Do I warm up before yoga?

Yes, remember to warm up always before yoga. Muscles may be cold and stiff before you start your yoga session, which could lead to injury if you jump right into your practice. Warming up properly for your yoga practice is crucial for optimizing your pose performance, avoiding injury and many other benefits.

If you’re practicing on your own, you have to decide for yourself how much you want to warm-up. There are a bunch of factors – both internal and external – that factor into your decision.

Your body, your environment and the kind of practice you’re looking to have are all variable. Sometimes a practice on a given day necessitates a warm-up, but the same practice on a different day doesn’t.

Yoga warm up poses help to awaken, activate and prepare our bodies for the wide range of movements we encounter in daily practices. Yoga warm up sequences encourage circulation, improving blood flow to all our body parts by (warm-up) gently introducing stretches and movement into the different areas of our body. This helps loosen joints and relieve tightness in the muscles to mobility and you will likely find that you are more flexible, able to go deeper into your stretches and hold them with greater balance after having activated and heated your muscle groups.

There is a risk of injury If one jumps straight into deep stretches demanding poses without any warm up. In this case muscles can be cold and tense, and may putting you at increased risk of injury . Through stretching and engaging different muscles slowly and gently, yoga warm up poses also allow a mindful way to survey each area of our body and to notice which particular areas require extra focus and which you need to go easy on.

Yoga warm up is not just about preparing our physical body, but also about preparing our mind. as yoga is much of an exercise of the mind as it is of the body. Yoga warm up poses provide the perfect starting point to get into a yogic state of mind and centre your being – reconnecting your mind to your breath and your body. Centering describes the meditative process whereby you focus on the present, preventing any stress, worries or thoughts from distracting you from the experience of what is happening in the here and now.

Yoga warm up sequences not only helps us to avoid injury, but also we can optimize our performance. Many of the benefits of yoga come from the intelligent coordination of breath with movement. Thus by preparing our mind to centre on our body and breathing, warming up helps us to focus on achieving this coordination.