As a beginner, you might decide to start a home yoga practice for any number of reasons. Perhaps your schedule doesn’t sync up with the local studio’s. Or maybe you like learning in a more privatized environment. Or--maybe you don’t even have a local studio in the first place. Online learning can be a great alternative for many people to begin and develop a fulfilling home yoga practice, but it can be difficult to know where and how to begin. 

Before the days of widespread online yoga, we used to have to imitate pictures from yoga books or practice from a dvd if we wanted to learn how to do yoga at home. Nowadays, we have an entire encyclopaedia of knowledge at our fingertips which is wonderful, but can potentially become overwhelming when we’re trying to consider basic things, like, What online class do I start with? Or, How do I pick the right teacher and style for me? Or how about something even more basic like, What even is this yoga thing anyway? 

As someone who practices yoga at home everyday and who has been navigating the spread of online yoga options for the past several years, I’m happy to report that is is possible to have a fulfilling yoga practice at home--to learn new things, connect with my teachers and enjoy myself all at the same time.

I designed this guide to shed some light on the mysterious “how” of beginning a home yoga practice. My hope is that this can serve as a companion guide for you as you learn to navigate the online realm of yoga. Let’s begin! 

What Are Your Interests? 

Let’s start with this basic question: What’s your goal? Put another way: What are you interested in?

There is an enormous collection of data that exists online and by identifying our goal, or interest, we can identify a place to tap into it. Are you interested in strength training? Anatomy? Relaxation? Meditation? Yoga philosophy? Flexibility? Peace and happiness? ( ← That’s my jam.) It may be all of these things or none. The important thing is to discover what you’re interested in. 

The great thing about the internet is that there are so many options. The bad thing about the internet is that…(I’ll let you fill in the blank.) 

It can be challenging to sift through what seems like clutter until we find content that we genuinely connect with. And this is why discovering our interests is so important--because our interests will be our guiding star through the process of discovery. 

Finding Our Teachers

In this discovery process, we are trying to find a teacher or teachers that we are excited about studying with. Whether they post yoga practice videos on YouTube, write blog posts on their website, create programs on paid platforms, or live stream classes on social media, it is important that we understand our teacher’s teachings by verifying facts in our own experience. A true teacher has that indescribable quality that makes someone a friend--they should be someone you want to learn from. 

It is also important for our teachers to be available in some way to answer our questions should they arise. We should be able to clarify with them our understanding of the practice, whether that’s by engaging in comments with them on social media, attending a webinar or live workshop, signing up for a retreat, or even asking for private instruction. Connecting with a teacher can often help clear up confusion as it arises (and it will arise), and put us in contact with other like-minded members of the community (if that’s our thing). 

So where, exactly, are all of these online teachers? Well, you’re reading the article of one of them (check out my About page or Free Videos Page to learn more). And that’s basically the answer to that question: Yoga teachers are scattered across various online platforms and are teaching in a variety of ways, including free and paid yoga practice videos, educational blog posts, live streamed events, newsletters, webinars, books (remember those?) and more. 

The search begins by investigating the content on several different platforms. This is where our goal, or interest, comes into play. It will help us refine our searches in order to find the right fit, so to speak, so that we are comfortable with our teachers and the platforms we use to learn on. 

Selecting Platforms

There are many factors that determine what platforms are best suited for our practice, including whether the platform is free or paid, if the search functionalities of the platform match our needs, if we’re interested in the style of classes offered, etc. 

A home practice often means scanning platforms for different teachers, practices and answers to questions. Our interests will usually help us weed through to what’s valuable, but it’s also helpful to understand how some of these platforms are structured and what they bring to the table. Understanding this can help us find new teachers, interact with them and work through confusion in our practice. 

Here is a brief breakdown of what some of these platforms have to offer: 

• Free Platforms

  • YouTube: The biggest selection of free yoga classes of all levels, styles and lengths, with many teachers adding new classes weekly. Teachers often customize their channel by categorizing their classes in easy-to-find playlists, and they are usually pretty clear about where else you can find them (social media, website, etc.). You can start with a simple search (your goal, or interest, should help generate some possible search ideas) and bounce to a couple of different spots in the video to see how and what the teacher is teaching. (Also bear in mind that teachers change over time, so it can be good to review several videos filmed in different years.) I tend to collect videos I’ve really enjoyed into my own playlist that I call Great YouTube Yoga, which is something I’m happy to share with you if you find it useful (and please let me know if there’s something I should add!). If your teacher wants to make it super user friendly for you to practice with them, they might have their YouTube videos on their website with special search functions, like ours, or build their own app to house their videos. Because YouTube allows anyone to post videos, it may require some diligence to find a teacher that you genuinely understand and are excited about. In these instances, our interest can be a great guide, and we can take steps to learn more about a teacher before practicing their class, such as browse their website, find them on social media or sign up for their newsletter (if they have one). 

  • Google: Google is a great resource to explore yoga teachers’ websites and discover online yoga publications. This is where I like to find answers to specific questions (like shoulder anatomy in the arm overhead position; or best yoga mat for slippery hands). Most articles I find are free and introduce me to platforms that contain huge collections of information about all kinds of different aspects of the yoga practice, including: anatomy and physiology, pose breakdowns and modifications, yoga history and philosophy, pose benefits, injuries and recovery (although let’s be responsible about this and consult physicians when it’s wise to do so), information on different yoga styles, etc. etc. etc.

    • Here’s a few yoga platforms that have helped me tremendously over the past several years: 

      • Yoga International 

      • Yoga Journal

      • Elephant Journal

  • Social Media: Many teachers share their teachings and interact with their community on social media. You can connect with your teachers across all platforms they participate in to hear first when they upload a new class, dialogue video, blog post, etc. Teachers often use social media to introduce you to the human behind the teaching, give you behind the scenes glimpses into their practice and/or business, and ask for your input for what you want to learn next. You can find new teachers using the platform’s search function (be it with keywords, hashtags, etc.), and at some point, each platform will learn your behavior and suggest new teachers to you.   

• Paid Platforms

  • Paid platforms can be a great alternative or supplement to free online instruction. They often feature experts in the field and specialize in different areas in order to justify the fee. For example, you might find a handstand bundle on a paid platform, designed and filmed by an expert inversion teacher as a series of 5 classes. Other online platforms offer a more Netflix-like assortment of classes, focused in different areas and taught by expert teachers. Platforms offer monthly membership pricing, a la carte pricing, or both. 

  • Here’s a few paid platforms to get you started: 

    • Yoga Glo, YogaVibes, CodyApp, Gaia, Yoga International, Udemy, OmStars, Yogi Approved, MindBodyGreen, DoYouYoga, and more

Tying It All Together

As we evolve digitally, we will likely continue to have better free education and more access to it, which means this is an exciting time to start practicing at home. We are no longer dependant on whoever is teaching 4 miles from our house because now our house has access to the world. Whether you’re interested in getting sweaty and active, or to contemplate the question “Who am I?” (which is at the heart of the yoga practice), there are experts sharing the practice online and reaching audiences all over the world.

In a nutshell, the process for how to start yoga at home for beginners is to: 

1. Determine what you’re interested in learning

2. Search for those interests it in a few platforms

3. Look for teachers you want to learn from

4. Practice when you want to practice 

There are some logistical things to figure out, such as your physical practice space at home and whatever gear you want to feel comfortable while practicing (such as clothing, yoga mats, yoga props, meditation cushions, beautifying objects like candles, etc.). 

Then there are the other factors, such as interruptions from family members or breaking for chores, etc. To this I say: We are each destined to have a unique practice and there are no hard and fast rules for how our practice should be. My rule of thumb is to follow my interests when I can. Sometimes that means sweating on a mat for an hour,  other times it’s listening to a talk from one of my teachers while making a meal, and still other times it’s rolling out my mat for a practice chopped up by turning over the laundry and taking phone calls. A home yoga practice can customize itself into all the little nooks and crannies in my life, and this is probably why I love it so much. 

I find that the technicalities of how long I should practice, how often, what type of class, etc. gets decided naturally from a place of interest, and that it’s possible to learn new things, connect with my teachers and enjoy myself all at the same time. 

Over to you: What are your other questions regarding starting a home yoga practice? Or, if you already practice at home, what other tips would you recommend other than what I have here? Leave a reply in the comments to add to the conversation. 

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