3 Short Summer Yoga (Snacks) Routines

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 summer yoga routines prior to engaging in your 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 summer yoga practices will be useful even if you don’t engage in the specific activities they were designed for. Please give them a try!

How to Practice Summer Yoga 

We gently move your spine in all five directions in this short standing practice, 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 uphill, downhill, and sidestepping for extended periods of time.

Reprinted with permission from Sequence Wiz.org

Educated as a school teacher, Olga Kabel has been teaching yoga for over 14 years. She completed multiple Yoga Teacher Training Programs but discovered the strongest connection to the Krishnamacharya/ T.K.V. Desikachar lineage. She had studied with Gary Kraftsow and American Viniyoga Institute (2004-2006) and received her Viniyoga Teacher diploma in July 2006, becoming an AVI-certified Yoga Therapist in April 2011. Olga is a founder and managing director of Sequence Wiz, a web-based yoga sequence builder that assists yoga teachers and yoga therapists in creating and organizing yoga practices. It also features simple, informational articles on how to sequence yoga practices for maximum effectiveness. Olga strongly believes in the healing power of this ancient discipline on every level: physical, psychological, and spiritual. She strives to make yoga practices accessible to students of any age, physical ability, and medical history, specializing in helping her students relieve muscle aches and pains, manage stress and anxiety, and develop mental focus.