Stay flexible while you work out
While we are all spending far more time indoors than usual, we need to maintain a good level of fitness and activity to stay healthy. An important part of any fitness regime is maintaining flexibility, which is why yoga is a fantastic discipline to incorporate into your daily workout.Creating a yoga routine to stretch your muscles gently after cardiovascular exercise is a wonderful way to relax and re-energise while working from home. Yoga’s focus on breathing is also the perfect way to concentrate on your body and leave all your worries behind. It’s also something the whole family can do – yoga comes in all sorts of levels, from beginner to expert, so there are movements for everyone.
Chiquita bananas, as well as quality and great taste, can provide a great pre- or post-workout snack for yoga. This is because they are high in good, fast-acting carbs in the form of soluble fiber and natural sugars that restore the body’s levels of glycogen, which helps to repair muscles. They’re also packed with potassium, which is important for muscle function. Fitness coach Frankie Ruiz has some great tips to increase your muscle flexibility below.
Make yoga a post-workout priority
After every workout, make sure you finish off with a five-minute session of static stretches, targeting the areas of your body that got the most use during your routine. This means that if you went for a run, you would focus on your quads, hamstrings, calves and lower back for your stretches, for example. Static stretching involves creating tension on different muscles for at least 30 seconds. Doing this regularly will improve your range of motion while reducing the soreness you might feel from your exercise routine.
Yoga is for everyone
The really great thing about yoga is that it works on various levels: it improves breathing efficiency, flexibility and balance as well as core strength. The meditative aspect of the poses also helps to improve your state of mind. In your own house, there’s nobody to judge if you wobble, so now’s a great time to start!
Some of the easiest poses to master are the Downward Dog, Warrior I and II, Upward Dog, Lunge, Tree Pose and Savasana. These are easy to find online – look up images and choose a selection for your routine. Don’t worry too much about a specific time to hold each pose, but rather breathe deeply about 30 times before switching positions.
It’s difficult to do too much yoga, so it really is a form of exercise you can do every day or just form one or two poses when you have a few minutes to spare. Team your routine with a calming, soothing meditation or yoga playlist – all the popular streaming websites have plenty to choose from. And relax…
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