Yarra’s difficulty ladder
Everything I’ve studied, arranged from “first morning” to “give it a decade”.
Two numbers, always. A — Adapted: the practice as I would hand it to you on your first morning, with every seated option and smaller range available. T — Traditional: the practice as the lineage teaches it, at the depth a long-term student is expected to reach.
The gap between those two numbers is the most useful thing on this page. A small gap means the practice is honestly what it appears to be. A wide gap means the friendly version and the traditional version are nearly different disciplines wearing the same name — and that anyone quoting only the friendly number is being a little dishonest about where the road goes.
The scale
| 1–2 | Any body, any day, no learning curve. You already know how; you just haven’t been paying attention. |
| 3–4 | A gentle entry. Some coordination or attention. Nothing that punishes you for being new. |
| 5–6 | Real capacity, consistency, or memory required. You will be bad at it before you are good at it, and that is the arrangement. |
| 7–8 | Genuine prerequisites. Conditioning, years of pattern, or a teacher watching. Not a place to begin. |
| 9–10 | Specialist territory. Long study and usually a lineage. Listed for honesty about the map, not as an invitation. |
What actually makes something hard
- Coordination and memory load — the most underrated. Yang 24 is not physically demanding. Remembering it is.
- Balance risk — the difference between “difficult” and “dangerous” is almost always whether falling is on the table.
- Floor transitions — getting down and back up is the hidden gate on half of all yoga and Pilates. Nobody lists it. Everybody feels it.
- Sustained isometric load — standing still is not resting.
- Breath complexity — retentions carry real physiological weight and deserve caution, not enthusiasm.
- Supervision requirement — some things are not advanced, they are simply unwise alone. Different category entirely.
- Cultural weight — some practices are technically simple and contextually heavy.
None of this is a fitness ranking. A person doing chair breathing with full attention is not doing an easier practice than someone performing Chen 18 badly while thinking about email. This ladder describes how much scaffolding a practice needs before it can be handed over safely — nothing about the worth of the practice, or of the person doing it.
Tier I — The first morning
Low demand does not mean zero risk. Start small, and stop if anything feels wrong.
| Practice | A | T |
|---|---|---|
| Ordinary breath awareness The floor of everything. The watching is easy; the staying is the practice. | 1 | 3 |
| Physiological sigh Your body already does this unprompted every few minutes. Almost nothing else I teach has a gap this small. | 1 | 2 |
| Coherent breathing A rocking chair made of breath. | 1 | 3 |
| Mindful chores You were going to wash the dishes anyway. Doing it without leaving for ten minutes is harder than it sounds. | 1 | 4 |
| Seated body scan Easy to begin, easy to fall asleep in, surprisingly hard to finish awake. | 1 | 4 |
| Movement snacking Modern invention, no lineage. It exists because chairs happened to us. | 1 | 2 |
| Hand mudras Physically trivial. In their own traditions they sit inside long seated practice, and the hand shape is the smallest part. | 1 | 5 |
Tier II — Gentle entry
Where I would put a desk-bound adult on week one, and leave them happily for a month.
| Practice | A | T |
|---|---|---|
| Ba Duan Jin — Eight Brocades The clearest example of why this page has two columns. Same eight movements, same name, two quite different asks. | 3 | 7 |
| Chair yoga (full set) The most underrated system I know. Built for accessibility from the ground up, so the gap stays small. | 2 | 4 |
| Wuji standing gap 5 Standing still. That is the whole instruction. Thirty minutes of it is one of the quietly brutal things in the internal arts. | 3 | 8 |
| Box breathing / 4-7-8 The holds are what move these off the floor. | 3 | 5 |
| Walking meditation (kinhin) Slower walking is harder balance than normal walking — the one place gentleness raises difficulty. | 3 | 5 |
| Liu Zi Jue — Six Healing Sounds Mostly breath and sound. The precision about sound formation is where the difficulty lives. | 3 | 5 |
| Daoyin warm-ups Purpose-built as preparation, so it stays gentle by design. | 2 | 4 |
| Restorative yoga Physically almost nothing; props do the work. The rating is floor transitions and long stillness. | 2 | 5 |
| Yin yoga Difficulty is patience and tissue tolerance. Five-minute holds are a psychological event. | 3 | 6 |
| Pre-Pilates fundamentals Deliberately small — that is what makes them fundamentals. Honest system. | 3 | 4 |
Tier III — Real practice
Requires consistency. You will be bad at these first.
| Practice | A | T |
|---|---|---|
| Wu Qin Xi — Five Animal Frolics More expressive and weight-shifting than the Brocades. | 4 | 6 |
| Sun Salutation A Traditional practice includes chaturanga — a real strength requirement that many people are quietly failed by. | 4 | 7 |
| Yang 8 / Yang 16 short forms Gateway forms, built to be gateways. Where I would start anyone curious about tai chi. | 4 | 6 |
| Foundational standing asanas Chair and wall versions are legitimate, not lesser. | 4 | 6 |
| Mat Pilates — beginner block The Hundred is a beginner exercise in name only. | 4 | 6 |
| Barre basics Without a barre it becomes a balance practice wearing a ballet costume. | 4 | 6 |
| Pranayama — foundational Learnable in a session. Doing it daily for a year without it becoming a chore is the actual skill. | 4 | 6 |
| Chanting / mantra Physically undemanding; socially excruciating for most beginners, which is its own difficulty. | 3 | 6 |
| Silk reeling Simple-looking spirals that take years. Not strength — whole-body coordination most adults have never asked for. | 5 | 8 |
| Yoga nidra The difficulty is exclusively staying awake, and I have failed this more than any other practice. | 3 | 5 |
| Balance drills Support drops it to a 4 instantly. Falls are the entire risk story. | 4 | 6 |
Tier IV — Committed study
Months of prior practice assumed. Bad places to begin.
| Practice | A | T |
|---|---|---|
| Yang 24 form Physically moderate; the difficulty is memory. You cannot adapt your way out of remembering. | 6 | 7 |
| Yi Jin Jing The friendliest-sounding name in qigong attached to one of its harder sets. | 6 | 8 |
| Zhan zhuang — extended holds It looks like nothing and it is not nothing. | 6 | 9 |
| Mat Pilates — intermediate/advanced Built for a dancer's body and has never entirely pretended otherwise. | 7 | 9 |
| Chen 18 / Chen forms The most physically demanding tai chi in common circulation. | 7 | 9 |
| Sun Salutation B / vinyasa Cumulative load plus tempo. The tempo is what gets people. | 6 | 8 |
| Kundalini kriyas Introductory work is approachable; intensive breath-of-fire is gated, not merely advanced. | 5 | 8 |
| Shaolin stances & hand forms Horse stance is simple to describe and humbling to hold. | 6 | 8 |
| Ice / roller skating Off-skate prep is a 4. The moment there are wheels, falling becomes the curriculum. | 6 | 8 |
| Tai chi weapon forms Form memory plus an object with its own opinions about momentum. | 7 | 9 |
| Microcosmic orbit / neigong I document what the lineages say and decline to teach it independently. | 6 | 9 |
Tier V — Long road
Included so the map is honest. Not an invitation.
| Practice | A | T |
|---|---|---|
| Gymnastics & acrobatics Floor basics only here. Past that you need a coach, a mat, and a spotter. | 8 | 10 |
| Advanced inversions Deliberately absent from the compendium. Neck loading and fall risk put these outside what pictures should hand out. | 8 | 10 |
| Traditional Shaolin conditioning A subject of admiration in the essays; not instruction. | 9 | 10 |
| Intensive breath retention Belongs with a teacher who can see your face. | 8 | 10 |
| Push-hands (partnered) Solo drills only here. Finding a good partner is its own difficulty rating. | 7 | 9 |
The gated list — not advanced, just unwise alone
A different axis entirely, and I want it kept separate. Some practices are not difficult so much as inappropriate without supervision — a beginner could physically perform them tomorrow, which is precisely the problem.
- Intensive kundalini and breath-of-fire work — can cause dizziness or distress. It is not taught here; use a qualified teacher.
- Extended breath retention — can cause dizziness or fainting. It is not taught here; use a qualified teacher.
- Deep backbends and loaded spinal rotation — easy to enter, expensive to exit.
- Anything for a diagnosed condition — a clinician’s territory, not a compendium’s.
- Long silent retreat — for some people meditation surfaces material that needs a professional present. Documented, not rare, not a personal failing.
- Weapon forms in shared space — the staff does not care about your good intentions, or your lamp.
Three notes I keep repeating
On the widest gaps
Wuji standing (3 → 8), Ba Duan Jin (3 → 7) and Sun Salutation A (4 → 7) are all routinely sold as beginner practices, and all three have traditional forms that would fold a beginner in half. I am not saying don’t teach the friendly version — I teach it constantly. I am saying tell people the road continues.
On seated variations
They reduce the rating by roughly one to three points across nearly everything, and they remove fall risk entirely. It is the single highest-leverage accessibility decision in the whole compendium, which is why every movement here carries one.
On difficulty versus intensity
They are not the same axis, and conflating them is how gentle practices get dismissed. Wuji standing is a 9 at depth and would look, to a passing camera, like a woman doing absolutely nothing.