Ep 133: How Often Should Students Practice Yoga?

Answering the question of how often to practice yoga seems simple enough, but the full answer is more nuanced than most students expect. This episode takes a broader look at what the body actually needs to stay healthy and resilient over time, why yoga works best as part of a varied movement diet rather than as a student's only form of exercise, and what the yoga tradition itself says about practice beyond the physical postures. I'll also share a personal story of injury that came directly from too much deep stretching, which is one of the most common and least-talked-about patterns in dedicated yoga practitioners.

We'll cover:

• What We Get Wrong About More Yoga 
• What a Balanced Movement Diet Includes
• My Personal Injury Story
• Yoga - More Than Asana
• A Practical Answer on the Frequency Question

Mentioned in the episode: 

Teaching Students with Injuries Mentorship

Supporting students who have developed injuries or imbalances, understanding the anatomy behind common yoga injuries, and building a teaching practice that meets real students in real bodies is the work of the Teaching Students with Injuries Mentorship.

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Transcript

Monica 3:59

Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Monica, and I'm so glad you're here. Here is where we talk about the anatomy, the injuries, the nervous system insights, and all the real-life answers to questions that you wish had been included in your yoga teacher training. I'm a yoga teacher who specializes in helping teachers work confidently with students who have pain and injuries. I focused my continuing education in biomechanics, human movement, pain science, and the nervous system. And a lot of what I share on this podcast, I learned the hard way through my own body, through my own mistakes, and through years of working with students who were doing the same things I once did. I know this has happened to you. A student comes up to you after class and asks you one of the most common questions you will ever get as a yoga teacher, How often should I be practicing?" And you say some version of, As often as you can," or, "A daily practice is ideal." And it sounds like great advice. It sounds encouraging, too. But today, I wanna talk about why that answer, as well-intentioned as it is, might actually be missing some very important information. Today, we're talking about the frequency in which students should be practicing yoga, but we're going to look at it in a much bigger context than just how many times a week should someone be practicing asana. Because I think the question of how often to practice yoga is really a question about how to build a movement diet that actually supports the body long term, and that is a conversation that goes well beyond yoga. One of the things I see pretty consistently in the yoga world is this idea that more practice equals more benefit, that the dedicated student is the one who practices every day, that the path to transformation is through daily asana, and that if you're not practicing as often as possible, your practice is incomplete. And I understand where that thinking comes from. Because yoga is a beautiful practice. It feels good, and it has measurable benefits. When something feels good and seems to be helping, it makes sense to want more of it, right? But here is what that thinking misses. Yoga, as most students practice it, is predominantly a stretching and flexibility-based practice, and the body does not thrive on a single mode of movement repeated over and over, no matter how good that movement is. What our bodies actually need is variety, challenge from multiple directions, and recovery time between those efforts. So before we talk about how often students should practice yoga, we need to talk about what else should be in their movement diet alongside yoga. Let's talk about what the research and the physiology actually tells us about what the body needs to stay healthy, mobile, and resilient over time The first piece is strength and resistance training. This is the one that is most often missing in the yoga world, and it matters enormously. When you load your muscles through resistance, whether that is body weight, free weights, bands, or machines at the gym, you're building the kind of strength that protects your joints, supports your connective tissues, and keeps your bones dense as you age. Yoga does offer some resistance through body weight poses like plank and Chaturanga, but it's generally not enough loading to build the kind of strength that most bodies need. Students who are practicing yoga and not doing any resistance training are missing a significant piece of the picture. The second piece is aerobic exercise. Cardiovascular fitness supports heart health, circulation, respiratory function, and mental health in ways that yoga alone generally does not address. A dedicated yoga practice is wonderful for the nervous system and for movement, but it typically does not elevate the heart rate enough for long enough to build aerobic capacity your students benefit from having some form of movement in their week that gets them breathing harder, whether that's walking, cycling, swimming, dancing, or whatever it is they actually enjoy doing. The third piece is mobility and joint specific movement. This is where yoga and other intentional movement practices really can shine. Moving joints through their full range of motion, exploring in range, and working on the tissues around the joints, this is incredibly valuable and often underserved in conventional fitness culture. So yoga absolutely has a role to play here. It's just that yoga works best when you practice it alongside strength and aerobic work, not in the absence of it. When students understand that these three things work together, they start to see yoga not as, like, the entire answer but as one important part of a bigger picture, and that reframe can change how they approach their practice. I had to learn this the hard way. For a period of my own practice, I was doing a lot of deep stretching. I loved it. I was working towards greater flexibility, spending time in long holds, exploring my end range, and it felt productive. I felt like I was doing something good for my body. And then I developed proximal hamstring tendinopathy. That's an injury at the attachment point of the hamstrings right at the sit bone, the ischial tuberosity. And it is one of the most common injuries that comes directly from too much aggressive hamstring stretching. it is stubborn, it's painful, and you know what? It takes a long time to resolve. I also developed rotator cuff issues that I can trace back to the same pattern of overloading certain tissues through repeated deep unloaded stretching without enough complementary strengthening work. I'm sharing this not to scare you or your students away from stretching because stretching is valuable. I'm sharing it because I was doing what so many yoga students do. I was treating more flexibility as the goal, and I was practicing in a way where I was chasing that goal without understanding what I was actually asking or demanding of my tissues. The hamstring tendons do not love being stretched repetitively to end range without adequate loading. The rotator cuff muscles need strength, not just mobility, and my body eventually told me very clearly that what I was doing was not balanced. Learning that the hard way is part of why I talk about these things now. So when a student asks how often they should be practicing yoga, part of my answer is always this, "What else are you doing?" Because yoga works best when it's not practiced in isolation. Now, I do wanna shift the conversation slightly because there is another layer to this question. When we talk about practicing yoga, most students and honestly most teachers are only thinking about asana, about the physical postures. But yoga is an eight-limbed practice, and asana is just one of those limbs. there is pranayama, the practice of breath. There's meditation, the withdrawal of senses, and concentration. There is ethical practice through the yamas and niyamas. These are not just add-ons to the real practice of yoga. They are actually where the practice gets really deep and intentional. So this matters when answering the frequency question. A student might feel like they cannot maintain a daily yoga practice because they don't have an hour every day to do a full asana practice. but if yoga includes meditation and pranayama, then daily practice becomes much more accessible. Ten minutes of breathwork in the morning is a yoga practice. Five minutes of meditation before bed is also a yoga practice. A moment of intention, stillness, and awareness in the middle of a busy day is also a yoga practice. So when students understand this, the conversation around frequency completely changes because instead of asking, "Can I get to the studio four times a week?" They start asking, How can I weave in the practices of yoga into the complexity of my daily life?" And this is a much richer question, and it tends to lead to a much more sustainable relationship with the practice. I always encourage my students who love the physical practice to also explore what pranayama and meditation can offer them. And what I often hear back is that those practices create shifts that the asana practice alone was not creating. Attention to nervous system fluctuations, in particular, responds beautifully to breathwork and meditation in ways that even a very consistent asana practice doesn't always accomplish. all right, let's get to the actual practical answer Because I know that's what you want the answer to. If a student is practicing only yoga and nothing else, then two to four sessions per week of asana is a reasonable range for most people with the understanding that those sessions should vary in intensity and focus. Not every class should be a vigorous vinyasa. Not every class should be deep stretching. Not every class should be still and restorative You should stress that variety within the yoga practice itself matters as well. But more importantly, a student who is also strength training two to three times a week, doing some form of aerobic movement and including breathwork or meditation in their daily routine is going to have a very different relationship with their asana practice than a student who is only doing yoga. A student that is well-rounded in their movement diet can handle more yoga, will recover better, and is less likely to develop the overuse patterns and repetitive stress injuries that come from doing the same kind of movement all the time. The students who are most at risk are the ones who are doing a lot of yoga and nothing else when that yoga is primarily flexibility focused. These are the students who develop hamstring tendinopathy, hip labral irritation, shoulder problems from too much passive stretching without strengthening, and other overuse injuries that build over months and years. As a teacher, one of the most useful things you can do is gently open up this conversation with all of your students, not to deter them from coming to your classes, but to help them understand that their yoga practice is most powerful when it's part of a bigger movement picture. When you frame it this way, it actually positions yoga as something more intelligent and intentional, and students learn to respect the various ways that they can incorporate yoga into their lives, which as we know, is much, much different than any other movement modality. What I want you to take away from this episode is that the answer to how often students should practice yoga is really an answer about how they're living in their bodies overall. All yoga practices are valuable, the asana practice, the breathwork and meditation, and all of these practices work best when the body is also being challenged in other ways, being loaded, being cardiovascularly stimulated, being given time to rest and offering variety. If a student comes to you asking this question, I hope this episode helps to give you a more complete and honest answer to offer them, an answer that honors the full value of yoga while also being real about what our bodies need to thrive for the long term If this episode is making you think more deeply about how to support students who come to you with questions, injuries, or concerns that might have developed from a practice that wasn't quite balanced enough, that's exactly the work we do inside the Teaching Students with Injuries mentorship. We go deep into anatomy, pain science, injuries, the nervous system, and how to build a teaching practice that meets your students where they are. You can learn more at the link in the show notes, and if you wanna have a conversation about whether it's the right fit for you right now, Book a strategy call with me. That link is also in the show notes. As always, thank you so much for being here and being part of the conversation. All right, bye