Yin yoga

Yin yoga is a practice of a small number of passive floor postures, each held for three to five minutes with the working muscles deliberately relaxed, so that the load falls on the denser connective tissue around a joint rather than on the muscle crossing it.

It is a modern practice with a short and traceable history. Paul Grilley taught it from the 1980s onwards, drawing on the martial arts teacher Paulie Zink and on the anatomical work of Hiroshi Motoyama, and Sarah Powers gave it the name and much of the meditative framing it now carries. The yin and yang language is borrowed from Chinese thought: yang tissue is muscle, which responds to rhythmic effort, and yin tissue is ligament, tendon and fascia, which is thought to respond to slow sustained load. Some yin teaching also maps the postures onto the meridians of Chinese medicine, which is a framework rather than a physiological claim, and it is worth being clear about which of the two you are being given.

What makes it unlike everything else on this site is that you are asked to do less rather than more. The instruction is to find the edge of the shape, stop well short of it, and then stay there while nothing appears to happen.

A yin class is short on content and long on time. Sixty minutes might hold five postures and a rest.

• Settling, five minutes. Lying or sitting, often with a bolster, doing nothing in particular.
• Four to six long holds, forty minutes. Seated forward folds, wide legged folds, hip shapes, a supported backbend, a gentle twist. Each is set up carefully, then held while a timer runs.
• The exits, which nobody warns you about. Coming out of a five minute hold is slow and briefly feels strange. The tissue takes a minute to feel like itself again, and that minute is part of the practice.
• A long rest, ten minutes. Usually Savasana, sometimes guided as Yoga Nidra.

Three rules run through all of it, and they are the whole method. Find your edge, which means go to the first honest sensation and no further, because in a five minute hold the shape you can just tolerate at thirty seconds will be unbearable at three minutes. Be still, because fidgeting reintroduces the muscular effort you came to switch off. Hold for time, because the slow response of connective tissue is the mechanism the practice is built on, and a forty second version of a yin posture is simply a stretch.

What should you feel? Something dull, wide and tolerable, that you could describe as pressure rather than pain. Sharp, hot, electrical or pinching sensation means come out now, not in a minute.

The comparison that actually confuses people is yin against restorative, because both involve lying on the floor with props for a long time and they are trying to do opposite things.

The single sentence version: in yin you should feel something and in restorative you should feel nothing. The full argument is on yin vs restorative, and restorative yoga has its own page. Against a moving class the difference needs no table: yin has no standing work, no strength work and no cardiovascular effect whatsoever, which is why it belongs beside a fuller practice rather than instead of one. Hatha is the obvious other half.

Two claims are routinely made about yin yoga, and they are on very different footings.

The claim about the mind is the better supported one. A randomised controlled trial of a five week yin yoga based programme in 105 stressed but otherwise healthy middle aged adults found significantly greater reductions in the stress related biomarker adrenomedullin, in anxiety and in sleep problems than in the control group, with the arm that added psychoeducation also improving on stress and depression. That is one trial, in one population, over five weeks, and it is a reasonable basis for saying that a slow passive practice can help an anxious person sleep. It is not a basis for anything stronger. If that is why you are looking at yin, yoga for anxiety is the page written for it.

The claim about fascia is the one to be careful with. You will read that long holds remodel connective tissue, rehydrate fascia, or release stored emotion. The first of those is a plausible mechanism that is genuinely under investigation, the second is loosely used, and the third is a metaphor. What I can tell you from forty years of watching people is narrower and more useful: long passive holds are the most reliable way I know to move a hip that has not moved in years, and they are also the most reliable way to irritate a knee that was already unhappy. Both of those are worth knowing before you book.

The practical caution follows from that. Long passive loading can quietly overload a joint precisely because the muscles are switched off and nothing stops you. If you have an irritable knee, a hypermobile spine, sciatic pain or a recent injury, the deep hip and forward folding shapes are the ones to modify first, and yoga for back pain sets out which.

Yin has clearer indications than most styles, because it does one narrow thing well.

• Your hips have not moved in a decade and stretching has stopped working. Yin. This is what it is for.
• You sit at a desk all day and cannot switch off in the evening. Yin or restorative, in the evening, and the desk sequence during the day.
• You are anxious and want something you can do while too tired to move. Restorative first, then yin. Restorative asks less of you.
• You are completely new to yoga. Not yin on its own. It is easy to follow and it teaches you almost nothing about how to stand, and a beginner cannot yet tell a dull ache from a warning.
• You want to get fitter or stronger. Not yin. It will not do it, and no honest teacher will tell you otherwise. See yoga vs gym.
• You have an irritable knee or a hypermobile back. Be careful, use more props than you think you need, and shorten every hold.

My verdict. I think yin is genuinely useful and I would not want anyone to make it their only practice. Held actively, a posture teaches you to organise yourself under load, and that is the thing that lets a sixty year old get off the floor unaided; a passive hold teaches you to tolerate sensation, which is a different and also valuable skill. My honest position is that yin is the best second practice on this list. One or two evenings a week, alongside a slower held class, and it earns its place immediately. As the whole of somebody's practice it worries me, because I have seen people arrive very open and very weak, and that combination is the one that ends in an irritated joint.

Yin is not taught here, and neither is anything else by name. The classes here are not labelled by style: one teacher, about forty years of teaching, 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 for anyone who cannot travel. There is no yin class on the timetable and no timer running.

What the hour does contain is the part of yin that a general class can honestly carry: a small number of postures, held long enough to matter, with props offered before anybody struggles, and a long relaxation that is not treated as an optional reward. The holds are twenty seconds to a minute and active rather than three to five minutes and passive, which is a real difference and not a lesser version of the same thing.

If a long passive practice is what you want, take it in the evening at home. The bedtime sequence is the closest thing on this site, and it is built around exactly this: few shapes, long holds, supported, with the breath left alone. How to start yoga at home explains how to fit that beside a class, and the first class is free if you would rather look at the room before deciding anything. All ages and all levels; the classes page has timings and costs.

Yin postures often carry their own names, which is confusing at first, because most of them are floor shapes you already know renamed to signal that they are being held passively.

The seated forward fold is Paschimottanasana, taken far shallower than usual and with the back deliberately rounded rather than long. The supported backbend is closest to Setu Bandhasana with a block under the sacrum, or to Matsyasana over a bolster. The kneeling shape that a yin class uses to load the ankles and the front of the thighs is Vajrasana, and the rest between everything is Balasana with a bolster along the torso.

Nothing in a yin class asks you to stand, which is exactly its limitation. The postures that build the strength to hold yourself up are Tadasana, Trikonasana and Vrikshasana, and none of them appears here. If you want the two halves in one week, take yin in the evenings and the ten minute morning routine when you get up. The breathing that a yin class leaves alone is worth learning separately: Bhramari and Anulom Vilom are where to start, and how often should you do yoga covers how to stack it all up.