How to use this site
A free, sign-up-free self-practice guide to Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga — the whole sequence, posture by posture.
What is Ashtanga?
Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga is a set sequence of postures joined by breath and movement. The order never changes: sun salutations first, then the standing postures, the seated sequence, and a closing sequence of inversions and rest. Because the order is fixed, you spend no attention deciding what comes next — the sequence becomes a container, and the work moves into the breath.
Three things run through every posture, and together they are called tristhana. Ujjayi breathing is a soft ocean sound made by narrowing the throat, with the inhale and the exhale kept the same length. Bandha is the light inward lift of the pelvic floor and lower belly that keeps the spine long. Drishti is a single fixed gazing point given to each posture. When those three hold, the practice becomes steady rather than athletic.
One movement, one breath — that is vinyasa. A posture is usually held for five breaths and entered and left through the same counted steps. Traditionally the practice is done early in the morning, six days a week, resting on Saturdays and on the full and new moon.
How to use this site
Follow the sequence in order. The page below lists the sun salutations first, then each section of the series in its traditional order, so you can scroll and practise from top to bottom. The tabs at the top of the page switch between the Primary, Intermediate, and Advanced series.
Open a posture for the detail. Every pose has a page of its own with the counted entry steps, alignment notes for hands, feet, knees, and gaze, the mistakes that show up most often, and modifications and props for a body that is still opening.
Let Practice Mode keep the breath. It reads each posture aloud, counts the breaths at the pace you choose — four to eight seconds each — and moves on when the count is finished, so you can keep your eyes closed and stay with the breath instead of the screen.
Nothing here needs an account. The poses you mark as done are stored in your own browser and never leave it.
About the author
Written by Choi Seongjin — twenty years of Ashtanga practice, and currently teaching three classes a week. The text here is not a translation of someone else's manual: the entry steps, alignment notes, and common mistakes are written from that practice and that teaching, against the standards handed down in the Mysore tradition of Sri K. Pattabhi Jois.
It was built for people who practise alone, without a shala nearby. Two things go missing first when there is no teacher in the room — the order of the sequence, and the small alignment details someone would otherwise correct — so both are written down here, to be checked in the middle of a practice rather than remembered.
Every posture page carries the date its text was last revised, and corrections are welcome: if something here does not match what you were taught, say so and it will be checked.
Practice Mode, in detail
Practice Mode turns the list into a guided session. Start it from the header, from the bottom bar on a phone, or from a single posture with “Practice from here” — that last one is the useful one when you are working on the second half of a series and do not want to sit through the beginning again.
On a wide screen it lays out in three columns: the running order on the left, the timer in the middle, and the current posture's description on the right with its breath count. The sun salutations are grouped and fold open into their eleven counted steps. On a phone only the timer and the large visual remain, because that is all you can read from the mat.
It speaks. Each posture's name and description are read aloud, then the breaths are counted one by one — “the breath is five, one… two… three”. Choose a pace between four and eight seconds per breath; the reading speed follows the pace you set, so a slow practice is not narrated at a rush. Between postures there is a pause of about eight tenths of a second, long enough to move without feeling pushed.
The spoken guidance uses the speech voices your browser already has. Posture text exists in Korean and English, so a session in any other interface language is narrated in English. If your browser has no speech voice the timer still runs and only the voice is missing. Postures you pass through can be marked as practised automatically, and leaving takes one tap on “End practice”.
How progress is kept
Tap the check on a posture card — “Mark as practised” — and the card turns amber and counts. The bar in the left rail shows how far through the current series you are, and the progress panel underneath breaks it down by section, one dot per posture, so a glance tells you which section you have been avoiding. “Next pose” jumps to the first posture you have not marked and highlights its card for a moment.
Each series is counted separately. Switching the tabs at the top between Primary, Intermediate, and Advanced re-reads the same marks against that series, so finishing Primary does not make Intermediate look half done.
All of it is stored in your own browser and nowhere else. There is no account, nothing is uploaded, and nothing follows you to another device or another browser — clearing your browsing data clears the marks too. “Reset progress” wipes them on purpose, and offers a single undo in case you did not mean it.
If you are starting from zero
Do not try to learn the whole series at once. The traditional method adds postures one at a time: for the first weeks practise only Surya Namaskara A, five rounds, followed by the closing sequence and rest. When the breath holds steady through those, add Surya Namaskara B, then the standing postures in order, then the seated sequence one posture at a time.
Fifteen or twenty honest minutes beats an hour you dread. The sequence is practised six mornings a week in the tradition, with Saturdays off and a rest day on the full and new moon, but three or four steady mornings a week will carry you further than a heroic weekend.
Use the postures' own pages rather than the pictures. Every posture has entry steps in counted order, alignment notes for hands, feet, knees, and gaze, the mistakes that show up most often, and modifications with props for a body that is still opening. The photographs are AI-generated and some details are approximate — when a picture and the alignment text disagree, the text is the one to follow.
This site does not replace a teacher, and the Intermediate and Advanced postures in particular should be learned with one in the room.
Language, theme, and finding a posture
Ten interface languages sit behind the globe in the header. The choice is remembered and written into the address, so /en/ and /ko/ can be shared or bookmarked directly. Posture descriptions themselves are written in Korean and English; the other eight languages show the English text inside a translated interface. Arabic switches the whole layout to right-to-left.
The sun and moon button switches between the dark and light themes. Dark is the default — it is easier on the eyes before sunrise, which is when most of this practice happens — and the choice is kept in your browser.
The search box finds a posture by name in either script and ignores diacritics, so “Marichyasana”, “마리챠사나”, and a half-typed “trikon” all land in the same place. On a phone the bottom bar carries the same three things the rail carries on a desktop: the pose map, Practice Mode, and progress.
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