Yoga Alignment: Why Some Yoga Poses Feel Impossible

Overview 

Have you ever struggled with a yoga pose and wondered, Why can’t I do this when others can? You’re not alone. Many people assume that flexibility and strength are the only factors in yoga poses. The truth is your unique bone structure plays a huge role in what poses feel accessible. Or impossible!

In this episode, I share my personal experience struggling with Wheel Pose. AKA Urdhva Dhanurasana. And what I learned about skeletal variation. The reason why some poses will never feel right, no matter how hard you try. If you’ve ever felt frustrated by a pose that doesn’t seem to work for your body. This episode will help you understand why—and why that’s completely okay.

Key Topics Covered:

1.     Why Some Yoga Poses Feel Impossible

• How skeletal structure, not effort, determines flexibility and mobility.
• Why yoga alignment is not universal.

2.     The Myth of "Perfect" Yoga Alignment

• Why traditional yoga cues don’t work for every body type.
• The difference between skeletal compression vs. muscular limitation. Which explains why some poses are impossible.

3.     Strength vs. Structure: Wheel Pose vs. Crow Pose

• What's stopping you? Is it physical or mental?
• Why strength wasn’t the issue. Instead my bone structure was.
• How I finally got into Wheel Pose, but why it felt awful.
• Wheel pose requirements.

4.     Ahimsa & Honouring Your Body’s Limits

• Why forcing a pose can lead to injury and chronic pain.
• How teachers can empower students with variations instead of rigid alignment cues.

5.     What Yoga Teachers Need to Know About Anatomy

• Why most teacher training programs don’t teach skeletal variation.
• The importance of learning how to adapt poses for different bodies. To make yoga more accessible and inclusive.

Episode Summary

Not all yoga poses are meant for every body. That’s okay! In this episode, I share how understanding skeletal variation completely changed my approach to yoga. Both as a student and a teacher.

I explain why some poses will never feel right for you. The harm of forcing “perfect” alignment. Why listening to your body is the most important yoga practice. Whether you’re a yoga student frustrated by certain poses. Or a teacher looking to make your classes more inclusive. This episode will give you a fresh perspective on how to honour your body’s unique structure.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Trailer
• 0:15 Intro
• 1:12 Have you ever struggled with a yoga pose
• 1:36 We are all different
• 3:25 Wheel Pose AKA Urdhva Dhanurasana
• 4:10 Spinal Extension
• 6:55 Human Variation
• 8:02 Ahimsa
• 9:16 Yoga Poses are Like Penicillin
• 10:33 Empowering Your Students When Teaching

Transcript

We’re just different. This didn’t really occur to me at the start of my yoga journey Yoga poses are like penicillin. One may be medicine for you, but poison for another student.

Welcome to the Inner Fire of Yoga, a podcast about transformation, resilience, and the power of yoga beyond the mat. I'm Liz Albanis, Senior Yoga Teacher and Yoga Therapist in Training. This podcast was born in 2024, after I survived my second fire. Fire has been a recurring theme in my life, not just in the literal sense, but as a metaphor. It has asked me to burn away what no longer serves me, to transform and to rise stronger each time. This podcast is about that fire, the one that challenges us, but also fuels us to grow.

Have you ever struggled with a certain yoga pose? Even thought to yourself, I don't have any injuries. I'm young. Why is it so easy for the person next to me to just get into the yoga pose? And I can't, I've tried everything. If this has happened to you, it's normal because we are all so different. You look around you and you say that unless you've got an identical twin, No one looks exactly like you, and it's the same for us inside.

Our bones are different. Not just in relation to their size. Like for instance, some people have long legs and a short torso. Or vice versa. It's not just the size, the length. It's also the orientation of how that bone grows. the torsion, the amount of twist. Some people have a great amount of range through their shoulders.

And as a result, they could make a potential Olympic grade swimmer with butterfly, but they also will be prone to shoulder dislocation more, and then there's people who make. Wonderful Olympic weightlifters because they can squat so deep because they've got shallow hip sockets. But they're also prone to hip dysplasia.

That's the drawback. So no one body is better than the other. We're just different. This didn't really occur to me at the start of my yoga journey. Even though I'd had horses for years, most horsey people, especially if they breed horses like I did and compete on them, learn a bit about equine conformation.

They study equine anatomy and they see that certain horses are going to be sounder. They're not going to go lame because they've got better conformation or some horses are going to make  better show jumpers than others. Some horses move better and will make a better show horse or dressage horse because of the way their bones are.

We are the same as people. So when it came to vinyasa yoga, there was a pose called wheel. Now, if you're not familiar with this pose, wheel pose, Sanskrit, Urdhva Dhanurasana, have a look at it. It'll make more sense. So wheel pose involves a lot of shoulder forward flexion. Now, shoulder forward flexion is when you raise your arms up, but if you're just using your shoulder to do this, it means your upper traps aren't involved.

Upper traps is that little meaty part at your neck that helps elevate your scapula, lift your shoulder blades. So if you don't have full range with your shoulders, wheel pose could be impossible. The other thing that's involved with wheel pose is a lot of extension through the spine, a lot of back bent.

Now people's spines can be very different, not just with how many vertebrae they have, because spines are different as well. So when the spinous processes are closer to each other and you extend through the spine, like in cobra pose, upward dog bridge pose, as well as camel pose and Urdhva Dhanurasana wheel.

If they're closer together, they kiss. So, they bump each other. If they're further apart, they're not going to hit each other as quickly. So, this pose involves a lot of extension, but it's different to camel in that you also need shoulder forward flexion. Camel, you don't. And then you also need hip extension.

So hip extension is, in other words, bringing your leg behind you without arching your back. if you're just isolating into the hip. As we get older, most of the time we lose spinal extension and hip extension. Most of the time, not for everyone. So, this pose has got a lot going on for it. And I thought to myself, why can't I get into it?

And I asked the teacher and she said to me, your shoulders are not strong enough. That's why you're struggling to get into it. But the girl next to me, she was light, but she said to me, Oh, I've got such weak shoulders. She just would float up into it. Why, you might say? Because she had a lot of range through her shoulders.

And a lot of range through her spine and hips. And I thought, well, that's interesting. Well, why can't she just get into it if she's not strong? Then I went home and I asked my husband. He's strong in the shoulders, goes to the gym. I said, can you do this pose? He couldn't get into it either. But he's like me.

He wouldn't have made an Olympic grade swimmer with butterfly because his shoulder range isn't great. He's built for other things like marathon running. And then I said to the teacher, well, my husband couldn't get into it. And she just went, oh, he's not trying hard enough. And I thought, gee, there must be something wrong with me because that was what the teachers said.

And it made me feel like there was something wrong with me. I wasn't trying hard enough, but it was different to my experience with crow pose, Bakasana. This pose was almost impossible for me. And then I trained with Jo Phee, who is the senior assistant to Paul Grilley, the yogi who made yin yoga known and spread its benefits.

He has also spread the word about human variation, this sort of thing I'm talking about today. And I am so grateful to him and people who've studied with him for teaching me this because it has changed the way I teach now so much for the better. And the course I did with Jo Fee focused on shoulder anatomy.

Now, Jo Fee is an absolute anatomy geek. She knows more than average of what most yoga teachers do. Done so much training, you cannot tell me she doesn't know anatomy. And she taught me about human variation. And luckily, it was shoulders. And that's when I found out, Oh, this is why a wheel is. pretty much impossible for me.

Now, I did eventually get into wheel in lockdown. It was really hard. It only happened twice. I had to have blocks against the wall to make my arms longer and be able to push the blocks for leverage into that wall. And it felt horrible. Why do a yoga pose that feels and causes sharp electrical pain? It's not practicing ahimsa.

But it made me realise, training with Joe, ah, that's why, there's nothing wrong with me. Camel's just a better pose instead. And it's not because I had injuries like I do now with my shoulder. It was just my anatomy. And people might say, but you got into it twice. Yeah, but it felt horrible and I needed blocks and a wall.

And I worked on it and worked on it and worked on it at the same time I worked on Crow. Now Crow didn't feel horrible, it was damn hard to get into. But I didn't have limitations. I just had fear of falling with Crow and lack of strength in my upper body and my core that stopped me from getting in to Crow.

So there were different reasons. Sometimes it's an emotional block, like it was with me, with the fear factor that's stopping you from getting into a pose. But it's also important to think to yourself, what is my intention with this pose? My intention with wheel was I don't feel like enough of a yogi. I don't feel like I should be teaching yoga because I can't do wheel pose.

And a lot of my students can. That doesn't matter. I don't need to be able to do wheel. And this was such a relief when I learnt from Joe, there is nothing wrong with me. Yoga poses are like penicillin. One may be medicine for you, but poison for another student. So just know that there is nothing wrong with you.

Not all yoga poses are going to be suitable, and that's okay. None of them are mandatory. Even shavasana, corpse pose lying on your back, can be poison. I can only practice shavasana lying on my back if I have adequate props, because of the arthritis and the fractures I have in my spine now. That's okay. So, as teachers, It's important to learn enough anatomy and to have compassion and not make your students feel like there's something wrong with them.

I've done this in the past because I didn't know any better. It's important to give your students options and variations to empower them. and learn about skeletal variation and why some poses are not going to come easily or be near impossible or just dangerous. Because if I kept banging into compression in my AC joint in my shoulder, trying to get into wheel, it would damage my shoulders and cause something like bursitis.

So, we've got to honour the body and practice ahimsa, non harming. non injuring towards our body. But as a yoga teacher, know that it's important to empower our students to make decisions and not insist they do a pose a certain way or even just do a pose. They know their body best. They can feel what they're feeling.

They're in the driver's seat. You're not the pilot flying them, I should say. And it's important as students to listen to your body when it whispers so that you don't have to hear it scream out at you in pain. We don't practice yoga for optimum performance. It is not a sport. We practice yoga for optimum health.

If we ignore such signs, it's not going to give us optimum health. It's going to do the exact opposite. So, if you've struggled in a pose like I did with that one, I hope this is a relief to hear it. And if you're a teacher listening to this, I hope that opens your mind a bit if you're not aware of skeletal variation.

But I do encourage you to learn more about it. Most basic 200 and even 500 hour teacher trainings do not teach this sort of thing, unfortunately. Hopefully one day they will. And instead of many teaching you to memorize alignment cues, assuming that we're all the same, as Bernie Clark says, alignment is personal, not universal.

Thank you for joining me on podcast. I hope today's episode has left you feeling inspired and informed and empowered to take meaningful steps towards your wellbeing. If there's a topic you'd like me to cover, or if you'd like to share your story, I'd love to hear from you. Just fill in the form on the podcast page of my website.

Your voice is an important part of this journey. I want this podcast to reflect the conversations that matter most to my listeners. If today's episode resonated with you, please share it with someone who might benefit from these conversations. Don't forget to subscribe, it helps grow this incredible community of resilience and support.

Until next time, take care of yourself and never forget. the power, the possibilities of a regular yoga practice. See you soon.