Unwinding your Day
By Bernie Clark
June 1, 2026
Are you sitting right now? Most people are, if they are reading this. How long have you been in this position? If you are like most people, your hips are flexed, your legs are together, and your lower back is likely rounded. Your head may be forward, your neck flexed, and your shoulders slightly protracted. These are all acceptable positions for your body to adopt. But when you hold any one posture for a long time, you are in a yin position. (Note, I did not say you are doing yin yoga. There is more to yoga than posture.)
Throughout the day, we repeatedly place our bodies into passive, relatively still positions and remain there for extended periods. I call this “everyday yin.”
Everyday living exposes the body to long-held, low-load stresses, but typically within a narrow range of motion and in only a few directions.
Everyday living exposes our body to long-held, low-load stresses.1 Our body is used to this, but too much of anything can become a problem. While we hold these postures, our joints are not being put into varying ranges of motions. For example, while your hips may be flexed, they are not fully flexed. While your legs may be together, they are not at their end range of adduction. The same is true for the spine and shoulders. Everyday yin tends to keep us in mid-range positions. We load our tissues for long periods, but only through a small portion of their available movement.2
Everyday yin does not only apply to seated positions. Anyone who works as a cashier, teller or waiter knows how much time they spend standing. Or think of all the time you stand while working at a counter or waiting in a line. Even though you may sway occasionally to relieve discomfort, your feet, ankles, knees, hips, and spine are still experiencing prolonged, low-load stress.
Or, think of all the hours you spend each day lying in bed. Even though you unconsciously toss and turn, there are still long stretches of time where you remain in one position.3 Eight hours of everyday yin in bed places low loads on hips and shoulders.
The Benefits and Downsides of Everyday Yin
If you had a magic machine that could look inside your body while you hold these postures, you would likely find viscoelastic elongation (creep and relaxation of fibers) occurring in your fascial tissues, along with fluid redistribution in the extracellular matrix and low-level cellular signaling responses being generated by the cells residing in your fascia. 4 These low-load, long-duration stresses can help maintain connective tissue integrity and prevent deconditioning of our passive fascial structures. At the same time, muscle activity is reduced and localized blood flow may be restricted when muscles are held in fixed postures.5 We are conserving energy when we allow our fascia to provide support rather than engaging muscles, which may increase our daily endurance for all we have to do. Slow shifts in our extracellular fluids can support hydration and nutrient exchange, which is especially important for our cartilage and fascia.
However! We can do too much of anything. While during a yin yoga practice we can acquire many of the above benefits while we stay in a pose for five minutes or so, when we overstay our welcome in any one position, maladaptation can occur. Sitting for prolonged periods can lead to increased stiffness, discomfort, and a reduced tolerance for movement.6 Tissues thrive on variability and changing stresses.7 Over time, relying heavily on passive tissues such as ligaments and joint capsules for support may reduce their responsiveness, which can affect proprioception and movement quality. Blood flow is reduced and venous pooling can occur which can lead to low blood pressure.8
The concern is not any one position, but that we stay too long in postures we repeat over and over again, with little variation.
Restoring Balance
One of the simplest ways to reduce the negative effects of everyday yin is to fidget! Move around. Change your position every few minutes. Paul Grilley once told me that he could always tell who the yoga students were when he was in a movie theatre. They were the ones constantly moving even though they were sitting. The members of the audience who had little interoception sat still throughout the whole show, but the yogis felt the discomfort of being still for too long and fidgeted constantly. Five or even ten minutes in one position is unlikely to be a problem, but the longer we remain still, the more important it becomes to change position.
The next step is to introduce the neglected directions and depths that you don’t get to while staying in one shape. I know some teachers worry about offering flexion positions to their students during an evening yoga class, reasoning that their students probably have been flexed at their desks for hours that day. That may be true, but the flexion they experience during the day is usually shallow and limited. Sure, spend lots of time extending the hips and spine, but also go further into flexion in order to maintain your full range of motion. Explore the unused depth of each direction.
Everyday yin also tends to place the body into symmetrical shapes. Use your practice to explore asymmetry. For example, Half Butterfly or Half Frog places one leg straight and the other bent, introducing external or internal rotation at the hip. You can even switch positions halfway through the hold to increase variability.
If you start with a flexion pose, such as Butterfly, feel where your normal amount of spinal and hip flexion is and allow yourself to safely go beyond that point. Build conscious discrimination of where neutral is, what is normal, and what is safely beyond.
Extend Every Day
The areas most affected by everyday yin are the hips, spine, and, to a lesser extent, the shoulders and legs. The most common directions are flexion and adduction. The direction most often neglected is extension.
Move the spine backwards! Move the hips backwards! Supported Bridge is a wonderful way to do both. Bring your arms behind you and draw the shoulder blades together. A Reclining Butterfly over a bolster works well for that. If you have been spending hours every day flexing your hips and spine, spend some time going in the opposite direction. Use your yin yoga practice to regain and maintain these other directions and depths. But, do not forget to also include your yang practices as well. Use those muscles and get your heart pumping too.
Think of your life like playing a piano. Every day, you are playing the same notes, at the same volume and tempo. Why not change the rhythm? Play all the notes, with varying intensity. Sometimes hold a note; sometimes let movement flow.
Play the music of your life; the piano is your body.
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1 Owen N, Healy GN, Matthews CE, Dunstan DW. “Too Much Sitting: The Population-Health Science of Sedentary Behavior.” Exercise and Sport Sciences Reviews. 2010;38(3):105–113. doi:10.1097/JES.0b013e3181e373a2. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3404815/.
2 Studies of activities of daily living show that common tasks use specific, limited arcs of motion rather than the full available range of the joints. See Gates et al. 2016 for upper-limb ADLs https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4690598/ and Hyodo et al. 2017 for hip, knee, and ankle kinematics during daily tasks https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5537477.
3 Normal sleep is punctuated by frequent micro-arousals and position changes, which help redistribute pressure and mechanical stress across the body. See this Wikipedia article on microarousal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microarousal.
4 Fascial tissues exhibit viscoelastic behavior and respond biologically to sustained mechanical loading. Fibroblasts can sense stretch and convert mechanical forces into biochemical signals through a process called mechanotransduction. See: Pirri C, et al. “A New Player in the Mechanobiology of Deep Fascia.” International Journal of Molecular Sciences. 2023;24(20):15108 https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10607668/. And Chiquet M, et al. “How do fibroblasts translate mechanical signals into biochemical responses?” Matrix Biology. 2003;22(1):73 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12714044/
5 Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety. “Working in a Sitting Position — Overview.” CCOHS. This ergonomics summary notes that sitting requires the trunk, neck, and shoulder muscles to hold a fixed position, and that fixed postures can compress blood vessels and reduce blood supply to working muscles https://www.ccohs.ca/oshanswers/ergonomics/sitting/sitting_overview.html.
6 Kovats A, et al. “Time course of perceived knee stiffness following prolonged sedentary sitting.” Journal of Bodywork and Movement Therapies. 2025. The study found that perceived knee stiffness increased after as little as 30 minutes of uninterrupted sitting and that brief movement reduced both stiffness and discomfort https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2772696725000389.
7 Biological tissues adapt to the mechanical stresses placed upon them, and varying mechanical signals influence tissue remodeling, repair, and maintenance through mechanotransduction. See: Qin YX, Zhao J. “Mechanobiology in cellular, molecular, and tissue adaptation.” Mechanobiology in Medicine. 2023;1(2):100022. doi:10.1016/j.mbm.2023.100022 https://researchconnect.suny.edu/en/publications/mechanobiology-in-cellular-molecular-and-tissue-adaptation.
8<sup Thosar SS, Bielko SL, Wiggins CC, Wallace JP. “Differences in brachial and femoral artery responses to prolonged sitting.” Cardiovascular Ultrasound. 2014;12:50 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25512175/.