inward, a lower back that takes the load a hip refused, a shoulder that has learned to shrug on every inhale. Those are cheap to fix in the first month and expensive to fix in the third year. So my advice is the boring one. Learn ten postures slowly, then go and flow through them for the rest of your life.

Vinyasa is not taught here. The classes here are not labelled by style at all: one teacher, one hall at the residents' association in MSR Nagar in north Bangalore, and an hour of asana, pranayama and relaxation taught slowly, in person there or live online. There is no flow class, no playlist and no peak posture.

That is a limitation and it is worth stating rather than dressing up. If what you want is an hour of continuous movement and a heart rate in the right band, this is not the room for it, and any teacher who tells you a slow class will do the same job is selling you something. What a slow class can do is the part a flow class cannot: give you the postures accurately enough that a flow class becomes safe for you.

The flowing part of the tradition is here in its older form. Surya Namaskar is a vinyasa in the original sense of the word, a counted sequence of movements each taken on one breath, and it is taught step by step with the breath marked. If you would rather start on your own, how to start yoga at home sets out a first week, and the first class is free if you want to see the room before deciding. All ages and all levels. Timings and what each option costs are on the classes page.

Vinyasa sequences are improvised, but they are improvised from a small vocabulary, and knowing it makes the first class much less bewildering.

Almost everything is strung between Adho Mukha Svanasana and standing upright in Tadasana, with Urdhva Hastasana and Uttanasana as the way up and down. The lunge you will meet a hundred times is Ashwa Sanchalanasana. The backbend is usually Bhujangasana or its stronger cousin, and Balasana is where you go when you have had enough, which you are always allowed to do.

What a flow class rarely gives you is the seated half of the practice. Padmasana and the breathing that belongs with it, Anulom Vilom and Bhramari, are usually compressed into the last ninety seconds or dropped. That is the gap to fill at home, and the ten minute morning routine or the bedtime sequence will fill it. If you are choosing between a flow class and the gym, yoga vs gym is the comparison, and how often should you do yoga covers how many of these you can usefully take in a week.