Micro Yoga

Why micro-yoga might be right for you.

I recently came across the concept of micro-exercise: when you take small empty blocks of time in your day, the times you might pull your phone & go on social media, instead you do a quick bout of exercise. There are multiple benefits of micro-exercise: it can act as a reset for the activity you’re doing, increase blood flow to get you more focused & allows you to fit in more exercise during the day, which you might not find the time to do otherwise.

Extending this idea of micro-exercise to micro-yoga was a big leap for me. You don’t always need to put aside a big block of time to get the benefits of yoga. In this article, I will give four tips to help you implement this into your day.

1. Leave the perfectionism behind.

One habit that can derail us from doing exercise & wellness activities is doing it perfectly. Having too high expectations for the ideal conditions will leave you in a place where it’s easy to just not do it. All you need to do some yoga is your body and a bit of empty space (you could even do it on a plane!). That’s it. It’s nice to be in a beautiful space, with gear to help us, and a teacher to guide us. But this ideal isn’t always going to be there, and probably more often than not.

So let’s embrace that. Let’s embrace that things aren’t always going to be perfect. That it’s ok to do it in the kitchen, or in the airport or in the park. Because the goal I have for Yoga is to practice grounding myself, and stretching, moving & extending my body. That’s it. So whatever allows this to happen is a win for me.

2. Remove the decision making.

We want to make the process of doing yoga as easy as possible. We want to remove or minimize all the barriers between us and the yoga we want to do. And one big barrier is decision making. The more decisions between us and doing the yoga, the less often we are going to do it.

So have a routine you know off by heart, or use our MyYoga App, so your brain doesn’t have to think about what you should do, you just do it. Another decision making barrier is ‘How long do I hold my pose for?’. You don’t want to be debating whether you’ve held this pose for long enough. This is where a timer comes in, either using a very minimal timer on your phone or MyYoga App. Keep it simple.

3. Keep it short

The keyword in micro-yoga is MICRO. Keep it short. When starting a new habit like exercise or yoga, the big thing that trips us up is making the process or commitment too much. If we start off committing to a 1.5hr yoga session, we’re more likely to fob it off when it comes around again than something that takes two minutes.

You want to develop a pathway in your brain that associates micro-yoga with low-cost to big-wins. There’s a saying in neuroscience: neurons that fire together, wire together. You want your reward neurons to fire when you think of doing your micro-yoga. You want it to feel easy to start, low investment (2 minutes or less, you could even start with 20 seconds), and feel the benefits straight away (increase blood flow, relaxed, reset, grounded in yourself).

You can help remind your body of these things by taking a few seconds afterward to really feel the benefits. Feel the increased blood flow, the difference in mood, feel your body.

4. Make it consistent

To make the most of micro-yoga, like anything, the more consistently you’re able to do the activity, the more it becomes a habit and easier to do overtime. It becomes automatic to think of doing some yoga when you’ve got a short space of time available. It becomes the default route in your mind. One way to help develop this habit is to make a no-option rule.

Start with some regular time interval you have each day. And for 30 days, make it a no-op option choice of doing some micro-yoga. Remember, it is already a low investment, high benefits, so this shouldn’t be that hard to do. Once you’ve got that down, extend it to more time intervals during the day, and eventually see where it fits into your life and add it as another tool in your health and wellness toolbox.

Conclusion

I hope this helped you think about different ways you could do yoga. You don’t always have to do it on a yoga mat or in a yoga studio. As long as you’re achieving your goals, it doesn’t matter. MyYoga App is designed with all the above points in mind, and more, to help you achieve your yoga goals.