Eight months of practising at home and I've never taken a class — what am I missing that I can't see?

Film one session a month from the side, at hip height, and watch it back at double speed. That's most of the value of a teacher's eye for the price of propping your phone on a book.

What it showed me: my back foot was turning out in every lunge, my head was dropped in every plank, and my left side was doing about eighty percent of what my right side was. None of those were things I could feel. All three were obvious in ten seconds of video. I've since taken classes and they mostly confirmed what the camera had already told me.

One private session was worth more than a year of group classes for exactly your situation, and it cost me about the same as three drop-ins.

The teacher watched five poses, changed two things — where my ribs were in every backbend, and my hand position in downward dog — and the second one fixed wrist pain I'd assumed was permanent. Group classes are lovely and a teacher with twenty people cannot see you the way one with only you can.

If you do one thing, do that, and tell them upfront you've been self-taught for eight months and want to be checked rather than taught something new.

Slightly against the grain: I don't think the danger is the poses you're doing badly, it's the poses you're not doing at all.

Home practice tends to become a groove — the same twenty poses that feel good, in the same order, for years. Nobody's asking you to do the awkward thing, so you don't. That's what a class actually gives you: someone else picking, including things you'd never choose.

Alignment errors that hurt tend to announce themselves. A gap in your practice never does.

Eight months of consistent practice you actually enjoy beats a class you attend twice and quit. Get one session of eyes on the three poses you repeat most and carry on.

I reinforced a bad chaturadanga for about a year — elbows flaring wide, shoulders dropping below the elbows — because it let me get through the sequence and nothing hurt at the time.

Then my shoulder started clicking and complaining on anything overhead, and it took a physio, six weeks off pressing, and relearning the pose on my knees to sort out. The video teachers all said the right words about it. Hearing the cue and doing the thing turned out to be very different.

So: home practice works, and the repeated load-bearing poses are the ones worth having checked.