This PPT is for beginners to understand the foundation of Yoga Practice that is meant to prevent injuries and maximize benefits of Yoga by using two foundational elements - Stability & Easiness during the practice. If one deviates from such foundation, it indicates that one is performing wrong practice or overdoing it, which can harm instead of benefiting the practitioner.

1. Patanjali Yoga Sutra to
Improve Your Yoga Practices
Prevent Injuries & Maximize Benefits

2. स्थिरसुखमासनम् ॥४६॥
Sthira Sukham Asanam Sutra 2.46
Asana is a poised and
relaxed manner of sitting.

3. Maharshi Patanjali
calls the posture which keeps the body and
mind stable and comfortable as Asana.

4. Posture which causes instability and
discomfort to the body & / or mind
cannot be called Asana.

5. Use This Sutra as Principle
during Yoga Practice
To Avoid Injuries & Maximize Benefits

6. Principle 1
Yoga Practice should always be within the
limits (capacity) of the body and never beyond.

7. Principle 2
Never follow ‘No Pain No Gain’.

8. Principle 3
Discomfort indicates the practice
beyond capacity or wrongly practiced
Trembling, irregular or fast breathing, shaking during the yoga practice amounts to
discomfort.

9. Principle 4
Not having good flexibility!
Do not worry about perfection
in short period of yoga practice
Practice within your limits still gives full benefits of Asana.

10. Principle 5
Which Asana is stable and comfortable depends on
one’s age, body type, state of health, body flexibility.
Listen to your body during yoga practice.

11. Principle 6
Persistence & Patience work wonder
Little but regular yoga practice is far better
than the irregular practice of long durations.
A tree doesn’t grow in a day. It needs time and effort to bud from a sapling and then into a full-
grown tree. Only then can you reap the fruits...

12. Practicing Yoga benefits,
but doing it wrong, injures

13. According to the Time’s article in 2007, entitled
“When Yoga Hurts,” 13,000 of the current 14 million
practitioners were winding up with injuries directly
linked to Hatha Yoga

14. Yoga causes musculoskeletal pain in
10 per cent of people and exacerbates
21 per cent of existing injuries, University of
Sydney research shows.

15. 29,590 yoga-related injuries seen in hospital
emergency departments from 2001 to 2014 as per
data from the National Electronic Injury
Surveillance System (NEISS) which were used to
estimate the incidence and type of yoga-
associated injuries.

16. In NutShell,
Never Cross Your Body Limits...