Half of our students started after forty. What changes in a body that comes to yoga later, what does not, and how the classes are built around it.
When I opened Sora I expected most students to be in their twenties. Four years later, half of them started yoga after forty, and some after sixty. They taught me more about teaching than any training did.
What changes
Recovery takes longer, balance needs more attention, and joints like to be warmed up before they are asked for range. None of that is a reason not to practise. It is a reason to practise in a certain way.
What does not change
Strength still builds, at any age. Flexibility still improves, more slowly. And the breath still does what it always does: a long exhale calms you at seventy exactly as it does at twenty.
Restore and Yin on a Thursday evening. Props are not a beginner's crutch, they are how you stay longer.
How the classes are built
Every class starts lying down, so nobody begins on cold joints
Balance poses always have a wall or a chair within reach
Props are laid out before you arrive, so using them is the default
Inés gives two versions of every hard shape and never says which is the easy one
Nobody in the room is behind. They just started at a different time.
Inés
Starting now?
Foundations is an eight-week course for complete beginners in a group of eight. The next one starts on 12 January.
Written by
Inés Varela
Inés has taught for fifteen years, first in Lisbon and now in her eight-mat studio in Ruzafa. She writes the journal between the morning and evening classes.
