By Bernie Clark
March 20, 2023
There are a few related questions that beginners to yin yoga often ask: “How often can I practice yin yoga? Is it okay to do it every day? How much rest should I take between practices?” It may be frustrating to hear the simple answer, but the simple answer is, “it depends!” This answer is vague because there is no one answer that is right for every body. But, there is an answer that will be appropriate for you.
Yin Yoga practice includes long-held, static stresses
Consider the activities of daily living. How often are you on your feet? How long are you sitting with your hips flexed and your spine rounded? How many minutes in a row are your arms or knees flexed or hands extended at the wrists? Yin Yoga can be defined in many ways but one working definition is that it is the practice of long-held, static stresses. This means we place the body into a position where our joints experience enough stress or load that we can sense the challenge. This is called the “edge”. It is explained in the first of the three principles of yin yoga:
Principle #1: Come to your edge in the posture where you feel a challenge. It should not be too intense. If it is too intense you will not be able to relax in the pose, nor will you be able to stay very long. Be where you can linger.
Principle #2: Once you are at a challenging edge where you can stay without fidgeting, cultivate stillness. It is okay to move if the body opens and you are invited to go a little deeper, but we are not trying to get to any particular place or depth. We are cultivating sensations. If the sensations grow too intense, back off or come out of the pose.
Principle #3: Stay for time. While there should be some sensation, time is more important than intensity. Linger for 2 to 3 minutes if appropriate but if it is better for you to stay longer, stay longer: maybe up to 8 or 10 minutes or more.
Everyday living involves yin-like stresses to our tissues. Standing, walking and even running will require the feet to bear loads. We stand every day and usually, we are standing for much longer than an average yin posture is held. Think of how much time you stand while preparing a meal in the kitchen or brushing your teeth in the bathroom. Not to mention the hours on your feet if you happen to work as a teller, waiter or cashier. And yet, our feet do not break from these daily yin-like stresses. The arches of our feet are designed to accommodate constant loads. Indeed, they would suffer and atrophy if they did not receive constant stress. Similarly, consider how many hours a day your hips are flexed and your lumbar spine is fully flexed as well. (If you are not sure your lower back is fully flexed while you sit, take a seat and with one hand, feel the shape of your lumbar spine. If it is flat or straight, it is fully flexed!1)
While sitting, our knees are flexed. While working on a computer, our elbows are flexed and our hands slightly extended at the wrist. There are many examples of daily living creating long-held, static stresses in our joints and to our muscles and fascia; and yet we suffer no problem repeating these positions every day. Our bones are even more resilient: consider people who wear braces on their teeth. They do not wear the braces every other day. They experience constant stress in the jaw bones 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for years. That is a lot of yin!
Can you do yin yoga every day? The answer comes from your own lived experience. It should be okay to do a yin yoga practice every day, but! People are complicated and unique. There will always be exceptions to every generalization. In an earlier article, How Long Should I Rest Between Practices?, the case was made for giving the muscles a day or two of rest before stressing them again. This is because exercise causes microscopic damage within the muscles and its associated fascia, and time is required to allow this damage to be repaired. Once repaired, the tissues can be stressed again. The majority of the damage to our fascia is dealt with within 48 hours as shown in figure 1.
Figure 1 The timing of collagen synthesis and degradation. The solid red area signifies net degradation; solid green signifies net synthesis. [Based on figure from Magnusson, 2010.2]
Given this finding, it makes sense to say that we should do yin yoga every other day. But, that ignores human variation and the degree to which you stress your fascia during your practice. If you are constantly pushing to your joint’s end range of motion, holding this position even if there are strong sensations (or worse—pain!), and staying for much longer than is necessary, then you may be well advised to reduce your frequency of practice. If you stay within the middle of your range of motion, do not stay when sensations become too challenging, and most importantly, don’t feel any negative effects in your joints when you come out of the pose or over the next day or two, then for you it may be quite appropriate to do a daily yin yoga practice.
The answer I give when asked by students how often they can do yin yoga is, “It depends!” It is a frustrating answer to hear because most people want a precise prescription of what they can and cannot do. But the reality is, you are unique! What works for someone else may not work for you. The best way to answer this question is to discover what frequency of practice works best for you. This requires some experimentation and close observation. Begin your investigation with two classes a week and slowly increase the number of practices per week while paying close attention to how your joints feel during the practice and over the next 48 hours. You can interleave different targeted areas on consecutive classes: the spine for one class and the hips for the next class. In this way you may be able to do yin yoga more frequently because on the hip days, your spine is resting, and vice versa.
Over a few months, you should be able to determine optimal frequency of practice. Maybe you are one of the fortunate ones who can do yin yoga every day. Lucky you! But, maybe you don’t need to work your joints and fascia that often. Interspersing three days of yang practice and three days of yin practice, with a glorious day off once a week may be your ideal prescription. You are the best judge of what is optimal for you but this does require that you set an intention for your practices
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Footnotes
[1]It does not take much hip flexion to flatten the lumbar spine, and a flat lumbar spine is fully flexed. Except for perhaps the top two lumbar vertebrae (L1 and L2) of contortionists and dancers, the lumbar spine does not extend (backbend) beyond straight. See Your Spine, Your Yoga, page 179, for details.
[2]S.P. Magnusson, H. Langberg, and M. Kjaer, “The Pathogenesis of Tendinopathy: Balancing the Response to Loading, Nature Reviews Rheumatology 6.5 (2010): 262–8, doi:10.1038/nrrheum.2010.43.