How this site is written

The one rule that shapes everything

Benefits on this site are written mechanically. "Stretches the hip flexors of the back leg." "Loads the standing ankle through constant small corrections." "Extends the thoracic spine while the pelvis stays anchored." What you will not find is "cures thyroid problems", "controls diabetes", "detoxifies the liver" or "boosts immunity" — not because those claims are unpopular, but because they are unsupported, and a reference site that makes them is not a reference site.

This is enforced in code rather than by good intentions. The build runs every benefit sentence in the dataset against a list of banned terms — disease names, organ claims, treatment verbs — and refuses to build if one appears. 209 pose pages pass that check on every build or the site does not ship.

Contraindications

Every pose page carries a prominent, pose-specific list of who should skip it or change it. These are the ordinary, well-established cautions taught in teacher training: pregnancy for prone poses, closed twists and deep abdominal compression; glaucoma and uncontrolled hypertension for inversions; cervical spine injury for anything loading the neck; wrist injury for the hand-weighted poses; knee injury for deep flexion and kneeling. They are deliberately the loudest block on the page.

They are also, necessarily, general. A page cannot examine you. If you are pregnant, post-surgical, injured or managing any condition, the list on the page is a prompt to ask a doctor and to learn in person — it is not clearance.

Where the words come from

Every step, benefit, mistake and caution on this site was written for this site. Traditional asana names are not anyone's property, and neither is the physical fact of how a pose is performed — but the sentences describing it belong to whoever wrote them, and none of the sentences here are borrowed. Nothing is reproduced from any yoga book, studio site or other library. Sanskrit names are given in Devanagari with IAST transliteration; where a Hindi common name differs from the Sanskrit, both appear.

The energy figures — and their real limit

This is the part most yoga sites get wrong, so it is worth being exact. The 2024 Adult Compendium of Physical Activities is the standard reference for the metabolic cost of activity. It does not publish a MET value for individual asanas, because individual asanas have not been measured. It publishes values for styles of practice:

So each pose on this site is mapped to the nearest published code — restorative poses to the quiet-practice value, most held poses to Hatha, continuous sun salutations to the Surya Namaskar value, and advanced, inverted and arm-balancing poses to Power — and the code used is named on the page. The figure shown is the cost of a practice of that kind, not of holding that one pose. Anything more precise would be invented, and inventing a number is the one thing this network never does.

The arithmetic itself is the standard ACSM relationship: kcal per minute = MET × 3.5 × body mass in kg ÷ 200, quoted here for a 70 kg adult and linear in body mass, so you can scale it yourself. The full activity dataset, covering everything from walking to weightlifting, is published on a sister site, BurnLab.

Difficulty ratings

Three levels, assigned by judgement rather than by measurement, and stated as such. Beginner means learnable in a first class with a version that works for most bodies. Intermediate assumes a working base of strength and range and a teacher who has watched you move. Advanced means long-practice: the risk is rarely the shape itself but arriving at it years early. Difficulty and safety are different axes — a beginner pose can still be wrong for a specific knee.

Hold times

Hold times are conventional teaching ranges for each family — long for restorative and seated work, short for backbends and arm balances — with per-pose overrides where the convention does not fit. They are a starting point, not a target. The correct hold is the one where the breath stays even.

Illustrations

There are none, deliberately. Every pose photograph and diagram worth looking at belongs to somebody, and the alternative — scraping images and hoping — is theft with extra steps. A clean typographic page with accurate instructions beats a stolen photo, and the site loads faster without them. The only artwork on the site is the drawn figure on the home page, made from SVG shapes.

What this site cannot tell you

• Whether a pose is right for your body. Ranges, injuries and proportions differ enormously, and the same pose is easy for one skeleton and impossible for another.
• Whether what you are feeling is a stretch or a problem. Nobody can answer that from a page. Sharp, radiating or joint-line pain is not something to work through.
• Anything medical. Not diagnosis, not treatment, not whether yoga is advisable for your condition. Those are questions for a doctor.
• Exactly what a session costs you in calories. The style-level MET values are the best published data available, and they are still averages across people and classes.

General information only — not medical advice. Some asanas are unsuitable during pregnancy, injury or specific conditions. Learn from a qualified teacher and stop if anything hurts.

Corrections

If something here is wrong — a transliteration, a muscle group, a missing contraindication — that is worth fixing and gets priority over everything else. Send the page URL and what looks wrong.