I Don't Care If You Can Touch Your Toes

What a real milestone looks like — and why the other kind doesn't matter

Let me tell you about the goal that almost every new student arrives with, stated or unstated, that I choose to ignore intentionally.

Touching their toes.

Or its close relatives: getting into a full split, binding in a twist, achieving some version of a pose they saw somewhere and decided represented the finish line of a yoga practice. These goals arrive with varying levels of self-awareness — some people say it out loud, some people just quietly gauge every session against it — but they are almost universal. And with the greatest possible respect: I don't care.

Not because flexibility is irrelevant. It's not. But because touching your toes is a performance metric. And I am not in the performance business.

What we measure instead

Here are some of the milestones that actually matter in a SAAL Yoga practice. I am listing them without irony, because every single one of them is a meaningful clinical outcome:

• You can get off the floor without using your hands.

• You slept through the night without your back waking you up.

• You got in and out of the car three times today and didn't think about it once.

• The morning stiffness that used to take two hours to resolve is gone in twenty minutes.

• You bent down to pick something up and it didn't register as an event.

None of these will ever appear in a yoga Instagram post. None of them photograph particularly well. But every single one of them represents a genuine, functional, clinically meaningful improvement in how a body moves through an actual life. Which is, I would argue, the entire point.

The problem with flexibility as the goal

Flexibility-as-goal has a few specific problems that are worth naming, especially for the population I work with.

The first is that it is a moving target with no clear clinical relevance for most people. How flexible you need to be is entirely determined by what you need your body to do. A dancer needs a different range of motion than a retired accountant with lumbar stenosis. Chasing flexibility beyond functional range is not just unnecessary — for certain spinal conditions, it is actively counterproductive. Hypermobility without stability is how things go wrong, slowly and then suddenly.

The second problem is that flexibility as a goal tends to produce a specific kind of impatience. People push into end range before the tissue is ready. They interpret tightness as an obstacle rather than information. They override the sensation that is trying to tell them something because the pose is the destination. I have seen more backs irritated by overzealous hamstring stretching than by almost anything else. The hamstrings are not the problem. The approach is.

The third problem — and this is the one I find most worth saying out loud — is that flexibility as a goal tends to obscure real progress. If you are measuring yourself against whether you can touch your toes, and your back is hurting less, your balance is better, your nervous system is calmer, and you are sleeping more reliably — but your hamstrings are the same length they were six months ago — you will feel like you have failed. You have not failed. You have made significant and durable progress. You just can't see it because you're looking at the wrong thing.

What functional progress actually feels like

I want to be specific here, because "functional" is another word that gets used loosely until it means nothing.

Functional progress is when your body does what you need it to do, without pain, without thinking about it, and without the low-grade dread that comes from not trusting it. That's it. That's the whole definition.

It looks like: reaching the top shelf without bracing. Sitting through a dinner without shifting every twenty minutes. Walking on an uneven surface without slowing down and mentally calculating each step. Gardening for an hour and then moving on with your afternoon.

These things sound ordinary. They are ordinary. They are also exactly what people lose when a spine condition progresses and exactly what they are trying to get back. They are not consolation prizes for people who can't do the real yoga. They are the real yoga.

Why the showy stuff isn't neutral

I want to be careful here not to be dismissive of people who enjoy a more athletic or aesthetic practice — that's not the point. If you have the spine for it, go enjoy it.

The point is that for a body with a clinical history, chasing those goals is not neutral. It's not just a different path to the same destination. For a disc that doesn't tolerate deep flexion, the forward fold that gets you to your toes is not a harmless stretch you haven't quite achieved yet. It is a repeated provocation of a structure that cannot currently tolerate it. The goal itself is working against you.

This is one of the things I find myself explaining most often in strategy calls: the practice you're trying to build is not a modified version of the practice you see elsewhere. It's a different practice entirely, built from the spine out, with different milestones and different definitions of progress. Not lesser. Different. And for your body, actually more demanding — because it requires precision rather than just effort.

Effort is easy. Precision takes longer to develop and pays off for decades longer.

The milestones worth tracking

If you want something to measure — and measuring is fine, I measure things too — here are some worth tracking:

How long does your morning stiffness last? Note it. Not obsessively, but as data. If it's decreasing over weeks, something is working.

What's your floor-to-standing time and strategy? Can you do it differently than you could three months ago? Do you need your hands less?

What's your tolerance for sitting, standing, walking? Not the maximum you can push through, but the comfortable range before you start compensating. Is that window expanding?

What does your back feel like the morning after a practice versus the morning after a day off? Not better or worse necessarily — just different. Learning what your back tells you after different inputs is one of the most useful things a practice can teach you.

These are the things that will tell you whether your practice is working. A forward fold won't. The forward fold is a party trick. The morning after a good practice, when you wake up and your spine feels like it belongs to you again — that's the data.

P.S. I say all of this having once cared very much about what I could do in a pose. The shift in what I measure happened gradually and then completely, and it changed what I do, how I teach, and what I think a good session looks like. The toes are there. I just stopped keeping score.

P.P.S. If you are in a yoga class that measures your progress by how deep your forward fold is, and you have a lumbar disc condition, I would like you to consider whether that class was designed with your spine in mind. The answer might inform your next step.