5 Ways to Ensure You Get on the Mat Daily

oga: From Dawn to Dusk - Enhance Your Daily Routine with Mindful Movement - By Felice Lamoreux

Reading time: 4 minutes

Incorporating yoga into your daily routine can be a transformative way to start and end your day with mindfulness and vitality. Whether you're a seasoned practitioner or new to yoga, finding moments throughout your day to engage in this ancient practice can yield significant physical, mental, and emotional benefits. From energising morning sequences to calming bedtime stretches, here's how you can integrate yoga seamlessly into your daily life for enhanced well-being and productivity.

Get up and go directly to your yoga mat*, or do yoga poses in bed.

Yoga feels incredible first thing in the morning because it helps stretch out and warm up all the muscles in your body that have laid still all night long. Research has shown that good-decision-making happens more easily in the early part of the day. And then once it becomes part of your routine to get up and directly begin your yoga practice, the decision-making part of it goes away, saving you more mental and physical energy for your day.

Do six sun salutations fresh out of the shower or bath.

If you don’t find it feasible to do some poses straight out of bed, sun salutations can be a quick way to stretch out as part of the morning routine before work, school, or getting going with the day. Sun salutations (Surya Namaskara) can be very simple or made more complex by adding different poses throughout the rounds. Depending on the amount of time you have, you can leave it simple or add additional rounds or extra poses within each round. When you’re low on time, doing six basic rounds while connecting to deep breaths only takes about five minutes.

Use your yoga practice to decompress from work.

A lot of people get home after work, or even stop somewhere before they get home, and get a drink and unwind from the stress of the day. It works because it rewards the brain with a strong hit of dopamine – which also makes it something the brain learns to expect and crave. But the pleasant effects quickly wear off, leaving us more stressed and wanting to drink more. By instead making it a habit to move the body right after work with this wonderful form of exercise, we are giving our brain that dopamine reward in a much more healthy and sustainable way.

Do some restorative poses right before bed, or even in bed.

If you get to the end of the day and you’ve either been putting yoga off all day or you lay down and it dawns on you that you never made it to the mat that day, take five minutes to do some bed yoga or hop out of bed and take a full body stretch and then a forward fold. Your sleep will be better and your body will not be as stiff when you wake the next morning. Ultimately your body and mind will thank you for even two minutes of gentle yoga.

Find a fifteen or twenty minute yoga break during the work day.

Most of us get at least one fifteen or twenty minute break during the work day. You can use that time to get on your mat, or even do a standing sequence if you are short on space or don’t want to bring a yoga ma t* to work. Whether it’s a good day at work or a more stressful day, taking a few moments connecting breath to movement is always refreshing.

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