Ideal Yoga Routine During Work From Home

What’s Inside? 

• The pitfalls to mental and physical health that can come from working at home
• How yoga can help in maintaining wellness when you work from home 
• All you need to do to get an ideal yoga routine for yourself
• A sample practice that you can follow (to be given by a teacher)

Work From Home – A Double Edged Sword

Whether it be due to the current COVID-19 pandemic, a natural choice stemming from opportunity or freelance, or a way to keep going through a gap in full-time employment,  the concept of work from home provides great opportunities and challenges. You have great control over your environment and productivity output, but at the same time, distractions and responsibilities abound. 

Working from home also means that you do not get to go out as much as regular workers do, which in turn means less opportunities for physical activities. Indeed, working from home can make you susceptible to stress, obesity, back and neck problems, carpal tunnel and eye strain. Losing out on your health however, should not be the cost of working from home. So, how can you remedy the problem?

Breathe Easy – Yoga To the Rescue

If you are working from home and need to add some exercise to your routine, you should consider yoga, and here is why – 

• Though it may look (and is) peaceful and gentle, yoga provides a great challenge to the body and can pack a powerful calorie burn, helping you keep the fat at bay.
• Yoga can help in increasing your mobility and flexibility by putting your body through a wide range of motions. Over time, you will be able to bend and twist deeper into poses, from which will come muscle stimulation, relaxation, and stiffness and pain alleviation
• Yoga can also work wonders for your mental health. Not only does yoga help in reducing stress and increasing relaxation, it can also enhance memory, concentration, and focus. For those who suffer from, or are vulnerable to, mental health disorders, yoga can also help in symptom alleviation.
• For those who work from home, lack of routine can become a major source of uncertainty and procrastination. Adding yoga to the mix helps in creating order and structure to your day, and can become the perfect winding own practice to help bring your day to a close, or to give you that energy boost in the morning to get all your work done.
• Working from home also means that you often have to balance home and work requirements at once. Whether it be cooking while researching or attending a meeting while keeping an ear out for the kids, work from home can bring its own stresses and challenges. Yoga helps in dedicating some self-care time where you can focus on your own self and wellbeing

Making Yoga A Part of the Day

In order to develop an ideal yoga routine that you would be sure to practice everyday, here are some important considerations – 

• Practicalities – Before you get down to a routine, you need to make sure that all the practicalities are in place. This includes ensuring that you have ample, conducive and clean space to work out in, alternative arrangements to look after your pets or kids if you have them, and keeping all necessary items such as the yoga mat and water handy. Looking after these practical considerations helps in preventing interruptions to your routine, and ensures that you find no excuses to not work out. 
• Goals – Yoga is a versatile and holistic tool, so you can decide what parts to focus on depending upon your goals. If you wish to follow an energy-boosting and calorie-burning routine, you can focus more on asanas and stretches. If relaxation is what you are after, you can throw in some meditation and pranayama into the mix. Your goals will impact the time of the day you work out at, and what the end results will be. Of course, you are free to mix it all up and have a little bit of everything.
• Leaning Well – Since you will not have the supervision of a teacher or the structure of yoga class, you will have to depend on your own common sense and wisdom to work out properly and prevent injuries. This would not be a problem for regular practitioners, but is an important consideration for beginners. So make sure to learn the practice from reliable sources, and modify when necessary. Always listen to your body and stop or modify when needed.
• Respect Your Body – Remember that you cannot just plunge into an inversion or backbend without any warm up, as this is more likely to lead to strain and injury than a stronger body. Instead, gradually warm up by doing some opening poses that engage the major muscle groups, move on to the intense poses, and come back to cooling down with some meditation and relaxation poses. This ensures that your body is able to take the best of the exercises without any harm.

By integrating yoga into your daily routine, those who work from home can gain a lot by the way of physical and mental wellbeing. It can also help you in taking out some much-needed time for self-care, and leave you recharged and replenished for your projects. So do take up yoga as you work from home, and you will find better routine, physical and mental health, and better productivity.

To help you along, here is a sample routine that you can try out, developed exclusively by the teachers at Hith Yoga Studio