Elevate Your Practice: A Guide to Intermediate Yoga
By Dennis Bluthardt, Namaste Studios
Yoga promotes a healthy body, mind, and spirit through meditative postures, breathwork, and movement.
Intermediate yoga (sometimes called Level II yoga) requires your body to develop more strength and balance and a deeper understanding of breath.
When you begin yoga, most practices switch from basic poses. In other words, you quickly learn a handful of poses and try to master your body’s alignment and form. Intermediate yoga emphasizes posture and body position but adds transitions and challenges to the practice.
I believe there is a mental “hump” to getting over this phase of development in yoga—and it is vital for your journey. By better understanding your mental practices and preconditions, you can “advance” in yoga far beyond the limits of your beginner’s yoga class.
Developing a Balanced Intermediate Yoga Practice
Develop full-body strength, improve flexibility, and enhance balance with a well-rounded yoga routine. But yoga isn’t just about the physical — you’ll also experience stress-busting, focus-enhancing, and joy-boosting results.
Your sequence should follow a mix-and-match philosophy. Aim to include at least one posture or pose pack (combination of three or so poses) that challenges strength, flexibility, or balance.
Here is a sample gentle class for beginners:
Begin with a warm-up. In a gentle class, this might mean an extended Savasana, some light pranayama (breathing exercises), and easy stretches to prepare the body for physical practice (the asana).
Add strengthening poses (Warrior II) and gradually make them more challenging until you start to work up a sweat (Plank). For most fit individuals, this almost always involves engaging the core and building lower body strength, flexibility, and balance (remember that whole-body strength training is the single most effective way to melt body fat).
Add flexibility poses (Downward Dog) until you work those deep, peak-level flexibility muscles (Pigeon Pose).
I recommend saving subtle balance work for your warm-up (Tree Pose) or peak pose (Half Moon).
Always end in a restorative and subtle Savasana. It will give the body time to work that beautiful yoga magic, and you’ll build mindfulness and relax the nervous system — that’s what we’re all here for, right?
Understanding Intermediate Yoga
Intermediate yoga can be personal and pivotal. It’s that in-between space where basic poses and techniques have been achieved, yet some of yoga’s much deeper experiences and facets are coming into view. It’s a sweet space to inhabit because you have enough of the foundations of your body to breathe under your belt. You are permitted to delve much deeper into the well of the rich, ripe teachings on body mechanics and alignment and the magnificent selection of other techniques (alongside asana) that yoga offers.
For many, it isn’t just the physicality of yoga that deepens into the intermediate leap but the mental, emotional, and often spiritual connection to both the idea of yoga and of Self. More complex postures and sequences can be pretty humbling, and usually, patience and bandhas are the order of the day. Alongside this comes the opportunity to start playing with how poses are put together and built, interweaving variations of poses into seemingly familiar sequencing, which enables your body to grow and delve into corners previously ignored. Fire them up and create some incredible shapes and spaces in the body.
The strength and flexibility needed to transition from advanced beginner to intermediate yoga are apparent to anyone with experience. Still, alongside increased muscle mass and depth, most intermediate classes also push you to slow your yoga down. Practice mindfulness, mala use, and pranayama during asana to prepare the body and the mind to sit in asana and to delve deeper into Dharana, the next stage of the path of yoga (the Eight Limbs) and the seventh upon the path. Be fit enough to sit still—still sufficient to plumb the depths of meditation.
Key Intermediate Yoga Poses
If you’re an intermediate yoga student, you can deepen your practice by exploring poses (asanas) that represent a variety of styles.
For example, Warrior II can help you build strength and stability in your legs and learn to tap into your focus and determination. This pose can invite you to engage your core, lift your chest, and open your hips, which can help you embody the pose’s associated attributes of empowerment and grounding and learn how to take on a similar position of personal power when you need to take a stand in life.
Extended Side Angle Pose combines the benefits of several other asanas: a lateral (side) stretch for your torso (basically, everything from your back heel to the fingertips on your top hand), strength training for your legs, and a bit of balance work combined with alignment instructions that can help you learn how to guide your breath. You can build on what you’ve learned in Virabhadrasana II (Warrior II) to find Utthita Parsvakonasana.
Tree Pose is a standing balancing posture that can teach you to align your lower body and sway gently like a tree without falling over when life pushes you a little off balance.
Half Moon Pose can help you build a sense of your entire body in space. Ardha Chandrasana will allow you to learn how to work all body parts to maintain your alignment in poses that require balance, flexibility, and strength. This pose can also help you connect with the cosmos within you; you are made of stardust and carry magic in your cells and moon-touched tides in your blood.
Crow Pose can help you strengthen your body and prepare to try other arm-balancing asanas. Practicing arm-balancing poses can be exhilarating and give you a spark of courage or confidence once you’ve mastered them.
A Supported Shoulderstand is an inversion pose that can help you rest and rejuvenate. It can be calming for your entire body and help direct the flow of the breath and your focus inward.
Common Challenges in Intermediate Yoga
Intermediate practitioners will run up against the same obstacles again and again. The ones I encounter most often are fear of inversions and an inability to do balance poses. For many, the fear of inversions—headstand (sirsasana), handstand (adho mukha vrksasana), etc.—comes from a lack of belief in one’s strength and stability. If this is the case, this fear can be incapacitating. But for any practitioner, balance poses—tree pose (vrksasana), crow pose (bakasana), etc.—are complex. We all wobble, we all fall.
The solution? Build. Use your already ingrained knowledge of the importance of repetition to do the work it takes to make these problematic asanas routine. Know that every beginner must acclimate themselves to advanced asanas before they feel like it’s something they can do. It will take time. It will take resilience. Even falling, once learned, doesn’t hurt all that much.
The Role of Breath and Mindfulness in Intermediate Yoga
The art of controlled breathing does one other super cool thing: It gives us a vehicle to manage our energy levels. As we learn and experiment with more Pranayama techniques, we can better explore the edges of our asanas!
Season that combination with a hefty dose of mindfulness, and these two techniques can answer your problems—in yoga, not life (unfortunately). For beginners, mindfulness encourages them to focus on their breath in the current moment and absolutely nothing else, enhancing the benefits that they can gain.
Intermediate yoga practices are a great addition to any fitness routine. These moves take you deeper into the core principles of alignment, breath, and body awareness. They help you become limber, gain strength, and improve your balance.
As a yoga student, playing with intermediate poses can be a lot of fun because you’ll see more poses that were once out of reach beginning to come into the picture. In this way, working toward those poses that you still can’t do teaches you about more than just the final pose – each pose on the way there challenges your body on its journey.
Feel free to reach out and let us know what you fit into your yoga routine or spark a conversation with a fellow student. They’re always happy to share their stories.
