If you’re just getting bitten by that yoga bug, the best way to enrich your yoga class practice (apart from one of those lovely yoga vacations or week at a yoga retreat) is to build home yoga sessions into your daily routine. I know that for many of us it’s easier said than done, but making the effort to bring your yoga home with you not only enhances your progress, but also adds that sense of balance and calm to those home / work / life demands that seem to overtake every day. So, how to get started? Check out our ABCs for taking your yoga home with you …
Ask for Advice :
All the time you’re relatively new to the postures, it’s best to keep up with those classes. Your yoga instructor has completed extensive yoga teacher training and knows all about building routines, so make the most of your class sessions and ask your instructor to identify which poses you should start off with at home. As you progress, your instructor can offer you hands-on attention when learning new positions until you are confident to include these into your home routine.
Build up Slowly :
You might not have either the time or the confidence in enough postures to start off with a full 45 minutes of yoga, so create your routine from an intial starting point, say 15 to 20 minutes and work through your poses within the time frame. As you become more confident, both the time you take when holding each position and the number of postures you include will gradually increase, until you find you can easily fill those longer sessions at home.
Consistency is the Key :
Perfecting your yoga is the same as mastering any skill : practice makes perfect, so the more consistently you practice your basic moves and the more regularly you include yoga sessions into your home routine, the better your overall progress will be. To be honest, if you focus on this using the slow build-up method above, you’ll quickly find you get to the stage where you’ll find yourself feeling disappointed if you miss a session, because you really start to feel those benefits of regular yoga pretty quickly!
Diligence with Poses :
Be diligent about practicing your poses and pick the ones which will benefit you the most, which is not necessarily the same as choosing the ones you like the best! Again, practice does make perfect and if you set yourself up to include at least one pose a session which you find more challenging, you can think of this as a positive challenge to improving your posture and your practice.
Environmentally Friendly :
The joy of a home routine is that you can pick anywhere to do it, indoors or out, so long as a few basic criteria are met. The space must be warm, relaxing, calm and comfortable. Wherever you lay your mat can be your yoga studio, so long as you can achieve the calming space required and have ample room to stretch without bumping into the furniture. If you can light a scented candle and play some appropriate music, then even better!
If necessary, you can always research images of yoga studios, yoga retreats or meditation retreats to get an idea of what might work within your own home. Finally, you could always ask your yoga class instructor, because when learning how to become a yoga instructor, he or she will have learned all about conducive environments and will be able to offer you handy advice, from which scents in candles to use for different moods (relaxation, energizing etc) to advising you on the latest mix of relaxing tunes on CD!
So there you have it, the ABC (and then some) for building a home yoga routine that you can stick with!