Yoga Basics Challenge: Stay Grounded with Standing Yoga Poses | Day 2

** If you are unable to view the video above, you can watch it directly on YouTube Here

Welcome back to the Yoga Basics Challenge. It’s another day to come back to your mat and allow your mind, body and soul to benefit from movement and breath.

Yesterday was all about the breath and practising awareness in breathing.

Today, we will look at another important topic in yoga: Standing Yoga Poses

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Grounding Down with Standing Poses

If you haven’t already noticed, every (well almost every) yoga class will definitely go through several standing yoga poses. It reflects the importance of standing yoga poses in yoga – these provide yogis with the ability to connect to the earth, or ‘grounding’, and build stability.

Standing poses strengthen and stretch major muscle groups in the lower body to bring about significant health benefits (including fat burning!)

That said, standing poses are not easy to perform, especially for newbies to yoga. I remembered having a huge love-hate relationship with standing sequences during my early yoga years. They caused me to ache, and my muscles quivered like a shaking leaf in almost every practice (they still do sometimes).

Yet I stand by my belief that the poses you dislike most are the poses you have to practice most. Standing poses may not be the nicest to practise, but they are definitely some of the most beneficial poses.

So keep practising standing poses until you get the hang of it. Things will get easier with practice, I promise.

Now for today’s class..

We will mostly build on yesterday’s class, with the additions of

• Chair Pose: One of the most important symmetrical standing poses you will learn in yoga
• High Lunge: Really great for some hip flexor work here
• Warrior 2: Opening up your hips through external rotation of the femur

Try practising these 3 standing poses to start. Learn to be really aware of how you feel in these poses and whether there are micro-adjustments you can make to feel more grounded, stable, and balanced.

We will build on these standing poses as we go along (watch for tomorrow’s class!).

Some additional resources

If you are keen to practise more standing yoga poses, you can also learn about some of the best ones to do regularly in this article.

Another class which you can do to challenge yourself is this Strengthen & Fat Burn video class. This may not be for beginners but you can always try, and remember to hit the ‘pause’ button whenever you need to.

Otherwise, I hope you enjoy today’s practice. See you back on the mat tomorrow!

XOXO,

Candy