Fact or Fiction: Yoga in a Chair is Easier?

Fiction!

While it is more accessible, chair yoga can be just as challenging as yoga on a mat.

Most yoga students are hesitant to use a chair or prop, thinking that using them makes it easy or that it’s just the “modified version,” but this mindset is misguided.

Using a chair in yoga can make certain parts of a pose easier, true. In Tree Pose (Vrksasana), for example, a chair can help stabilize you and reduce the pose’s balance requirements. However, using a chair can allow you can stay longer in and emphasize different aspects of the pose. For example, if you spend all of your time in a pose fearful of falling over, you aren’t concentrating on other aspects like engaging your core, externally rotating your thigh, lengthening your spine, or bringing attention to your breath.

The chair actually enables more and different work on the body and with the breath.

Who can do chair yoga?

One benefit of chair yoga is that it can be more accessible than yoga on a mat. People with mobility issues, who have had recent surgeries (like knee replacement), or who have balance challenges are perfect candidates for trying chair yoga. The chair provides alternatives to poses to make them accessible to all levels, ages, and abilities.

But, contrary to popular belief, young, able-bodied, and athletic people can also benefit from doing yoga in a chair, which provides additional opportunities for flexibility, strength, and getting deeper into poses. A chair can help you hold poses longer, focus on weaker aspects of your practice, and improve alignment.

What are good poses to do in the chair?

Mountain Pose with a chair

It depends on why you’re using it. A chair is a prop for deepening your own practice and should be viewed accordingly.

If you have had a recent surgery or injury, you should use a chair to perform poses that allow you to be gentle with or avoid the recovering area. For example, after a knee replacement surgery, the chair allows you do yoga without being on hands and knees and lets you do poses without all your body weight. After you have been cleared to exercise or once you have recovered, chair yoga helps you slowly improve strength and flexibility in that area.

For people who are skeptical, I suggest using the chair for resistance. For example, try Mountain Pose (Tadasana) with a chair in front of you. With the back of the chair in front of your hips, press your hands into the back of the chair. The chair’s resistance activates your back, shoulders, and upper arms, making the pose more challenging.

What kind of chair should you use?

Any stable chair will do, but simple wooden dining chairs or folding metal chairs are the most accessible. Yoga chairs don’t have a back, which allows you to do more poses with your legs through the chair, but there are many ways to use a chair with a back, so a yoga-specific chair isn’t necessary.

Yoga chair

I used to offer chair options during my classes and realized that no one ever took me up on the opportunity, despite the benefits they might have received from using it. Chairs are often looked at as taking the easy route in yoga, and most people think it isn’t for them. Once I started creating classes that included them (not just as an option), people realized how challenging chair yoga could be and were more open to using them.

Yoga in a chair is not easy, but it is accessible, and I recommend that everyone try it to see how their practices might be transformed for the better.