6 Ways To Make Yoga Accessible For Seniors

In this article, the physical benefits and potential risks of yoga for seniors are explored, emphasizing that instructors must adapt traditional practices to accommodate the complex health needs of older adults. The text outlines specific strategies to ensure safety and accessibility, such as using chairs, focusing on functional movement, and prioritizing the yogic principle of "non-harming."

Yoga enthusiasts are typically pictured as young, fit, and flexible; yet the reality is that more than a third of Americans who practice yoga are age 50 and older.  

Health benefits are the main reason why seniors say they practice, as yoga has been shown to relieve many ailments common to older adults, including improving blood pressure, heart rate, and insulin resistance, easing anxiety and depression, alleviating back pain, and reducing sleep problems. 

This presents a great opportunity and a serious challenge for yoga instructors because – like any intervention that can boost health – yoga also carries potential risks, and older adults are more likely than younger people to get hurt doing yoga. 

In fact, some commonly taught yoga practices may be risky for seniors.  

These include straight-legged forward bends, which increase the risk of vertebral fracture for people with low bone density, and breath holding, which can affect blood pressure and is inadvisable for people with heart disease and hypertension. 

Yoga For Seniors: What You Should Know 

Of all age groups, seniors are the most complex and varied, with some able to run marathons and others unable to get out of bed.  

More than 90 percent of Americans age 65 and older have at least one chronic condition (such as heart disease, cancer, and diabetes), and more than 40 percent take five or more prescription medications, which may have side effects, including increased fall risk.  

In addition to known, diagnosed diseases, seniors are also at a higher risk than younger people for “silent” disorders that may be aggravated without warning, including hypertension, heart disease and osteoporosis.  

Even fit older athletes have vulnerabilities that often are not understood by many yoga teachers.

These important considerations are generally not included in basic yoga teacher trainings.  This is why, in 2007, we created the Yoga for Seniors professional trainings in collaboration with health professionals at Duke Integrative Medicine in Durham, North Carolina.  

Our program brings together the best of current, evidence-based medicine with the ancient wisdom, experience and tradition of yogic teachings, and we have trained more than 1,000 yoga instructors in our approach, which we call “Relax into Yoga for Seniors” and have outlined in a book by that title.  Our central focus is the yogic principle of Ahimsa, non-harming.  We join with our physician colleagues in the imperative: “First, do no harm.”

My Yoga For Seniors Story: Practicing What I Preach 

As a senior myself, who will turn 72 in February 2026, I have a special appreciation for all I’ve learned in more than two decades of teaching yoga to seniors and training yoga instructors how to adapt the practice to older bodies, minds, and hearts.  

Yoga was considered a fringe, hippie activity back when I started practicing in my early 20s, and I have seen explosive growth in my more than 50 years on the mat.  While much about yoga’s popularity is welcome, I take exception to the common misconception that yoga is a “workout.”  Yoga is actually a “work-in.”  

It’s a precious opportunity for self-discovery and transformation, helping us quiet our mind, move energy through our body, connect with our innermost self, and cultivate awareness and compassion. 

And I practice what I preach.  As a thin, older woman, I have low bone density, and no longer do or teach poses that present an increased fracture risk, such as Headstand, Plow, or Uttanasana (straight-legged forward bend).  I avoid extreme breathing practices like Kapalabhati and Bhastrika, which can strain the cardiovascular system, because I had open-heart surgery at age 54 to replace a congenitally abnormal heart valve and repair an aneurysm.

After a lifetime of striving and pushing myself physically (I earned a black belt in karate at age 42 and a second-degree black belt at 45), I now embrace the wisdom of Patanjala’s Yoga Sutra 2.46, Sthira Sukham Asanam -- “A yoga pose should be steady and comfortable.”  Yoga invites us to find the balance between effort and surrender, courage and caution, doing and “undoing.” This is quite different from our culture’s mistaken belief that “more is better,” and learning to develop the critical counterbalance of slowing down, finding ease, savoring the moment, and developing a compassionate relationship with the body has been extremely useful for me and for my students. 

 This view from my seventh decade of life – and from working with hundreds (possibly thousands) of older adults--informs my recommendations for making yoga accessible to seniors.  It’s important to recognize that many seniors come to the practice out-of-shape and often experience pain.  And it’s also essential to recognize that individual seniors may be exceptional.  

If a 70-year-old has practiced yoga headstands every day since childhood, that practice may be fine for that person.  However, for most older adults, especially those new to yoga, I offer these suggestions to make the practice accessible:

6 Suggestions For A Safe Practice: Top Tips For Yoga For Seniors 

1. Respect Gravity

The cardiovascular system loses elasticity with age, which can result in dizziness when changing positions, such as getting up from lying down or from sitting to standing. That’s why it’s important to give people plenty of time to make this shift and offer support (a chair, the wall) if someone feels unsteady.  

Gravity can also play a role in joint pain for those with arthritis and other musculoskeletal issues.  For example, gravity and body weight on an affected joint may make Child’s Pose problematic for someone with knee, hip, or ankle pain.  

Changing the posture’s relationship to gravity, by turning it upside down into the Knees-to-Chest pose, can “take a load off” the affected joint and offer similar benefits without the pain.  

2. Chairs for Everyone

Since most older adults cannot sit comfortably on the floor with a neutral spine (i.e., not rounding their backs), teach seated poses in a chair.  

The chair can also be a useful prop – to help people get down and up from the floor and to serve as a support when doing standing poses.  Most of us spend most of our days sitting, but rarely learn how to do so with good alignment.  Helping people learn this essential skill, by teaching Seated Mountain Pose in a chair, can dramatically transform how they look and feel--relieving pain and enhancing respiration, circulation, digestion, and core strength.

3. Focus on Function

Teach skills that will be useful off the mat to enhance independence and the ability to do activities of daily life.

For example, help people learn how to stand with good alignment (Mountain Pose), improve balance (Tree Pose), sit down and stand up from a chair (Chair Stand/Chair Pose), and cultivate relaxation (Three-Part Breath).  

Teaching people how to come into a challenging position on the mat--then practice relaxing and breathing into it--can be extremely helpful when life places us in a challenging position, as we can draw upon our practice of relaxing and breathing into it. 

4. Make it Fun

Create an atmosphere that makes the practice enjoyable by helping students appreciate what they can do and develop a sense of mastery.  

Avoid the common practice of sharing “the full expression of a pose” with modifications for those who “can’t do it.”  Instead, guide students into a variation of each posture that they find challenging, but not a strain.  

Validate each person’s unique variation, which may be Tree Pose in a chair, Downward Dog with hands on a wall or Warrior One with arms at shoulder height.  Emphasize the yogic recognition that each person is whole and complete, just as they are.

5. Use Skillful Language

A teacher’s choice of words holds great power in creating a safe environment, so it’s important to encourage and invite rather than direct and demand.

Directive language tends to focus on how something “should” look—for example, “I want you to reach both arms up so that your upper arm is alongside your ear.”  Skillful language invites students to pay attention to how something feels—for example, “when you’re ready, extend your arms up, only as high as you comfortably can.”  

6. Leave Plenty of Time for Savasana

While this final relaxation pose looks easy, because it involves lying down or sitting and doing nothing, Savasana – which means Corpse Pose – is arguably the most difficult yoga posture because it invites us to release all tension from the body, mind, and heart.  

In my twenties, I thought it was creepy when a yoga teacher asked us to consider this pose a meditation on death.  Now I appreciate this opportunity to be still and to surrender completely to the earth.  

The reality that life is impermanent is central to yogic teachings.  Rather than being morbid, this awareness can enhance our appreciation for the precious gift of breath.  And in our hurried, worried world, taking time to stop doing and focus on undoing – letting go and letting be – can be among the most useful practices of all.