Short answer- Kinda. Long answer…
While you don’t necessarily need to have a separate stretching session prior to your yoga session, I highly recommend easing into yoga with gentle movements or stretches. Making your beginning pose wheel vs windshield wipers are two drastically different ways to start your practice, with one being far more likely to lead to injury (answer: wheel). While it may be “awkward” at first to incorporate gentle stretches into your practice, like anything, it gets easier with time. But if it helps you to do a separate warm up to focus on stretching- go for it! Make your practice work for you, and personalize it how you see fit.
I’d say the first ~5-7 minutes of my personal practice (along with every class I teach) are dedicated to gentle movements and stretches that focus on warming up our major joints/muscle groups. Not only do I feel like this gets me in the right mindset for yoga, but makes more challenging postures more effective/rewarding since I can typically go deeper into the pose. I also fully believe that it prevents me from injuring myself at times. We’ve all been there when we try to do something without being properly warmed up and afterwards think to ourself “maybe I shouldn’t have done that” (this can literally be anything! Not necessarily just yoga). The point of doing yoga is to invest time in yourself to make yourself feel better, not worse. So do yourself a favor and invest a couple extra minutes in yourself for gentle movements to make the rest of your practice easier, and to prevent potential injury.
Here’s how I do it:
Wrist stretches
Reaching // up, down, and side-to-side
emPOWER wellness 
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