Yoga Poses for Spring

It’s Spring… finally!

Spring is a great time to come back to your yoga practice if it started to slip away over the Winter. The evenings are lighter and dragging yourself out of the house after work seems much easier.

With Spring comes a new energy, the slowness of Winter is over and you might find that you can start to take things at a slightly quicker pace.

Someone asked me to talk about different poses and their benefits and I thought it would be good to talk about some poses that are especially powerful now as we shed the Winter and move into Spring. So… here are a few of my faves and why they are so great!

Sun Salutations 

Those of you who joined me to welcome the Spring with 108 sun salutes will know just how amazing this practice is. You don’t have to do 108 to feel an amazing benefit.

Sun salutes warm up the whole body in such an amazing way and they are such a nice practice to do as we see in lighter days.

Traditionally Sun Salutes are practiced to give thanks to the sun but also to symbolise new beginnings. Every day that the sun rises is a fresh start.

Why not try and start your morning with a few… They might even give you more energy than your morning coffee. Don’t skip the coffee though, we can have both!

Cobra Pose

Cobra may be part of your sun salute anyway but its an amazing pose in itself and its often skipped over so quickly as we move through and straight up to downward dog. As humans we are spending more and more time hunched over… hunched over our laptops, hunched over in the car and hunched over on the sofa watching the TV! I am by no means an angel, I struggle from this as well. Cobra pose is an amazing chest opener, physically drawing the shoulders back and down creating space where we so often hunch. In yoga we often talk chest openers as ‘heart openers’ and cobra is no different. As the chest is drawn open here we give the heart space, when we have this space we start to invite new energy in.

Twists

Twists are amazing!!!! When we twist the body we activate so many of the organs especially the digestive organs. If you struggle with digestive issues twists would be a great thing to try. In yoga we often talk about twists being detoxifying and this is why! They get everything moving. In the Winter we move a lot slower and naturally do less movement and in turn our digestion can often suffer. Twists are a great way to get things moving again.

Not to mention how good they are for spine health.

Lunges

We LOVE lunges… again, lunges are an often overlooked pose in yoga. There’s nothing particularly fancy about them. They are however great for opening the hips and building a strong foundation in the legs.

We store so much tension in our hips, this can be especially true for women. With our more stagnant lifestyles again as we sit at desks, in our cars and on the sofa our hip flexors are starting to become increasingly tighter. Lunges do a great job of working into this tightness.

In lunges we are working to find a sense of grounding (through the wobbles) but also as we lift our arms up overhead we are also working to find a sense up upwards energy. This energy is exactly what we need in spring… upwards momentum and the energy of moving forwards.

All of these benefits can be felt even if the back knee is on the mat so modify if you need!

Butterfly Fold

As we move into Spring and start to get a new burst of energy and ideas it can also be a really powerful time for reflection. Any kind of forward fold can be great for this, a chance to look inwards and reflect. Maybe on new ideas or maybe on things that we are ready to let go off.

Folding forwards with the legs in butterfly can be even more powerful as it stretches in inside of the legs. In Yin Yoga and Chinese Medicine we talk about Qi. Qi is energy and it moves around the body in different channels that we call meridians. As we talk about detoxifying as we move into Spring it can be a great time to focus on the liver, a powerful organ for detoxifying. The meridian for the Liver runs down the inner legs and so butterfly activates the Qi flow to the liver.

As we move into Spring it’s important to keep listening to your body. It’s so so easy to rush into moving at full speed and sometimes we need a bit longer to come out of hibernation mode. Rest if you need to rest.

Best,

Grace x