4 Ways to Spice Up Your Yoga Practice — Runners Love Yoga

“But… yoga is boring!”

As a yoga teacher, you tend to hear certain refrains from those who don’t regularly practice yoga (yet!) for whatever reason: one of these is the good old “but I’m not flexible!” to which I usually respond with “I wasn’t either when I first started!” because, truly, I was not, please take my word for it! But, whether or not you are or are not flexible is also no reason to do or to not do yoga!! As you will eventually discover, hopefully earlier rather than later in your yoga journey, it matters far less what you look like while doing a pose, what poses you can do to the deepest available option, what poses you can even DO, period. Instead it matters a lot more what your yoga practice does for your body in terms of how it makes you feel, physically, mentally, and emotionally. It matters one millions times less whether you can do a split, and one million times more whether you are actually listening to your body while doing any particular pose (which is what actually doing yoga is all about, anyways). So, go do YOUR yoga, whether you deem yourself flexible or not!

That said, probably the second most common reason for not doing yoga is that yoga is boring. (Sometimes the person tries very hard to not hurt my feeling as they realize they are talking to a yoga teacher, and they say something like “yoga is just not for me”—but if you read between the lines here, what they are trying to say is that yoga is just not interesting or fun for them!) My answer here is not, in fact, that yoga is always interesting, but that “you just haven’t found the right yoga for you!”—because, yes, you are right, yoga can be VERY boring indeed if you don’t have the right teacher for you! So, first things first. Before we add in ways to make your existing yoga practice a little zestier, let’s first address the most important consideration for new or uninitiated yogis in particular!

1.) Find the teacher or style that is right for YOU.

Just like you can have a teacher who turns their high school chemistry students into a bunch of “nodding penguins” (this was the term that my Mechanical Engineering prof gave to students whose heads dropping forward jolted them awake again), you can equally have a yoga teacher or teacher of any subject or discipline who makes that subject or discipline much less titillating and fun and beneficial than it might otherwise be. If you went to one yoga class and found it super boring, don’t judge all of yoga off that one class! (This is like running one 10k and saying you don’t like racing in general or doing that particular distance!) Chances are that teacher was just not the yoga teacher for you, but trust me on this, there IS a yoga teacher out there who IS for you. (There are also—this sounds harsh but is also true—just generally some very not-so-good teachers, whether of high school chemistry or yoga or anything else! So, keep this in mind as well. Sometimes it is a matter of fit of teaching style, personality, what you are looking for in a yoga practice, and sometimes it is a matter of just finding someone who is flat out just a good, experienced teacher, but in either case, you owe it to your soon-to-be-feeling-better body-on-yoga to find YOUR yoga teacher out there!

The term “yoga” has grown to encompass many varieties of yoga, from Ashtanga to vinyasa to Iyengar to yin to Kundalini to power, and while all of these sub-disciplines are incredibly different (though similar in some ways!), so are all the individual teachers within that discipline incredibly different in their personalities, the manner in which they teach (though similar in some ways too!). So, my advice to the new yoga student who thinks yoga is boring is to try as many teachers and styles as they can until they find the one that clicks. You will find the one that you love! It is also worth noting that different yoga styles can vary a lot from place to place: my experience of power yoga in London (which I loved and could be called creative vinyasa) was not even close to my experience of power yoga in a Northeastern U.S. city (which I did not enjoy and found altogether too Bikram-esque!). You may also find that different styles or teachers are more fitting to you at different times in your life: being stuck in a chair too often during grad school in my 20s, I gravitated towards powerful vinyasa classes, whereas now I am much more appreciative of yin yoga’s restorative effects on the fascia and body as a whole too!