What Most Yoga Teachers Get Wrong About Preparing for Pranayama

Most yoga teachers are taught that chest opening is the key to better pranayama, but what if that’s actually the last thing to focus on?

In this solo episode, I share the five areas of asana practice that matter most when preparing the body for pranayama. We explore lung anatomy, spinal mobility, nervous system regulation, hip flexor tension, diaphragm function, and why true breath expansion comes from working with the whole body, not just the chest. If you want your pranayama practice to feel more effortless and effective, this episode offers a practical framework you can start applying right away.

Episode Highlights:

• Common pranayama preparation myths
• Body as the container of prana
• Side and back body breathing
• Lung anatomy and breath capacity
• Spinal mobility for pranayama
• False expansion through chest opening
• Nervous system regulation through breath
• Front body dominance and stress
• Hip flexors and diaphragm function
• Lower abdomen freedom for breathing
• Chest opening as a result
• Intelligent asana preparation framework
• Breath literacy in practice
• Actionable pranayama preparation steps

Pranayam Teacher Training 2026

Prana & Presence: An Immersive Week of Yoga, Stillness & Soulful Study in Southern Italy

Join our mailing list

Find all the resources mentioned in this episode

Connect with us on Instagram

Subscribe to Aham Yoga on YouTube

Let’s Talk Yoga Podcast on YouTube

Leave us a review and share this podcast with your friends!

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi everyone, welcome to episode 224 of the Let's Talk Yoga Podcast. I'm Arundhati, and on the show today, we're getting nerdy about asana with regard to pranayama. This is another solo episode, and as we drop this, we are literally two weeks away from our annual pranayama study program and optional yoga teacher training. This course starts on June 19th, and by the time you hear this, the early bird prize has ended. But I would still love to have you in the training. June 19th is when we start, and I will share all the details of this online program at the end of today's episode. Even if you are not in this program or you are one of the students who has been through this program in the previous years, this episode is new and has something very relevant for anyone listening. On the show today, we talk about the relationship between asana and pranayama, specifically what to do to open the body up for pranayama, to set yourself up for success. Now I know most of you listening will be thinking, oh, that is chest opening. If you open the chest, we are able to do pranayama. But I have some news for you. That is the very last thing we want to aim for when we work with the body in asana. So in my world, when we say pranayama, we're not saying chest opening. In fact, it's the last thing on our list and the least significant one. I'll give you five other things to look at when you practice asana. So next time you are on your mat and you want to prepare your body to do praniana someday, then this will be very helpful. So grab your cup of chai, grab a pen and paper, and let's get nerdy about asana and praniama.

SPEAKER_01 1:51

Hi everyone, I'm Arundati, and you've just tuned in to the Let's Talk Yoga Podcast, your ultimate online destination for learning about yoga. Whether you're a seasoned yoga teacher or a curious yoga student, there's something for you here. Let this podcast be your watchful yoga school. We offer insight, inspiration, and loads of dirty exploration of yoga along the way. But first, who am I? I'm an image, a immigrant yoga teacher, immigrant for the past decade. I have my own yoga community. I'm also a Hollywood cooling, and I've nurtured a typing yoga community at my studio, as well as a global yoga audience to my courses at this podcast. Through this podcast, I intend to create a space for you, the yoga student and yoga teacher, to learn about yoga. Think of this as your online yoga school free teacher training coming to you every week. So grab your cup of chai and let's jump in.

SPEAKER_00 2:54

Welcome back. I want to start by sharing something about pranayama. Most people get this wrong. We think praniama begins when you sit down, close your eyes, and start doing some technique, working with some ratios, starting to retain the breath and jumping from technique to technique, or doing it, say five minutes at the end of class or at the start of the day, and your pranayama is done. It's a checklist item and we move on. But that's the wrong way to approach it. We skip the body entirely. We even skip the breath. The reason I say we skip the breath is because we go straight to technique. And I've said this so many times to you in the recent past that the breath is not a technique. So when we jump and go straight to techniques, we've lost the body, we've lost the breath. So what I want you to think of is the body is the container of prana. And the way your prana moves, your mind moves. In fact, every thought in your mind is governed by the movement of prana. We will be doing a deep dive into prana in this training, but you cannot build a solid foundation in pranayama by skipping over the body. You have to train the breath inside the body, inside a pose in a specific way. So when you sit down to do pranayama, it is more effortless. What happens nowadays is because we literally just close our eyes and sit down for pranayama, we've lost the foundation and we find pranayama to be more of an uphill climb. We struggle with it, we don't have clarity, we find it boring, it's not stimulating, and we give up very quickly. So today, on this episode, I want to plant a seed very clearly. The question I want to answer for you is what do we actually do in our physical practice? What should we be doing in our asana practice to set ourselves up for eventual pranayama effortlessness? And more importantly, I want to bust one very big myth that exists in this world. So I hope you have grabbed your pen and paper because we are going to get started right now. The myth I want to bust right away is ask any group of yoga students or teacher trainees in a room, what do you do with the body to be successful in pranayama? They will say chest opening, heart opening, front body opening. And I completely understand why, because it makes intuitive sense, doesn't it? Breathing feels like a front chest thing. You open the chest and you breathe more freely, correct? No, that's kind of wrong because chest opening is not the primary function for pranayama. It's not secondary and it's not even tertiary. It's the last thing on my list. And today I'm going to share four things that come ahead of chest opening, and that will help you become more successful in your pranayama. Now, reason one is the lungs live on the sides and the back and not in the front. This is the anatomical truth that exists in our body, and this one thing changes everything. So whether you do pranayama with me or not in this training or outside, I hope you remember this: that the lungs live on the sides and the back body. Think of this as a 70-30 ratio. 70% of your lung tissue is on your sides and on your back. 30% is in the front. So when we spend the bulk of our asana practice opening up the front body, we are spending most of our time and effort in the 30% and not the 70%. So when you reframe this and you start working on side body opening and back body length, then you have shifted from working in the 30% category to the 70% category. Now, in the training, we will actually sit down and go over asana practices that will help you understand what type of targeted asana work to do that will get you to this 70% and open that 70% up effortlessly. But remember, the first rule of thumb here is 70% of your lung tissue are on your sides and on your back, and 30% is in the front. So when we say chest opening, we're not referring to the front of the body. We in fact want to switch that whole narrative to side and back body opening. When you work like this, you have automatically shifted yourself into more enhanced body opening for pranayama. Think of this as preparation for pranayama and not just chest opening exercise. And if you genuinely want to open or expand your breath capacity, you need to open what's beside you and behind you and not just what is in front of you, because the breath moves three-dimensionally in pranayama. The second reason is chest opening without spinal mobility creates false expansion. Again, chest opening without spinal mobility creates false expansion. Now, here's what I constantly see in online classes, in students' practices, in teachers' teaching is a student who wants to do pranayama, we end up putting them in a backbench or some type of chest opening, right? The front body lifts, and the front body looks expansive. It looks like we're creating space. But the thoracic spine, the upper part of your spine is stiff, and the back body often compresses to a love front body length. And again, we look at this in our asana practice for pranayama, and it becomes more about the aesthetics of it and not necessarily what's actually opening or expanding. When we do this back body compression and front body lengthening, like this thoracic spine, your upper spinal compression, we are squeezing the space that the breath can be in. Okay, you get the shape of it, but you don't have expansion. Anybody can stuff themselves into a backbend in some form. But I want you to remember that praniyama is not a shape, it is a function. Okay, the function requires genuine three-dimensional functional opening. And that has to come with spinal mobility. So this rotation of the spine, twisting is a significant component. Okay. So it's not just the postural illusion that we are going to go after. We're actually going to bring so much fluidity, mobility, ease, lightness into the spine that there is front body opening, side body opening, and back body ease in the pranayama preparation. So remember, we want to bring in some amount of spinal mobility. Now you might be thinking so all twisting poses will help get us to pranayama. The short answer is no. There are some specific twisting poses that are more conducive towards building the body up for pranayama. And what those are, we will look at in the training itself. Now, the third reason is front body dominance drives the exact nervous system state that we want to move away from. Okay. Reason three is front body dominance drives the exact nervous system state that pranayama needs us to move away from. Now, what does this mean? When the front chest is lifted, the front body is dominant. Most people will default to breathing towards the front of their chest, mid and clavicular chest breathing, which is usually higher, perhaps a little shallower, and maybe not as slow and deep as we could get in other postures. This type of breathing pattern can potentially create stress, can potentially create a condition that helps the mind be more restless instead of settled. The front body dominance, the front body opening is sympathetically driven for the nervous system. It is the breath of activity, of urgency, of anxiety, of fight and flight. Now, does this mean every time we do a front body opening, we are in that state? Absolutely not. Pranyama needs the opposite. So pranayama needs a settled, parasympathetically driven, toned nervous system. A body and breath that have down regulation as part of practice. You don't always want front body autonomic nervous system dominance. We want the back body length and the side body opening to help us go more towards parasympathetic dominance. We want that lower chest breath, lower side back breath. If you practiced in my classes, you know what I'm referring to. We want to release the grip on the abdomen. So we can't keep lifting the chest higher and bringing the breath higher up. In fact, it's the opposite. So more chest activation before pranayama literally help moves us in that direction where we're preparing for something that is not pranayama, if that makes sense. So the third reason that we do not want to keep doing chest opening is because it puts us more in an autonomic nervous system state instead of a parasympathetic dominant nervous system state. The fourth reason here is tight hip flexors and a compressed lower abdomen strangle the diaphragm from below. This is one of my favorite things to teach when it comes to asana preparation for pranayama. The diaphragm is such a wonderful thing in human anatomy. It does not work in isolation. The diaphragm is part of this beautiful system, the system that starts from the pelvic floor and moves all the way up through the abdomen. So if your psoas is tight, say the front of your thighs, that hip flexor region, if the part that you are always using when you're sitting on a chair or driving or in a squat, it's pretty much where most humans are chronically tight. Okay, the lumbar spine is compressed, the pelvis tilts forward, the lower abdomen is often gripped. In fact, we don't even breathe that deeply into the lower abdomen anymore. In that state, the diaphragm cannot descend fully on the inhalation. The breath gets stuck in the upper chest and it just gets kind of strangled because the diaphragm has no room to drop. To me, this is one of the most significant things when it comes to teaching people how to breathe well, to build good qualities of breath before even going to pranayama. It's what I have called breath literacy in previous episodes, and something we'll showcase in our training in more detail and clarity. But just remember, no amount of chest opening can fix this. You have to address the container from the bottom up as well as top down. So when you address this container from bottom down, the hip flexors, the quads, the lower abdomen, that is where pranayama actually begins inside the human body, not in the shoulders or the pectorals or the deltoids. It moves from down to up. So the fourth reason why we don't want to just keep opening the chest all the time is because we are strangling the diaphragm from the bottom. And you want to work on removing some of that tightness in the hip flexors and the quadriceps, as well as getting freedom in the lower abdomen to move towards effortless pranayama and enhancing just how you breathe more freely and deeply and continuously. And the last reason here in my solo quick episode here is chest opening is the fruit and not the root. And I know this sounds like a rhyme and it's meant to, so you can remember it and keep repeating it to yourself when you step on your mat. Is chest opening is the fruit and not the root. And I really want you to sit with this one because it's an important one. When the back body is long and spacious, and when the side body is open, when the hips are free, the lower abdomen is spacious, and the spine can rotate freely and openly, the front body is naturally open on its own. And as a consequence of that, the whole body is prepared, prepared for what? Prepared to sit and go into the layers of pranayama. So the chest opening that we've been chasing in the modern yoga world for many decades, it arrives last. And it is the result of getting everything else right. So when that chest opening arrives and we do these front body back bends through genuine preparation rather than just forced spinal opening, the breath that follows this is completely different. It's full, it's three-dimensional, it's smooth, and it mirrors many qualities of the breath that we'll talk about in the training. It becomes truly stirram and such, steady and effortless. So cueing chest opening and just calling that preparation for pranayama is short-sighted. And there is a better way. And it's like you are opening the flowers gently and not just plucking away at the petals to get the flower to open, if that makes sense. The flower blooms when the conditions are right, and so does the breath. So if I could leave you with a pranayama prescription from this episode, so you actually have something that is actionable that you can take back, just remember this, okay? Before your next pranayama session, or even in your own asana practice and teaching, run these things through your mind. Ask yourself: have I addressed the side body? Have I lengthened the back? Have I released the tight hip flexors and lower abdomen? Have I given the spine some rotation? And if yes, the chest will take care of itself. And the pranayama that follows this will be deeper, steadier, and more effortless against tiram sukam, something I believe are guiding principles of my yoga and my life. This is so much more richer than just chest opening. This is breath literacy in action, and this is how we prepare the body intelligently. Now, this is just the top coding of what we will explore in the asana segment of my pranayama training. But I wanted to leave you with something that is actionable, something that you could use from today's episode. Again, I hope these five things are helpful in preparing your body and your students' body for pranayama. And always remember if you would like the list of the exact poses you would like to practice and understand how to do this, what are those few go-to things that we take to prepare the body for pranayama? Then my pranayama training starts on June 19th. And by the time you listen to this episode, the early bird prize has ended, but we are still enrolling students into this program. You can find all the details at ahameyoga.com or just take a peek in the show notes to find the link to this course. Once again, I cannot wait to meet you on June 19th in this training. It is 60 hours and more, and it is completely revamped from my previous year's training. I hope you will join me and help me build this mission of more breath literacy and more effortless pranayama in the years and decades ahead. Once again, all the details can be found at let's talk.yoga forward slash listen. And if you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating, a review, and share this with one other yoga friend. And I cannot wait to get nerdy about pranayama. But for now, enjoy your practice. Take a few deep, full breaths. I will be back next week with another guest and conversation. Until then, take care. Bye bye.