Short yoga snacks for more summer fun: Get your body ready for hiking, gardening, and strolling

How’s your yoga practice going this summer? Do you have an opportunity to luxuriate in your practice, or does it fall by the wayside of other activities? If it’s the latter, it might be useful to remind yourself what it feels like to connect to your body by doing short simple routines prior to engaging in your summer activities. Your practice doesn’t have to be long or elaborate to matter, it just needs to support you in your current endeavors. Try the short yoga “snacks” below to slow down, connect to your breath, and anchor in your body. These short practices will be useful even if you don’t engage in the specific activities they were designed for. Please give them a try and let me know how it goes!

In this short standing practice, we gently move your spine in all five directions, loosen up all major joints and ensure unimpeded energy flow along all five major energetic channels. You can do this practice any time you need a slight energetic boost.

Gardening usually involves a lot of kneeling, bending over and moving from side to side. This short standing practice strengthens your knees, loosens up your hips flexors and warms up your lower back, while also increasing circulation to your upper back, neck, and hips to prepare your body for gardening.

When you plan to go for a hike, particularly the kind that involves uneven surfaces and some elevation, you want to make sure that your ankles, knees, and hips are prepared for the challenge. In this short practice, we will warm up your calves and shins, awaken your thighs, and activate your glutes and outer hips, so that they could handle going up hill, down hill, and side stepping for extended periods of time.