Commit to Wellness!
Starting a new routine is hard! You may love yoga and especially love the feeling when you leave a yoga class, but it’s no secret that it can be difficult to keep up with yoga - even if you love it! Although many of our students love us, at Yogi Colorado, our biggest competitor is the couch!
Read on for tips and tricks to committing to a wellness routine like yoga, and sticking to it!
Break the Cycle
Have you ever started a new routine like yoga and simply fell in love with it? Feel in love with the way it made you feel both during and after class? You’ll attend classes more often than you imagined you would and just felt so incredibly proud of your commitment, but also felt so amazing in your body and in your mental clarity? At this point, you’ll revel in how easy it is to attend classes and you’ll really look forward to it! You’ll tell yourself that this is something you’ll do for life!
You may continue attending regularly for a couple weeks or for a couple months!
But then, something will happen. Maybe you’ll catch the flu and be out of commission for a week. Maybe your work needs you to do overtime for a week and you can’t make it to class at all. Maybe your friends come in town and you spend all of your time entertaining, but you can’t make it to class.
After your get well/your workload returns to normal/your friend goes out of town, etc. you eagerly think about getting back into your favorite yoga studio, but you tell yourself “tomorrow!” and cuddle on the couch with a blanket for some much-needed downtime. (If you need the downtime, definitely take it! Cuddling with a blanket on the couch is self-care too sometimes!)
At this point, you know you should go back to yoga and you know you would love it, but it’s hard to get yourself back to the studio. You know the benefits, but the couch is so inviting and do you really need mental clarity and flexibility and the fitness that comes with yoga? It’s easy at this point to convince yourself that you don’t need the yoga anymore.
Remember the benefits. Remember why you love yoga and how much it has helped your body, your mind, and your soul. This is the time to break the cycle. After you’ve indulged in the downtime, drag yourself to class, despite the couch calling your name and you’ll quickly fall back in love with it! The first 3-4 times after you’ve fallen are the hardest!
This cycle can be applied to much more than just wellness routines like yoga! Does this sound familiar for anything else? A healthier diet? Staying away from an ex? Studying routines for school or work? Waking up early? The best advice is to power through the times you don’t want to do it - keep going with it and eventually it will become such a part of your daily life that you won’t be going through these cycles as often!
Don’t base success on physical benefits.
Lots of people cite “wanting to lose weight” as a reason for starting yoga. Interestingly, this is not one of the most common reasons that someone continues practicing yoga longterm. Yoga definitely has physical benefits and may help with body recomposition such as losing fat and gaining muscle, but basing your yoga practice on the way you look is setting yourself up for failure. Instead, focus on how yoga makes you feel! Does yoga give you energy? Does yoga help with chronic pain?
Why should you not do this?
Firstly, your bathroom scale is one of the worse indicators of health. It simply shows mass, but not the composition. It doesn’t take into account bone structure, muscle mass, water weight, etc. What happens when you are making healthy strides in your body - drinking more water daily and increasing strength???? The scale may go up or remain the same. Will you feel discouraged when you see this? Instead, reward yourself for how good you are feeling! When feeling good is the goal, you are the judge rather than an inaccurate inanimate object.
Secondly, yoga isn’t about the way you look. In yoga philosophy, samadhi is the highest state of consciousness and described as enlightenment or bliss. To acheive samadhi, a yogi must follow the 8-limbed path which goes through social and moral observances first. To reward yourself for physical attributes is in direct contrast to yoga philosophy. You are beautiful in the body you are in today. Don’t reward yourself for physical benefits.
Set Goals, but Expect and Accept Failures
When you are first learning tree or dancer pose, expect to fall. You wouldn’t think that you would be able to balance on one foot for an indefinite period of time and be able to execute the pose perfectly the first time you tried it, right? Apply this logic to basically every area of your life.
Failing is okay!
Set a goal for the number of times you’d like to attend classes every week. But when you ultimately do not meet your goal one week, don’t beat yourself up. Just shrug it off, smile, and try it again - just like when you fall in tree pose!
