Short “yoga snacks” for summer activities: Long drives, golfing and biking

Whether or not you golf, bike or drive long distances, you can use the short yoga practices below to reconnect to you body, deepen your breath and get yourself moving. These practices can help you limber up at any point of the day and only take about 10 minutes each. They include a variety of movements to make sure that all your body parts are taken care of. Please give them a try and let me know how it goes!

Long car trips make your body tense all over. It can get even trickier if you often turn to speak to the people next to you or behind you on your trip. This short yoga practice helps you release tension in your hips and back, stabilize your sacrum, rotate your torso and loosen up your neck. You can do this practice anywhere anytime, before, during or after your trip. Your car can serve as a very useful prop.

When you get ready to play golf, you need to prepare your body for generating torque in a way that gives power to your swing and doesn’t compromise your back, shoulders and hips. In this short practice, we lengthen your spine to create an axis for rotation, awaken your core to give proper power to your swing and increase the rotational range of your torso. We also warm up your hips, shoulders, ankles and wrists in movements that mimic various elements of the golf swing to make sure that your body is limbered up and ready to play.

Biking keeps your body in a stationary crouched position with your legs doing most of the work, while still maintaining a limited range of motion. This short practice helps you to unfold your body and prepare you for biking long distances by warming up your calves, stretching your quadriceps, loosening up your hip flexors and your lower back, mobilizing your upper back, and increasing circulation to your neck.