WHEN IN DOUBT USE A PROP

PROPS ARE GREAT FOR ACHIEVING PROPER ALIGNMENT AND NOT THROWING YOUR BODY OUT OF WHACK

On the path to accessible and uncomplicated yoga for all, there are some underutilized and unsung heroes… PROPS.

Props are the key to making your teaching more available to a greater number of students.

Let’s take a look at how we can use yoga props as a gateway to a successful asana experience for you and your students.

Props are especially useful for those students that are more abundant, older, or less flexible. Props can make the difference between having a positive experience in a yoga class or a frustrating one. As teachers and students, we need to reframe the way we look at props and how we use them in our classes.

If we try to understand yoga thoroughly, we will find that it does not only contribute towards physical fitness, it also provides peace of mind and spirit. It puts us in a state where we are more inclined towards peace rather than juggling between the worries of the world. It helps in letting go of all the toxic negativity that is caged inside us and it makes room for self-awareness.

Props have been invented to assist students of all levels to help them attain the posture and stability they wouldn’t otherwise. These props include chairs, blocks, blankets straps, bolsters, sandbags, benches and walls.

These can be used by people of all ages, even if you have a certain health condition, these props will help you perform certain asana you wouldn’t be able to otherwise. Using these props entails a lot of health benefits:

• They can help recovering from an injury.
• They help ease the mind by removing fatigue from the body.
• They can help us maintain balance and stability.

Props teach your body muscle how to be properly aligned:

Yoga is all about posing correctly. It helps you align your body properly and how to be in the perfect posture. You obviously can’t make a perfect pose in the first go. It is all about patience, and how you slowly make your body flexible and comfortable enough to do a certain yoga pose with perfection. The goal of yoga is not to teach you perfection, but to help you stretch out your muscles and align them properly.

Practice makes challenging poses easier:

When we go to our first yoga class, we get intimated by all those advanced students posing properly and being able to flex their bodies. What we often fail to understand that these students have given time to attain the posture and flexibility they have today. They must have used to many yoga props, and so can we as a first time until we master each pose.

Props can help modify:

Not only do props serve as an aiding tool to beginners, they can also be used to intensify a pose and make it more advanced. For example, you can put a block between your legs and stretch to intensify it.