5 Ways To Establish Your Successful Home Yoga Practice

I’m a massive advocate for an at-home yoga practice. Once you’ve found a good teacher and established a good routine, a yoga practice at home can be inexpensive, really effective, and can take you places in-person yoga just can’t.

But how do we establish a good routine? How do we get into the habit? Here are my top five ways for establishing a successful at-home yoga practice:

1. Learn about habits

To dive into the world of habits, I highly recommend listen to The Yoga Revolution Podcast episode on Spotify, How to be a habit forming superhero. Put simply, habits are about small, simple actions that you find easy to repeat. When we think of our yoga practice as a big, life-changing thing, it’s hard to break it down into something we do regularly. So don’t. See your practice as a tiny thing you do a couple of times a week or more. Easy, bitesize chunks of yoga. This will ensure you’re setting yourself up for a new behaviour pattern of a regular yoga practice without much effort.

2. Don’t be overwhelmed with hour-long classes

If hour-long classes are your jam, then this won’t apply to you. But if you’re like me (and so many others) who can find a 60+ minute class a little intimidating, give yourself permission to do a 30-minute class (like this one for strength), or 10 minutes of upper body tension-releasing, or a 5-minute meditation. It’s all good. The benefits of your yoga practice don’t exclusively happen when you practice for a longer duration. In fact, studies have shown that regular shorter practices can affect your stress levels in a more significant way than more sporadic longer practices.

3. Follow your progress

When we write or journal about a goal, studies tell us that we’re at least 50% more likely to reach it. And the same applies for your yoga practice. Whether your goal is to gain flexibility in your hamstrings, get stronger in your upper body, or find a bit more calm in your days, journalling about how you feel and how your practice goes after every session can be a huge step towards reaching your yoga goals. So, after every practice, write down how you feel, what you struggled with, what you enjoyed the most, and how you feel compared to your goals.

4. Join a connected community

Movement with friends can be more impactful than without, and – we see it all the time in our membership – connecting with your teachers can impact your goals in a huge way. That’s why we encourage our members to buddy-up and practice together, and why our teachers are always on-hand to support with your practice.

5. Be kind to yourself

Starting a new habit isn’t easy, but you’re in great company, we all find it hard. The best thing to do when you forget, skip your practice, or fall off the wagon completely, is to be gentle with yourself. Beating yourself up actually ends up leading us to scrapping the goal of a regular habit completely, but by being kind, easy-going, and accepting (something our meditations teach you), you’ll be able to find your way back to your yoga practice easier.