4 Ways to Get Better at Yoga: Analyze, Align, Track & Refine

Have you ever felt stuck in your practice? You show up to your mat consistently, putting in the effort, but your alignment in certain yoga poses just doesn’t seem to improve. This is a common experience for many yogis. The issue often isn’t a lack of tapas or discipline, but rather a need for a more organized approach to your sadhana. Using a four-step system—analyze, align, track, and refine—you can create an intelligent, more productive path to improving your asanas.

Step 1 — Analyze: Establish an Objective Baseline

The first step for improving your asanas is to create a clear and honest picture of what’s happening in your body. You need to see what you’re actually doing in a pose, not what you think or feel you’re doing. Focus on 1-3 poses at a time. Taking on too much at once is overwhelming and unproductive.

Key Things to Observe in Asanas:

Joint Angles and Alignment: What’s the relationship between your hip, knee, and ankle? How are your shoulders positioned relative to your hips? Is your knee bending in the same direction as your toes? Are you locking out your elbows and knees?Engagement vs Relaxation: Are there muscles that are engaged that can be relaxed? Are you activating all the muscles needed to hold the shape of the pose?Spinal Curves and Alignment: Is your spine rounding in a forward fold or over-arching in a backbend?Weight Distribution: Where is your weight in your feet or hands? Is it equally balanced?Breath Quality: Is your breath constantly slow, deep, smooth and steady, or strained?Balance & Stability: Are you wobbling or using momentum to hold a pose?Recurring Sensations: Note any areas of recurring strain or discomfort.

Big Picture Observations

You can also track the larger objective and subjective progress in your practice. You do not need to track every one of the below suggested metrics, just keep notes on what is most important to you.

Objective Metrics: Hold times, range of motion/depth of stretch (use a visual marker like “fingertips to floor”), hold duration in seconds or breaths, or repetitions of a controlled movement like the Sun Salutations.Subjective Metrics: Perceived ease (1-10 scale), smoothness and quality of breath, pain or discomfort scale (0-10), and your energy level after practice.Consistency: Note your sessions per week and the duration of each.

Tools & Methods:

Short Video Clips: Use your smartphone, laptop webcam, or other device to record yourself from multiple angles—side, front, and three-quarter views. You can prop a smartphone up on a yoga block in a pinch, have someone video you, or use a tripod. You could also take still photos, but with video you can hit record and walk away without fussing with individual photos.Lighting: Make sure the room is bright enough so the photos or video are clear enough to show details. Don’t overdo it, as a very brightly lit room can be distracting.Mirror Checks: Practicing near a mirror offers immediate visual feedback, especially for static poses. Use a large full-length mirror if possible. You can also use a cluster of smaller mirrors if needed. Look at yourself and adjust based on what you see in the mirror. Shift your direction and angle and look again.Teacher Feedback: A skilled teacher can offer insights impossible to see on your own. They can also physically adjust you so you can feel the right alignment in your body.AI Yoga Apps: There are several new AI-powered apps that analyze your poses and give real-time feedback and guidance. These digital tools can identify and correct common mistakes when you practice at home without a teacher. Applications like Yogi can analyze your posture through your phone’s camera, giving real-time alignment cues specific to your body.

Create an “Analysis Snapshot” in a Journal, Notebook, or Spreadsheet

Use a journal, spreadsheet, or yoga app to log your findings, creating a baseline you can return to later to track your progress. Below is a sample of what an entry may contain.

Date:Pose(s):Context: (e.g., Cold, after a warm-up, end of practice)Objective Observations: (e.g., “Front knee is collapsing inward,” “Rounding my low back”)Perceived Difficulty: (Scale of 1-10)Pain Flags: (e.g., “Sharp pinch in left shoulder”)

Step 2 — Align: Apply Corrections and Modifications

Once you’ve analyzed your pose, the next step is applying corrections. Refer to asana guides to learn the correct alignment and compare it to what you are seeing in your poses. Tackle the large misalignments and poor mechanics first, then work your way to fixing more subtle patterns.

Principles for Alignment Work:

Start with the Foundation: Like a house, a pose is built from the ground up. Correct the biggest, most obvious issues first, in the parts of the body connected to the floor. For example, the position of the feet and knees in standing poses.Use progressive corrections: Start with big global adjustments, then move your focus and awareness to regional adjustments, and finally small local adjustments.
Global: adjust stance, foot position, or overall weight shift (e.g., “shift weight into the heels”).
Regional: adjust a joint chain (e.g., “stack the knee over the ankle”).
Local: fine-tune smaller details (e.g., “external rotation of the femur by micro-turning the thigh”).Keep it Simple: Use clear, straightforward alignment cues you can remember.Respect Your Limits: Never force a position that causes pain. Applying corrections based on the principle of Ahimsa, or non-harming.

Pause, breathe, and feel the change after a correction. Try to soak up the physical and energetic feeling of the corrected asana, to create a memory of what it feels like. If you experience persistent pain or uncertainty about alignment, stop and consult an experienced teacher.

For big-picture objective and subjective observations, use this info to craft specific goals and then break these down into a detailed plan of action. You may need to consult with a more experienced practitioner or a yoga teacher to fine-tune and refine your goals and give insights on how to achieve them.

Repeat steps one and two on a regular basis for several weeks before moving to the next step.

Step 3 — Track, Review, Reflect

Review your log every few weeks. Look for patterns, plateaus, regressions, or areas of progress. Celebrate all improvements, no matter how small. Reflect on where you have not seen any gains, and decide if more patience or effort is needed to progress. Decide whether you want to continue your current plan, refine your goals, or move to the next stage to make refinements. Jot down these thoughts in your journal or notebook.

Step 4 — Refine, Deepen, and Progress

Refinement uses your tracked data and overall experience to make smaller, more targeted adjustments. This may shift from the physical aspects of your practice to more internal work. You may want to dial in your breathing, or work with the energetics of the asanas. For example, you can explore using different breathing ratios, engage one or more bandhas (energetic seals), use kumbhaka (breath retention), or strengthen your drishti (gaze point) in one or more asanas. Or you may want to employ an experienced yoga teacher to work on nuanced adjustments that a camera can’t fully pick up.

You can stay at this stage for a while, or you can return to Step 1 for a new cycle of conscious improvement.

Common Pitfalls and Troubleshooting

Rushing Your Progress

It’s a common tendency to want to force the body into deeper or more advanced poses before building a foundation of mobility and strength. This is often driven by the ahamkara, the ego.
A Better Way: Break challenging poses into smaller, more accessible parts to work on. Practice humility, and honor your body’s limits.

Copying Cues Blindly

Following verbal cues from a teacher or mimicking images on social media without considering your unique anatomy can lead you astray. An instruction is a guide, not a gospel.
A Better Way: Learn the underlying principle of a cue. Investigate what that action is meant to achieve in the pose for your body and then adapt it.

Chasing Aesthetics

Caring more about the look of a pose than its functional stability and internal experience is a surefire way to invite injury.
A Better Way: Find a balance between the external appearance of an asana and the internal experience of breath, focus, awareness, and energy. Reframe your goals with the practice of Ahimsa (non-harming) in mind.

Inconsistent Focus

Attempting to improve a dozen different poses at once without a prioritized plan often leads to scattered results and frustration.
A Better Way: Apply dharana (concentration) to your physical practice. Select just one to three poses to focus on for a period of 6–8 weeks, then shift your attention to other targets.

Poor Progression Planning

Rapidly increasing the intensity or duration of your practice is a common mistake that can sideline your practice.
A Better Way: Patience is paramount. Apply the principle of gradual progression. You might increase your practice time or pose hold time by just 5–10% every few weeks or so.

Working Against Your Nervous System

Trying to learn or do too much when you are overstressed, fatigued, or emotionally taxed is like swimming upstream.
A Better Way: Plan technical work on your asanas for when you feel rested and calm. When stressed, pick a soothing practice that deregulates the nervous system and revives your inner strength.

Over-activating Muscles

Bracing or gripping muscles that should be relaxed in an asana creates excessive tension that blocks the flow of prana (life force energy).
A Better Way: Practice discerning between necessary engagement and unnecessary tension. Contract a muscle group for a moment, then soften it consciously while maintaining the overall shape of the pose. This develops a more refined bodily awareness.

Final Thoughts

Improving your yoga practice isn’t about forcing your body into a shape, or conforming to common misconceptions of yoga. Improvement requires deep listening, reflection, intelligent action, and persistence. This four-step system—analyze, align, track, refine—provides a practical path to improvement. Over time, these small adjustments improve balance, breathing, movement, and make you feel more present, aware, and alive.