Top Five Benefits of Online Yoga Classes

Wait, what? Why would a loyal unlimited passholder at her local studio sing the praises of learning yoga through a screen rather than in person?

It all started with a need to fill a perpetual pocket of emptiness in my studio schedule: Thursday evenings. Throw in some curiosity about all kinds of yoga styles I’d never practiced, as well as an interest in actually experiencing the teaching of several well-known teachers I’d recently started following on social media, and I found myself signed up on YogaGlo (despite their potentially evil patent bullying ways), MyYogaWorks and DoYogaWithMe.

We’ll do a head-to-head comparison of the sites later. For now, here’s why I’m hooked:

1. Whenever, wherever. Like Shakira, these classes are there and you’ll be near (and that’s the deal, my dear). Got a hankering for some midnight yoga? Stuck in a hotel room thousands of miles away from your local studio? Got home from work too late to drive across town and make it to a scheduled class on time? Summon a smiling yoga teacher immediately on your computer, tablet, or smartphone.

2. Pause. Rewind. Repeat. If you cat curls up in the middle of your mat underneath your downward-facing dog in the middle of Sun A’s, your online teacher will wait for you as you patiently remove YogaKitty for the 10th time. If you have no idea what a cue meant, you can listen again — and again — with no shame. If you did not elegantly glide into the pose in a single breath like everyone in the video, you can catch up. Just don’t lose your balance reaching for the pause button.

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Some of the “video journeys” available on MyYogaWorks[/caption]

3. Enjoy an extensive, on-demand tasting menu. Online yoga class portals are the Songza (or Pandora, or Spotify, etc.) of yoga classes. The options vary among the different sites, but generally, you can fine-tune your selection filters by style, anatomical focus, teacher, session length, and difficulty level. Yoga wizard, give me a class that is exactly 40 minutes long, vinyasa style, taught by Super Cool Teacher X, without music, targeting my hips. Going to the studio is more like listening to FM radio. You get what you get, when and how they decide to offer it to you. (Actually, that’s not a fair comparison. Modern radio is terrible.)

4. Brand-name teacher experience. You know the teachers who grace the cover of Yoga Journal and get quoted by your own teachers during class and perform perfectly photographed arm balances for hordes of adoring Instagram followers? Sure, it’s cool to “take” a class with them. Even better, with minimal financial investment and zero travel effort, you can learn whose teaching styles actually work for you and whose do not… before shelling out for a real-life workshop or retreat.

5. Passive mode. Outside of your practice times, watch as many videos as you want without actually doing any of the poses. (I mean, technically, you can also observe at a studio, but it’s a lot more convenient at home.) A non-practicing practice can be particularly useful when you’re exploring the mechanical components of an unfamiliar or complex pose, or if you’re a teacher taking note of how you might cue or pace a particular sequence.

But wait! Online classes are not perfect. In the next post, I’ll talk about some of the major drawbacks of learning through a pixeled teacher. And yes, why you should still make your way to a real-life class.