One thing you discover as you age, is that things ache more. There are more sore bits, injuries take longer to heal and niggles can frustrate our efforts to be pain free.
 
The body simply isn't as resilient as it was, and we need to work harder to maintain stability and mobility. We are all aging, and we can't wait for a pain-free day to do something positive to turn the tide. It takes more effort to hold our ground than it ever has before and waiting will only set us back further. 
 
I had a recent minor skin surgery (thankfully nothing to worry about). It didn't stop me practicing. I had to modify my yoga postures and work around any forward bending so that the stitches could work their magic.
 
My sprained ankle a couple of years back when I slipped into a hole in the park didn't derail my practice. My foot went black and blue and was swollen so cross legged was off the cards, but I simply had to avoid things that hurt, and ensure that I showed up to my practice with extra care and attention.
 
A bit like if I have a sore in my mouth, I don't stop cleaning my teeth. I just brush them more carefully, respect the sore bits, but take care of the rest of my precious teeth and gums in the meantime.
 
If your waiting for the day that nothing aches to get to your mat . . .
 
The Pros - there are lots!
Working with an injury can be brilliantly insightful. You'll discover an easily enhanced focus as the sheer risk of not paying attention is far greater. 
 
It is easy to view injuries as bad. Granted, no-one invites them, we all want to enjoy the freedom that good health affords. But discomfort is such an amazing opportunity for self-enquiry.
 
Instead of fighting against, and getting frustrated by, your ailments and symptoms, treat the sensations of the cold / achey hip / swollen ankle etc., as the body giving you information about what it can and can't do today. Be curious about the patterns in the mind, the way judgement and negative bias creeps in, and the potential for your intentions to be derailed by over-thinking. All patterns worth getting to know. 
 
It is tempting to let movement and meditative practices  drop off the priority list in the face of discomfort, congestion, fear etc. but it can be such an interesting and valuable time to practice. It affords new insights and rewards that are very different than if you were feeling fine. And the yoga still helps, even when it is more gentle than perhaps you would choose. You always feel better, more grounded, relaxed, energised, you'll recover sooner, and it can even adjust your relationship to the ailment to become more positive. 
 
I found Covid completely fascinating. I had new sensations in my body. My smell went completely. And mentally I knew I had 'it' - the dreaded thing that was sweeping across the world. It was in me, right now. If I allowed it, it could feel a bit scarey. But also there was a level of excitement. How interesting?! That thing that everyone is talking about, I get to experience it first hand, before anyone else I know. Was I going to be okay? Who knew. A completely new experience - how curious, a new adventure.
 
I was lucky enough to have it while on holiday and at no point did I feel so ill that I contemplated hospital. There was even something of a relief at getting it. There was no need to avoid getting it any more, at least for a few weeks after I felt bullet proof. A layer of worry that I didn't even realise I had been carrying around had vanished. That was worth discovering - that I didn't even realise I was that worried. I had discovered a lot about what 'worry' in its more subtle guise looks and feels like. Worth knowing. And from there I just had to go with what unfolded next. 
 
My yoga practice was a revelation. My postures and breath felt different. Each practice held a sense of fascination at what it was actually like to be in a body with Covid. The physical sensations, plus the stuff in my mind. The temptation of dramatic narrative and fear of what might happen next, drawing me away from what was actually my direct experience of what was happening. The vividness of experiencing my new body, within the familiar ground of my daily practice, helped deepen my practice and level of attentiveness and meditation. All brilliant insights to carry forwards. 
 
Ultimately life is often out of our hands. We like to think we are in control, we often try to be which can take so much energy. Illness and injury are times when situations are taken out of your hands in a visceral way. And this has great value and benefit.
 
This doesn't necessarily mean showing up to class with a streaming cold, but show up to something. Show up online and take it gently, take a short video, do your own personal practice. There is always something you can do, and it is always worth the effort. 
 
The old adage life is a journey, not a destination, applies at its best here. The journey is possibly the opposite of what you would have chosen, but there is plenty to enjoy anyway, it might just take a shift of mindset.
 
Definitely something worth practicing. ​

Hot yoga is really popular as an alternative to regular temperature yoga classes. Hot yoga is a studio-based yoga practice in a super-heated room (42 degrees celcius - imagine Egypt in the summer then pour in extra humidity) where the aim is to work through a physical yoga practice and sweat a ton, then lie down and bask in the heat as you recover from the effort. It's intense and many people love it. 

The claims about benefits of hot yoga practice are many:
- Detoxes the body
- Sweating is good for you
- Improved flexibility
... and so on.

The science may not back this up, but those who love it feel the results and swear by it. Those who don't love it, probably never go back.

I fall into the latter camp and find the claims to be subjective but if it benefits you and you enjoy it, then keep doing it.

As with all physical yoga practices, be cautious not to over stretch and be particularly careful with your joints, that they stay within a safe and comfortable range of motion. I have had many injured hot yoga practitioners come with knee, elbow and shoulder injuries from hot yoga classes so go carefully. Sometimes when the heat is on and the practice is intense, it is hard to listen to the inner voice advising you to ease off. Hot yoga can get competitive and that makes it harder to draw back from a pose when necessary. So applying your own sensible body-awareness skills to your practice is paramount when the heat intensity is turned up.

I'm biased, as I've been practicing yoga for 20 years and find an ambient room or even a cool space a wonderful way to practice. I can engage fully in my yoga practice when I'm able to turn the attention inwards rather than feeling overly hot or sweaty. I tend to heat up during my practice anyway, even if just taking a breathing (pranayama) practice.

I recently came across an interesting thesis which undertook a study comparing hot yoga practitioners alongside regular temperature Hatha yoga practitioners. The aim was to measure the effects of yoga practice on physiological and psychological fitness in young men and women over an 8-week period. Health metrics that were monitored include BMI, blood pressure, flexibility, peak oxygen consumption, back depression, anxiety and depression metrics.

Hot yoga participants worked at a significantly higher cardiovascular intensity and spent more time at a higher heart rate throughout the classes. But even with this, over the 8-week period, both hot yoga and Hatha yoga groups saw the same improvements in body composition and flexibility and also in anxiety and depression scores. So the outcome observations suggest that there are real, significant health benefits to engaging in both forms of yoga practice but there was no final measure on any additional psychological or physiological benefits gained by hot yoga training.

So by all means, do hot yoga practice if you love it and feel no ill effects from it, but from what we can tell, the health benefits are not greater doing it in a hot and sweaty room.

Another article to read more on this can be found here >

I'm a big advocate of home yoga practice. Little and often can often bring about the most benefit - it is free to everyone and has an intimacy to it that you rarely get in the classroom. Ask any of my students who get a free home yoga practice handout at the end of each term to go and try at home. So learning your yoga practice skills in a group class or with personal yoga tuition and then starting to apply those skills in your home practice is a wonderful way to practice yoga. I've written about home yoga practice before here. 

​One of the limiting factors to hot yoga practice is that you have to go to the studio regularly to do this, and the costs add up. (Don't get me started on Mr Bikram, the hot yoga business mogul and his exuberant love of money and Rolls Royces - as a business model he turned hot yoga into a money spinner). Of course the communities that develop around group classes are wonderful and valuable, but the tie in to the studio and the costs involved can become problematic. 

Beyond the intense physicality of the hot yoga class, also remember there is an inner essence to yoga practice. The internal connection through body, breath and mental focusing that go beyond the measurable health metrics outlined in the comparative study. I'm not sure the subtlety of my pranayama or meditation practice would be possible in an intensely heated environment yet the crown of  my yoga practice can often be found here (thus my bias to comfortable temperature practice). My inner meditative focus might be externally drawn to feeling overly hot or to the physical sensations of sweating. But I get that some folks need the intensity of a very physical practice to keep them focused out of their busy minds.

I guess my final thought is that usually any yoga practice is better than no practice - so ultimately do whatever is likely to motivate you and do what you you will enjoy. 

Thanks to Kalin Shephert Gawinski for sharing the abstract to their study from 2012. ​

1,000s of people get injured each year practicing yoga or taking yoga classes. Surprising perhaps when the reputation is that it is supposed to be safer than many physical activities that have more obvious associations with injury. With doctors referring people to yoga classes with health issues, what is going on here?

Yoga is usually low impact and if done with attention and with good and appropriate instruction should and can be safe, even for less able bodies and those with serious health conditions. But not all yoga classes are suitable for everyone, you have to find the right yoga for you. And once there, perhaps the safe perception of yoga leads people into a false sense of security and usual self-restraint is forgotten just because they are in a yoga class?

I have worked with students who have come from other yoga classes after sustaining injury, and have myself been injured from a well-intentioned adjustment from an enthusiastic teacher that left me in pain for a week. (He encouraged me to go that bit further into a twist by placing a hand to my back and gently pushing, I immediately knew I had pulled something and needless to say, haven't returned to his class.)

Students who come to my group classes tell me of existing health issues in the initial health form they fill in. Most are happy to listen to advice and modify what they do to accomodate their issue, erring on the side of caution, especially at first. Very occassionally the student still wants to have a go even with advice recommending them not to, sometimes they get away with it, sometimes you see problems starting to arise.

As a recent New York Times article comments:
Training for yoga teachers can vary, and classes are so large in some studios that instructors do not pay enough attention to everybody.

This only makes the problem more difficult, as the safe perception of yoga, compounded by large classes with teachers who have taken perhaps as little as only a month of training could be a recipe for the injured contingent to grow.

One Bristol yoga class disclaimer left me rather nervous and must be signed before participating - stating that: 'wrongful death could occur due to negligence', blimey. Of course disclaimers are extreme, and I signed the same disclaimer when I went sky-diving, but I kind of expected it then somehow... Perhaps it is a good reminder to us that ultimately we are responsible for our own bodies and should remain so at all times, even when we are sky-diving or in a yoga class.

As yoga teachers, we are often working with people who aren't strong and fit when they begin. People who may have been sitting at a desk all day before they come to class and have associated weaknesses, stiffnesses and perhaps susceptibilities waiting for the right moment to reveal themselves.

A student new to my class will often hear the instruction, go for all the easiest options offered today to see how  your body responds over the next day or two. Even after understanding existing health concerns you never know whether an old sciatic problem will feel aggravated or a back problem might rear its head and complain.

Working carefully initially, with safe instruction and supervision gets you started more safely. And it is one of the many reasons why regular practice is key. To come intermittently may mean that you feel you can work harder than you should, you managed to do this last time so you should be able to do it today, even though you haven't practiced in 3 weeks.

Regular practice with a developmental approach and a well-trained teacher will open up doors for you that will be safe and in the long more rewarding than the thrill of having survived an extreme experience. Preparing you for the extreme experience if that is what you are seeking.

Enjoy yoga, take care and practice safely until you are confident that you can stretch yourself beyond your usual boundaries. Find stability first before you reach too far.