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Originally Posted by Melahin
Yoga can only feel bad if you are doing it wrong. My practice for personal reasons are quite irregular, yet throughout my last two practices I consistently get better throughout the practice no matter how bad I felt at the start, I get more energized, I feel better and so on... not worn out as I did with my "old" practice. If your body is in a bad place you should start out more gentle, and move from there. Maybe Tai Chi is a better place to start. Maybe doing more all-fours if the (lower) back is sore and so on. It feels bad because we are impatient with where we are, and pushes too hard to get to a place where it feels better, but that never works... it only make the journey to feeling good take longer.
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Oh sure, I don't deny that you can get better even if you aren't consistent, it's just that it takes longer to get there. And a person can only do what they're body is capable of. If your tendons are too tight, you're not going to be able to touch your toes and your body positioning might be awful, but if that's all you can do, that's all you can do. Wouldn't you agree that the more regularly you do it, the faster you can progress and the more centred and balanced your positions will be? Which in turn means your focus can be less on 'how' you're doing the position so much as you can put your attention more fully on the good way you're feeling your body work.
When I first got really consistent about two months ago, I really noticed how I felt like I could feel my tissue in my arms and such kind of 'uncrinkling' like a dried chamois does as I would stretch it out. Over the next half hour or so, continual motion meant that by the time I was done, the weird crinkly feeling was gone. At the same time by the point where I was finishing up, the awful grinding in my back had let go and I felt good. Now with two months of 3x per week plus the Essentrics, and I'm feeling great from start to finish most days. I'm 62 by the way so at this age, everything tightens up a lot quicker and that becomes part of the challenge, keeping the joints and tissue lubricated for better efficiency.
My body is totally off balance with shoulders and hips at different heights, one leg is longer than the other, and my spine looks like the 's' in the word spine, so yeah, I was probably doing it 'all wrong in the beginning', but eventually I started loosening up enough so that even I was more balanced.
I think yoga is a marvellous place for anyone to start if they just go as far as they are able and no further in the bends and such or actually, even better if a person were to start out with a practise called Essentrics which is a program by a lady who trained as a classical ballet dancer. Its more a program of systematic stretching and in ways that we don't normally move our bodies so that joints that get compacted over time are opened up.
I'm trying to turn my daughter on to that because she doesn't like yoga much and I think that would maybe accomplish the same thing for her.