We Built Something Special This Month: Our Journey through Alignment and Strength in Yoga
- Sam Turner
- 5 minutes ago
- 8 min read
Hey you.
I’m quite confident saying that we have just come to the end of one of my favourite months of teaching yoga in 2025. It has been an absolute joy sharing Inner Architecture in my classes. Each month, I place a poll in a private group that lets regulars select what they’d like to experience next. For November, they decided on Inner Architecture, which allowed me to put my alignment cap on.
Alignment - Part 1
You may not know this about teaching yoga, unless you’re a yoga teacher reading this, but there are many ways to teach the shapes we make in a yoga class. I have never really titled myself as one particular style because I like to keep changing things up. Typically, I’m very much about making the shapes that are right for you. This is the centre of my personal yoga teacher handbook. However, this month I invited an additional layer of alignment.
To summarise alignment in yoga easily, I would probably just say it’s a list of guidelines for how we “should” position the body. This month, in particular, I personally focused on lines. I picked a list of poses that typically included quite a few strong edges that we could explore. It’s a rule of thumb that alignment-focused approaches typically require strength and endurance. It’s also worth noting right here that these guidelines do not work for everyone.
Strength
That leads me nicely into the second aspect of Inner Architecture: strength. If we were going to be embarking on a journey of alignment, I needed to add points where I could add a movement drill. There were two main ones that I wanted to include because part of the practice was going to involve sun salutations.
Sun Salutations
Sun salutations are a great place to explore alignment, especially those fundamental concepts like the hip hinge that show up in so many different shapes. If you don’t know what a sun salutation is, then this is the sequence: mountain/standing - standing forward fold - half lift - plank - cobra - downward facing dog - standing forward fold - half lift - mountain/standing. It’s a great all-rounder sequence that becomes easy to remember over time.
Now, I don’t often include sun salutations in my classes. They have their perks, but they can also be challenging due to the transitions required to move between some of those poses. There are numerous styles of yoga that overuse sun salutations. You may go through 10+ in a single class, which is not for me at all. Between quantity and transitions, they can quickly shift whether I’ve enjoyed a class or not, and I feel they can be quite exclusive in certain settings. I hate feeling like I am throwing my body around as quickly as possible just to keep up.
Movement Drills
The first change I made to the typical sun salutation sequence was starting at the back of the mat. Rather than the step back, I wanted to explore walking the hands forward for accessibility reasons: I think it’s a more accessible method of transitioning from standing to ground, and it means you just need to get your fingertips to the ground instead of the whole palm.
From there, remember how I mentioned those movement drills? Over week 1 to 3 I added in press-ups to build strength between plank and cobra, or in a tabletop sequence before we practised our sun salutation. The aim was to make the lowering-down process feel easier over time (it worked, by the way). I suggested anything up to five of these, meeting yourself where you’re at. If someone could only do one, and then made it to two? Objective achieved.
The second change I made to the sun salutation was walking the hands back from downward facing dog to standing forward fold. In a similar way to the press-ups, we started to add in a movement drill to develop this. I love this movement because it is a great way to come from ground to standing. We also practised up to five of these. Similarly, the aim was to get everyone to slow down walking their hands back. I find that people rush through this because they want it over. I wanted everyone to be a little more deliberate with this.
Alignment - Part 2
As you can probably tell, there was a lot of thought that went into this. We have alignment, strength, and sun salutations. I had checked two off through focusing on practising and improving our sun salutations. It was time to deep dive into alignment. This came at the end of the practice, but it began with the warm-up. In the warm-up, we welcomed concepts that would show up later whilst warming up the general area of the body.
Our alignment kicked in with extended side angle pose (week 1), peaceful warrior (week 2), and wide-legged forward fold (week 3). We took our time to break these down; I even had everyone watching me whilst I demoed it before we all came into the shape. My goal here was to introduce our alignment whilst giving everyone the chance to maybe challenge themselves as we were only practising one pose. All of these shapes require you to take your feet wider than hip-distance apart whilst facing the long edge of the mat. Each week, I said, “maybe you want to take those a fraction wider than where you normally would”. I knew it would help develop endurance in the legs.
Extended Side Angle Pose and Peaceful Warrior
I’m not going to explain every single thing that we did but, in week 1 and 2, once we had set up that strong Warrior 2 shape considering our lines — ankle, knee, hip, ribs over pelvis, pulling ribs to pelvis, and that T shape in the arms — we used a movement that first showed up in our warm-up: arms down to the side, arms extended in front of the chest, arms in a T shape, arms extended in front of the chest, arms up and overhead. This simple movement pattern started to move the shoulders but would become the way we accessed extended side angle pose and peaceful warrior. Rather than taking arms wide, we deliberately moved arms in front of the chest and made a T shape or lifted arms up and overhead so those arms could stay long whilst considering which felt better in the shoulder.
Once we had figured out the arms, it was all about finding that long line through the side body. In extended side angle pose, create a long line from fingertips/shoulder to back outer foot. I want everyone to avoid that floppy arm that I often see as people feel they are moving “deeper into the pose” when they’re just bending their elbow. In a peaceful warrior, I want to see that long line from hip to shoulder/fingertips, and the side bend comes from sliding the other hand down the long leg.
Wide-Legged Standing Forward Fold
Our warm-up transformed when I knew a wide-legged forward fold was coming. Fortunately, we had a lot of hip hinging throughout the practice between sun salutations and walking the hands from downward facing dog to standing forward fold. For most of the practice though, our legs were staying aligned with hips.
I grabbed a block for our warm-up and, either seated or lying down, we lifted the leg and passed it over the top of the block. This started to recruit a variety of muscles to navigate the lift up and over the brick. Then, depending on how each person felt, they could increase the height of the block. For most people, the taller the block, the harder the movement.
Once we were nice and warm, it was time to keep that block handy and get ready for our wide-legged forward fold. I’ll be honest with you, the list of things I wanted to do was growing quite rapidly, so I had to restrain myself a little. There were three stages to the movement: a half lift (torso parallel to the ground), the fold (rounding), and engage (draw ribs to hips and drive the bum up to the ceiling).
There were a few fundamentals that I wanted everyone to experience, regardless of the option they took. The first one was pressing into the outer edges of the feet to draw the legs wide, and the second was a very soft bend in the knee. I describe a soft bend as a tiny bounce in the knee; it’s basically 98% straight but there’s a tiny amount of bend so the muscles fire up.
Once the legs were set, this is where the well-practised hip hinge comes in. Keeping the spine as neutral and stable as possible, we hinged from the hip, pushing the bum back slightly as we came to the upper body parallel with the ground. I wanted everyone to prioritise the extended spine, pulling shoulders away from the ears. Depending on each person’s range of motion, a chair or a yoga block is a great addition to place your hands on.
Everyone had the choice to explore options from there. People seemed to love the engagement section. Once they were down, they started to drive the bum high and draw the base of the ribs to those hip points to get some engagement in the core. Some of us (I fall into this camp) are quite flexible in this position, so there might be a chance to take the crown of your head to a block or even the ground.
Week 4
Everything I’ve mentioned above happened over four weeks with one single goal in mind: bring it all together into one sequence. As we entered our final week, it was time to practise three rounds of sun salutations and bind together Warrior 2, extended side angle pose, peaceful warrior, and a wide-legged forward fold into one sequence.
Simply put, it was excellent. Feedback has been very positive from everyone, and I totally agree. I loved that there was something in there that really showed how a little change once a week can make all the difference. These movement drills showed that consistency can create change quickly and how beneficial it can be when we train a movement for a reason. Each and every person, in that final week, moved through the sun salutations with ease and grace. We were no longer doing five press-ups; we were just controlling the journey down from plank to lying on our front. It feels a lot easier when you’re expecting five of them. It was absolutely the same for walking hands in/out. We practised five each week; we only needed one at the end of it all. Even when we moved through three sun salutations, we didn’t get anywhere near the amount we had practised in our movement drills.
As I look back on the month, I loved each and every week! There were no moments where I didn’t feel like it went in the direction I hoped it would. There were some clunky moments, but that’s what happens when you include a movement drill. I often have to remind myself that it doesn’t need to feel like a dance… Yes, these smooth transitions and poses look amazing, but it’s not about the looks. It’s about how it feels!
This gave me a different perspective. It reminded me about balance — yoga is, in my experience, seeking balance. Sometimes we speed up, sometimes we slow down.
Sometimes we challenge, sometimes we stay with the familiar. Sometimes we move how we feel, sometimes we pull out the rulebook. There’s space for it all. Movement is our toolkit; we pick up what we need when we need it.
Thank you. Thank you for sticking with me if you’re still reading. Thank you for joining my classes. Thank you.
Sam
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