February yoga challenge recap

At the beginning of February, I decided to do a hips- and heart-opening yoga challenge. The goal was to do at least two poses each day in February, focusing on those two areas. While I missed a couple days in the challenge (mainly due to planning to do the poses before bed and then falling asleep early), I still feel like I got a lot out of it.

First, my hips are definitely more open than they were a month ago. I noticed during Warrior I on Monday evening that I was more square than I’d ever been before. While I can’t measure changes in the flexibility of my back and chest as clearly (I didn’t suddenly gain the ability to do a new pose I hadn’t been able to do before or anything like that), I feel like I made more progress in that area than I would have otherwise. (And probably stayed more calm and collected than I would have otherwise.)

The biggest takeaway for me was the reminder that there really is no reason for me not to do a couple of poses every day. I find myself twisting and stretching my upper body more just during basic activities because I like how it feels. And I noticed that most evenings when I said I was going to just do two poses, I quickly wanted to do more. Both the hip openers and the twisting poses just make me feel good. I’ve been spending a lot of time at my desk lately, and these poses felt like the bare minimum I could do to avoid feeling gross at the end of each day. They got my blood and breath flowing and made me feel human again.

Now that the month is over, I’d like to just make yoga poses something I just do regularly, like brushing my teeth. Doing them as soon as I get home from work seems to be the perfect time; I can get a lot out of the poses and I don’t have a good excuse for skipping them. I don’t plan to focus exclusively on these two areas going forward, but I’m definitely planning to keep yoga a part of my daily routine!