Hard workouts and sedentary days combine to make our muscles feel tight. And that’s where a lengthening yoga flow comes in—by incorporating certain yoga poses and combinations into your routine, you can loosen up tight muscles throughout your body and boost your mobility.
In the third installment of Sweat With SELF’s Yoga for Beginners series, yoga instructor Rita Murjani—the chief of staff at mindful living brand Aduri who teaches at NYC-based studios SkyTing and Equinox—demonstrates a yoga flow that’s designed to stretch out your tight muscles, particularly those along the sides of your body. Throughout the course of this nearly 40-minute video, Murjani will take you through poses, variations, and flows that will help stretch the tight obliques along your side, as well as tight hamstrings, back, quads, hip flexors, and glutes.
In this beginner yoga video, you’ll start with a bridge pose variation, where you’ll focus on your breath and centering your mind and body. Then you’ll get into the flow: You’ll recognize a bunch of the yoga poses here—especially the cat cow, downward dog, crescent lunge, sphinx, forward fold, and child’s pose—but you’ll build on several of them with different variations. (Say, for instance, the cat cow: Rather than taking this pose super slow, you’ll up the tempo here, and then switch in a different form that’ll really stretch out your hands, arms, and wrists.) You’ll also learn a few new poses too, like the lion’s breath, undulating cobra, and modified side plank. To end the yoga flow, you’ll hit a bridge pose variation once again, which will culminate in a heart-opening wheel pose.
Like in all of the Yoga for Beginners videos, Murjani will guide you through modifications with the use of props like yoga blocks for any of the poses that may be too challenging. That way you can practice this lengthening yoga flow at your own pace—and feel confident about the poses and ready to come back for the fourth installment next week!
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