Photo: Pond5

Ideally, you’d have a personal yoga teacher to tell you every time your feet or hands aren’t in the proper places for key yoga poses. That way, you’d feel the “oohs” and “aahs” in all the right spots. But unfortunately, instructors can’t be everywhere at once, so a few form mistakes may slip by them. That doesn’t mean you can’t get aligned like the pros, though. We asked experts to ID the most common missteps, whether they’re committed by beginners or experienced yogis. Keep reading to ensure your yoga game is as on point as possible.

RELATED: 8 Things Experts Wish You Knew About Yoga

Mistake #1: Putting your feet too close to your hands in downward-facing dog
This happens all the time, says Rhode Island-based yoga instructor Jessie Dwiggins. But its easy to position your hands and feet properly. “Start in a high plank with the hands directly underneath the shoulders,” Dwiggins says. “Then lift the hips up and back.” If your heels don’t touch the floor, that’s OK—it’s just a sign that your hamstrings are tight. You can always slide a blanket under your heels to have something to press into. What’s more important is that your weight is evenly distributed between both of your hands and feet, and that you activate your upper-arm muscles and core. You should notice a stretch down the backs of your legs.

RELATED: 5 Signs It’s Time to Take a Rest Day

Mistake #2: Letting your shoulders tense up in chaturanga
If you sit at a desk most days, you probably roll your shoulders forward without even realizing it. Well, think of the chaturanga as the opposite of that hunched-over-your-computer posture. “Chaturanga requires the shoulder blades to slide down the back, as the head of the shoulders lift away from the floor,” says Dwiggins. (You should feel an opening in your chest.) With your shoulders by your ears, you could put unnecessary strain on your upper body, which can lead to rotator cuff issues, Dwiggins says.

RELATED: How to Maximize Your Yoga Calorie Burn

Mistake #3: Leaning into the balls of your feet in mountain pose
The idea here (and in any pose): No matter what part of your body is touching the floor, you should have a firm, grounded connection. So putting too much pressure on your pinky or thumb in poses like plank or downward-facing dog is also problematic. “In down dog, people get a lot of wrist pain, often because they’re leaning on the pinkies,” says Gwen Lawrence, yoga coach and owner of Power Yoga for Sports. Think about plugging your whole hand or foot into the floor and distributing the weight as evenly as possible.

RELATED: The 15 Most Underrated Exercises, According to Trainers

Mistake #4: Rounding the lower back too much in forward bends
People tend to push their hips back when bending forward in poses like standing forward fold, dolphin and pyramid, because it seems easier…

A viral infection known as hand, foot, and mouth disease is sickening students at Florida State University and other schools around the country. The illness—which spreads through contact with bodily fluids or contaminated surfaces—can cause a rash, fever, blisters in and around the mouth, and painful sores on the hands, feet, and buttocks.

Hand, foot, and mouth disease is usually seen in young children, and outbreaks are often linked to daycare centers. But in the last month, it’s been reported at high schools in Indiana, Vermont, and New Jersey.

The University of Colorado at Boulder also experienced several cases on campus in August. And NBC News reports Florida State University (FSU) has seen 22 cases so far this semester.

While hand, foot, and mouth disease can sound—and look—scary, it’s not usually dangerous, says Nadia Qureshi, MD, pediatric infectious disease specialist at Loyola Medicine in Maywood, Illinois. It can be quite uncomfortable, though, and usually lasts five to seven days. There’s no cure and no vaccine to prevent it, so the best treatment is staying hydrated and taking over-the-counter medicine for pain and fever.

The most common cause of hand, foot, and mouth disease is the coxsackievirus, which spreads just like the common cold or flu. Dr. Qureshi says that outbreaks among older children and adults are rare, but not entirely surprising.

“In the past couple of years we’ve seen a new strain of the virus that causes a more severe and more atypical presentation of symptoms, and it does affect children as well as adults,” she says. “And a college dorm is the perfect place for it to spread: People are touching doorknobs, sharing things, living in close proximity to each other, and it’s easy to pass the infection back and forth.”

RELATED: Health Hazards in College Dorms

The new strain, a natural evolution of the virus, tends to cause a more widespread rash and more painful blisters. But even this form rarely requires medical intervention, except in the case of very young children who have trouble swallowing because of painful blisters in their mouths. In very rare cases, says Dr. Qureshi, the coxsackievirus has been linked to serious brain or heart complications.

According to WCTU TV, FSU administration has speculated that the outbreak may be due to a sewage spill during the recent Hurricane Hermine, or to a related electricity outage that prohibited laundry from being done and allowed germs to spread. 

To help prevent new cases, FSU is sanitizing all public spaces on campus, and has advised all living facilities on campus to sanitize their residences, as well. They’ve also encouraged frequent hand washing and the use of hand sanitizers. (CU Boulder also warned students working in science labs that the coxsackievirus can be especially harmful to rodents, and urges them to take “extra care not to spread the disease…

If you’ve ever taken off your fitness tracker “for just a few hours” and found it months later in the back of a drawer, you can surely relate to this: Researchers are studying why people stop using Fitbits, and the emotions they experience—from guilt to freedom—when they give them up. The researchers hope their findings will show that there’s no “right” way to track health and fitness data, and help developers create devices that will ultimately be more useful for consumers.

For their new study, computer scientists at the University of Washington surveyed 141 people who had previously used Fitbit but had since stopped. Half said they felt guilty or frustrated about their lapsed use, and nearly all of those who felt that way said they’d like to return to tracking.

About half of those who felt guilty said they’d stopped tracking because they lost their Fitbit or did not replace it after it broke. The rest said they lacked motivation to stick with it, or kept forgetting to use their device.

As for the other half—those who didn’t feel guilty for abandoning their Fitbits—45 participants said they had “conflicting feelings” about stopping, and were ambivalent about the prospect of starting again. Five people said they’d learned enough about their habits in the time they used their Fitbits, and 21 said they got no value out of tracking, found it annoying, or struggled to connect the data to actual behavior changes.

When the researchers made various recommendations about going back to tracking, those who felt guilty were very receptive to them. But those who had already gotten what they had wanted out of self-tracking felt those same suggestions were judgmental and unhelpful.

RELATED: 3 Unexpected Things Your Fitbit Can Tell You About Your Health

A previous study from the same group of researchers found that many people who gave up fitness trackers experienced no real difference in their lives. Some, however, experienced guilt for not keeping up with their habit, while others felt “relief from the tyranny of self-tracking,” the researchers said.

The new results, presented this week at the Association for Computing Machinery’s 2016 International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing, show that one-size-fits-all tracker designs lead to missed opportunities for serving different types of users, the researchers say.

“Right now self-tracking apps tend to assume everyone will track forever, and that’s clearly not the case,” said co-author James Fogarty, PhD, an associate professor of computer science and engineering, in a press release. “Given that some people feel relief when they give it up, there may be better ways to help them get better value out of the data after they’re done, or reconnect them to the app for week-long check-ins or periodic tune-ups.”

RELATED: First Look: The New Fitbit Charge 2 and Flex 2

The takeaway?

Most of the researchers’ advice is aimed at developers and marketers of these tracking tools…