Restorative & Yin

Restorative: the teacher builds each shape around you with bolsters, blocks and folded blankets, then leaves you in it. Expect long silences, dim light and very little instruction once you are set.

Yin: you take a shape, find the edge where you feel something but can still breathe easily, and stay. Teachers often talk through the holds — anatomy, a reading, a wandering half-lecture — because five minutes is a long time to be alone with your hips.

Both end in a long final rest, which is where a sound bath is usually slotted in when the class is billed as a pair.

Restorative yoga grew out of the Iyengar tradition, which made the deliberate use of props part of yoga in the first place. Judith Hanson Lasater, an early student of B.K.S. Iyengar, is the person who turned that into a practice of its own; her book Relax and Renew came out in 1995.

Yin has a tidy three-person lineage. Paulie Zink, a martial artist, brought long-held floor postures to North America in the late 1970s as part of a Daoist-influenced system he called yin and yang yoga. Paul Grilley studied with him in the 1980s and rebuilt the practice around anatomy and meridian theory. Sarah Powers, Grilley's student, added Buddhist psychology and gave it the name yin yoga.

The meridians and qi that yin teachers talk about are that tradition's own framework rather than demonstrated physiology, and the familiar line about yin targeting fascia rather than muscle is a teaching model, not settled science.

If you are deciding between them: choose restorative when you are depleted or recovering, and yin when you are restless and want something to work with.

Yin's long holds put sustained load on joints. Sharp or nervy sensation is a signal to come out, not to breathe through — teachers will tell you this, and it is worth believing them.