Beginning Yoga - 5 reasons why it can feel like Hercules' 13th Labor

Everyone’s journey with yoga is unique. The state of your body changes from day to day, hour to hour. Some days you feel more flexible and other days savasana is the best you’ve got.

To be honest, although yoga changed my life and continues to bring me joy and health, sometimes it can be a real challenge to get onto my mat. Even more so when you're just starting off your yoga habit and you have no idea what to expect!

Here are some of the reasons for that challenge.

1. Sit all day? Hunch forward in your seat that’s become perfectly moulded to your bum and thighs? With working life restricting our movement to wheeling across the cubicle in our chairs, your body gets stuck in positions that it is used to. Muscles, tendons and fascia get tight and you end up feeling like a dried out clay sculpture - brittle and hard. When you start to stretch them, it may feel like you are super stiff, uncoordinated, off-balance, weak, painful. You’re effectively having to tease apart those muscle strands that have become frozen in that position and if you do it too quickly or too intensely, it may even feel like you’re tearing the muscle apart. Which effectively you are, but you want to do it gently, like untangling hair from a hair brush.

2. Some poses feel impossible: Similarly to sitting all day, your muscles also become tense if you regularly stress or feel anxious. When you finally make the move from worrier to warrior, it can feel impossible to hold a pose or even get your body into that shape. Shoulders and neck are a mecca for stress which settles into your upper body like a cloak of lead. This can make it feel really hard to do even basic movements like lift your arms up to the ceiling.

3. You feel dumb because you can’t lift your arms up to the ceiling, a basic human movement. And no-one wants to be that dumb kid standing in front of his or her classmates who can’t spell ‘c-a-t’.


4. Or maybe all you do for exercise is run. You run until your quads are rock hard and your hamstrings are strung tight like a bow. You’ve only used and strengthened select body parts and may either experience injury from overuse or weakness from underuse. Add to that that if your alignment has been incorrect due to the wrong shoes for example, you may be compensating by roping in muscles that aren’t meant to be engaged while running. That leads to its own set of complications!


5. Feeling uncoordinated and awkward: this is totally normal when your body is learning new positions or new ways of moving. This doesn’t only happen to beginners but also to experienced yogis getting back into their practice after a break. If you don’t use it you lose it. This applies not only to muscle strength but to the neural connections in your brain and body. When you move, your brain has to send a message to your muscles to instruct it to move. The more you do it, the stronger that message pathway becomes and the stronger the signal. When you stop doing that movement for a longtime the connections between your brain cells start to wither away and reconnect elsewhere. So when it feels super hard like your brain doesn’t get it, it’s possibly because your brain is still on training wheels for that action.


The great news for all these challenges is that with consistent practice, you will overcome them! The key is to be consistent and be kind to yourself (work hard but don’t force it or you’ll create damage). If you want to imagine it’s like picking up a ball of pasta dough that’s been in the fridge. It’s hard and brittle and if you force it it will break and crumble. If you work it with a firm but sensitive pressure and just keep working at it, soon it will be supple and stretchy. Then, just to continue the pasta analogy, you can mould it into all sorts of shapes. Add some heat and you've really got a winning recipe!

So next time you find yourself staring at your yoga mat wondering if it's worth it, remember that the start might be tough but you'll always be glad you did it!