Any long-term practitioner can tell you about the ups and downs of their yoga practice. Often they made lots of quick gains or experienced rapid change in their first few years of practice. But then the pace of change slowed down. Maybe some months, or even a couple of years went by when it felt like nothing was really changing. They seemed to be struggling with the same postures day in and day out, until one day, suddenly the posture they’d been wrestling with for years happened for the first time. What changed? In this article, we’ll explore the answer to that question. Why does change sometimes happen after a long plateau in yoga? Read on to explore some of the reasons this might happen.
This article was prompted by a question that I received from a student. They asked:
“Why does it seem like the practice gets harder (and sometimes we even “lose progress”) right before we see a breakthrough or big improvement in the practice? It seems like the growth moments are always preceded by really frustrating slides backward.”
This student asks a good question. There’s both a physiological and a philosophical answer to this question of why change often seems to follow a plateau in yoga. Since yoganatomy.com is about yoga and anatomy, we’ll explore both.
Let’s start with the physiological answer.
The physiological part
Current sports science research describes a particular way that change happens when we challenge our body. Research indicates that in order to create change we have to repeatedly challenge our system within a reasonable range that doesn’t result in injury or ask us to do more than we can recover from. And then it takes our body some recovery time to integrate the new level of effort that we challenged our body to do. What’s interesting is that the change actually happens during the recovery phase of our training, not during the phase where we’re making the harder effort. That’s true whether we’re taxing our muscles to lift more weight or stressing our cardio system trying to run faster. That process isn’t linear. It’s three steps forward, and then one step back.
A plateau in yoga might be integration
Research that studied training blocks for sports like cycling or running that train particular aspects of the sport, like short sprints up a hill for example, has documented that the changes to our physiology don’t happen for the most part during the initial challenges to our body. They happen after we’ve repeated those challenges for some period of time and then allowed our body to rest and recover. So, what you imagine to be a plateau in yoga, may in fact be the span of time when your body is integrating the new activity.
Additionally, sometimes the answer is that what we experience as a plateau in yoga is actually just very slow change. We have to take into account that the body and context that we’re practicing with are different every day. If we’re tired from a busy workweek and feeling less strong in our arm balances because of it, for example, it doesn’t mean that we’re going backward in strength. To really assess whether we’re getting stronger in a particular pose or movement, we need to look at change over some months (or in the case of some poses, years) to be able to average out the daily ups and downs and see the arc of change.
The philosophical part
While the physiological changes that we experience when we do new physical activities are part of the answer to the question of progress in yoga, this is yoga, so of course, physiology isn’t the whole answer. So now let’s explore the philosophical side of the answer to this question.
One of my favorite ways to teach is to answer student questions with another question. This gets them thinking a little bit deeper, and sometimes it points them in the direction of realizing they already knew the answer to their own question. So let’s start with a few questions. Several questions live underneath the question the student posed in their email.
What does a plateau in yoga mean?
These are some questions that come to my mind when I consider the student’s question about why a breakthrough often happens after a plateau in yoga:
What does it mean to “progress” in yoga?
Do we need to progress at all?
What does it mean to hit a plateau in yoga?
Why do we have an assumption that progress is linear?
Why do we have an assumption that progress in yoga is doing deeper or more challenging postures?
When we age and inevitably have to start giving some postures back, are we not still progressing in the sense of learning and growing in our yoga practice?
What constitutes a big breakthrough or a big improvement in the practice? Is it only doing a more complex posture or going more deeply into a posture?
What would happen if you stayed in what you see as a plateau in yoga and you didn’t regularly experience physical change? Would you get bored with yoga? Would you think it was the fault of the style or teacher and then seek out a different style or a different teacher?
Many if not most of these questions may not have an answer or may have many answers, all of which are true.
Is yoga only about progress in postures?
In contemporary postural yoga in the West, there’s often a strong emphasis on the health and wellness benefits, particularly using yoga to increase flexibility, strength, balance, and other body-related achievements. But that definitely isn’t all that yoga is, or even necessarily what’s central to the experience of yoga, particularly for longer-term practitioners.
Progress in yoga is non-linear
Because we are using our body as our object of concentration, we’re tracking our physical experience. But that doesn’t mean there is a right way for anyone’s yoga practice to unfold. Sometimes when we think we’re on a plateau in yoga, change is happening, but in a non-linear way. Every day is different. Some days your energy is up. Other days maybe you’re tired or distracted. Taking the variability into account means that progress in yoga is rarely a straight line.
Look for the subtler aspects of yoga practice
What can also be true is that sometimes we’re just looking for something shiny rather than looking more closely at the level of details evolving all around us. If we have an idea that progress in yoga means doing more complicated postures or always going deeper in a pose, then whenever we don’t have that experience we might think we’re not progressing. But yoga is more than postures of course. Particularly as we age, what keeps us interested in our yoga practice may be different. We may find we need to direct our focus more onto our breath or our concentration to notice the subtle changes from day to day in our practice.
Relax your grip
Additionally, sometimes our mental outlook can be related to how change occurs in our practice. If we’re pushing too hard, or holding too tightly to a desired result, we can sometimes get in our own way. Softening our approach and relaxing our grip on our desired results can sometimes open the door to unexpected observations when we think we’re on a plateau in yoga.
Try a new approach
Finally, sometimes what’s missing is a piece of technique or a different approach. In that case, sometimes what happens is that we stop looking for a change for a while, so we think it still isn’t possible. Then one day, something (a teacher, a workshop, etc.) convinces us to try something a little bit different and we find that something we thought wasn’t possible was possible after all.
An example of this that I see with students in my workshops is reaching the hand to the floor in revolved side angle. When students first start practicing, everything may not be open enough to get the torso and shoulder close enough to their thigh for their hand to reach the floor. So, I’ll see students make a modification that makes sense for that moment, like reaching their hand to a block instead of the floor for example. But if the block becomes a habit, and they never take the block away and just look to see if their hand is getting closer to the floor, then of course they’ll never know that they’ve progressed in that way until someone suggests they try the pose without the block and see what happens.
Conclusion
There are many reasons that we might experience a plateau in yoga. Letting go of having a specific result in practice each day, focusing on other aspects of practice like the breath, and considering a new approach to a posture all have the potential to create new insights. Additionally, sometimes change is happening in our practice. It’s just slower than we can observe or our body is still integrating the new information.