Photo: Fiona Peters
I’m pretty convinced, after teaching hundreds of surfers, that incorporating yoga into your life is going to be a very good thing. Establishing a habit, however, is not easy. First you need to make a plan and then you need to stick to it. Here is my own foolproof six step process to help you start a yoga practice (or any other healthy habit you’ve wanted to take on).
1. Ask Yourself Why
Why is practicing yoga important to you? Will it loosen up your hips and shoulders, eliminate recurring back pain, make you more agile on a surfboard, improve your balance, give you more power, increase your endurance or help you to sleep? Whenever you’re tempted to skip a session, just remind yourself why you made this commitment in the first place.
2. Make It Manageable
You don’t need to go to a 90-minute yoga class to get the benefits, unless of course, that’s your jam. All you need is 15 minutes a day. And everybody has 15 minutes for something that they’ve already decided is a priority. Little and often is the key from a physiological point of view but also psychologically. It’s simply a lot easier to stick to when you make it manageable.
3. Schedule Your Habit
Decide when and where you’re going to do your session and stick to it. It could be first thing in the morning, on your lunch break or in the evening before bed. If you don’t lock down a time and place, it will be very hard to summon the motivation to roll out your mat enough times to make the habit stick.
4. Be Consistent
Consistency is key to achieving and maintaining momentum. You may have to skip a session from time to time, but make a promise to yourself not to miss more than two in a row. It’s much harder to start a new habit than to maintain an existing one.
5. Track Your Progress
Tracking can be incredibly helpful in the early stages of developing a healthy habit for two reasons. It acts as a reminder and creates a positive feedback loop of self-efficacy (that sense of, “you got this”). Keeping an app on your phone for this (there are plenty of options) is an easy way to record your yoga sessions.
6. Start Now
As Napoleon Hill said, “Most of us go through life as failures because we are waiting for the time to be right to start doing something worthwhile. Do not wait. The time will never be just right. Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along.”
A Note from the Author: Let me know if you have any questions about setting up your yoga habit and I’ll do my best to answer them. You can email me at abi@yoga15.com. And you can find my complete Yoga For Surfers training program here.
