Practising at home without a studio

Everything on this site assumes you are practising somewhere that was designed for something else — a kitchen, a bedroom, the space between a sofa and a coffee table. That is not a compromise we are apologising for; it is the actual situation for essentially everybody taking a class on a video call, including the teacher.

So here is the practical version: what the space needs to be, what to do about the specific ways a home gets in the way, and what you can safely ignore.

The space

For standing work you need about a bath towel's worth of floor — roughly four feet by two — plus enough room to put your arms out sideways without hitting anything. That is less than a yoga mat for the feet and rather more than a mat for the arms, which catches people out: the thing that actually constrains a Warrior II in a living room is a lamp at elbow height, not the floor.

Walk the space once with your arms out and turn in a slow circle. Whatever you hit, move it before the class rather than during it.

The floor

This is the one that matters for safety and it has three cases.

• Carpet or a mat: ideal. Short-pile carpet is genuinely good for standing work — better than a hard floor, because it grips.
• Bare wood, tile or laminate: fine barefoot, dangerous in socks. If you would rather keep socks on, get grip socks.
• A rug on a hard floor: the bad one. A rug that slides under a bent front knee is exactly how people get hurt, and it slides precisely when you load it. Either put a non-slip pad under it or stand beside it instead.

If the floor slopes — and old houses often do by more than you would guess — stand so the slope runs side to side rather than front to back, and keep the same orientation each time so you are not relearning it.

The wall

You need one you can actually reach, with nothing hanging on the part you might put a hand on. A door that could swing open is not a wall. A bookcase is not a wall. A radiator is not a wall.

The useful arrangement is to stand an arm's length from one, side-on, so a fingertip reaches it without leaning. That way it is available continuously rather than something you lunge for.

The chair

A dining chair. Not an office chair, which rolls; not a folding chair, which folds; not a stool, which has nothing to hold. If your only chair is light, put its back against a wall.

In this practice the chair is in use for every pose by everybody, including the teacher, so it wants to be within reach rather than in the corner.

Where to put the laptop

Worth getting right once and then never thinking about again.

1. On the floor or a low stool, not a table. A camera at table height sees your head and shoulders. A camera at knee height sees your feet, your knees and your stance, which is the part a standing teacher needs.
2. Six to eight feet away, side-on to you. Side-on matters more than people expect: most of the useful corrections in standing work are about what the knee and the hip are doing from the side, and a front-on view hides all of it.
3. Light in front of you, not behind. A window behind you turns you into a silhouette. If the only light is a window, face it.
4. Check what else is in frame. The room behind you is on thirteen other people's screens for an hour. Most people end up pointing the camera at a blank wall, which solves it entirely.

If you cannot get the whole of yourself in frame, show the legs rather than the head. We can teach a standing class from a view of somebody's feet. We cannot teach one from a view of their face.

The specific annoyances

A ceiling too low for arms overhead

Common in basements and older upstairs rooms. Every pose on this site that has the arms overhead works with the arms at the chest or out to the sides instead, and no, you are not missing anything important. Say so at the start and the instruction will be given both ways.

A cat, a dog, or a small person

The cat will sit on the mat. This is universal and there is no solution. What there is: a closed door for the balances specifically, because a cat moving across your field of view while you are on one leg is a genuine hazard rather than a joke.

Being overheard

A class with your camera off and your microphone muted is a completely normal way to attend and nobody will ask about it. You will get the same class, described in the same detail.

No time at a fixed hour

The honest answer is that live classes at fixed times do not suit everybody and nothing we do fixes that. Nine slots in Eastern Time is not many. If none of them work, the nine pose guides are free, they contain the substance of what we teach, and you can use them at two in the morning.

Making it happen at all

The space and the camera are the easy part. The harder part is that a home practice has no commute, no receptionist and nobody noticing you did not come, which means it needs something else to hold it in place.

A fixed slot beats a good intention. This is most of the argument for a live class at a published time, and it is a real argument rather than a sales one: a thing that happens at 7am on Monday happens, and a thing you will fit in when you can mostly does not. If classes do not suit you, pick a fixed time anyway and attach it to something that already occurs — after the first coffee, before the shower, while something is in the oven.

Leave it set up if you can. The single biggest friction in home practice is the two minutes of moving furniture, and the way to beat it is to need less moving. A corner where the chair already lives and the mat is already unrolled gets used far more than a tidier arrangement that has to be built each time.

Shorter and more often wins. Ten minutes four times a week does considerably more for standing work than forty minutes once, because the sense-and-correct loop that balance runs on cares about repetitions rather than duration. This is genuinely different from how strength work behaves and it catches people out.

Keep a very low bar for a bad day. Standing Still for one minute counts. Tree against the kitchen counter while the kettle boils counts. The value of a minimum that small is that it is almost impossible to fail at, and a streak you have not broken is a great deal easier to continue than one you have.

Practising when nobody is watching

One genuine downside of home practice, stated honestly: there is nobody to notice that your front knee has collapsed inward, and you will not feel it. Everybody develops habits in their own practice and the habits are invisible from inside.

Two cheap corrections. Use a mirror or a phone occasionally — not to look at how you appear, but to check one specific thing you cannot feel: where the front knee is over the foot, whether the hips are level in Warrior III. Thirty seconds of video answers questions that months of practising cannot. And change the room sometimes. A different floor, a different direction, a different light removes the environmental cues you have quietly started relying on, and what is left is what you have actually learned.

What to ignore

Things that get sold to people setting up a home practice and do not earn their place:

• Yoga clothing. Anything you can move in. Nobody can see what you are wearing on a 300-pixel tile anyway.
• A strap, a bolster, a wheel, a wedge, a block set. We use none of them. Two stacks of books do everything blocks do for the folds.
• A good mat. For standing work on carpet, no mat at all is fine. On a hard floor, the cheapest grippy mat is as good as the expensive one.
• A dedicated room. A corner of an existing one that you can clear in two minutes beats a perfect room you have to go upstairs to.

There are no affiliate links anywhere on this site, so there is nothing in any of that for us. The whole list of what we think you need is: a wall, a chair, bare feet and a floor that does not slide.