5 easy vinyasa yoga postures, broken down

I usually hesitate to use words like 'easy' or 'hard'. Yoga is a personal practice, and therefore the meaning of those words completely subjective. But if I had to select 5 beginners' level poses that show up in most vinyasa classes, I would choose:

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1. Mountain pose - essentially, standing. I like to teach tadasana with feet about hip width distance apart, feet bare, toes grounded, and an optimal postural position to begin moving from.
2. Low lunge - how I like to teach a low lunge is with the grounded knee directly beneath the same hip. That way, your pelvis lands in a neutral position, and you can work on extension of the hip joint, rather than compensatory movement in other places, like the low back.
3. Plank - while I would never describe plank as 'easy', it has its place in this list because of how much it shows up in a vinyasa class, and how deceptively straight forwards the actual shape of it is. Plank is tadasana, flipped on it's side. We want the same postural alignment as tadasana, yet because gravity is against us, we need a whole lot more support from the core to maintain it.
4. Cobra - again, it shows up a lot in most vinyasa practices. And in my experience, is a pose that is not given enough airtime. Cobra is one of the only poses in yoga where we practice 'pulling' rather than 'pushing' the ground. It works to engage the back line of the body - from the muscles that surround the scapula all the way to the glutes that support the trunk - in order to open up the front of the body.
5. Down dog - surely the most famous of them all, but not the most agreed upon! Down dog can be taught in so many ways. One thing I love to cue in down dog is to find a shorter stance, come up on to the balls of the feet, and find that point of hip flexion to lift your pelvis up (as picured). It releases the expectation that down dog needs to look a particular way, and instead focuses on the biomechanics of it. Getting that deep hip flexion is a movement that once we find in down dog, can be easily apply elsewhere.