10 minute morning yoga

A 10 minute morning yoga routine is not a compromised version of a long practice. It is a different thing with a different job. Its job is to get the spine moving in all directions, get the breath deeper than it was in bed, and get you to the rest of your day without a stiff lower back. Ten minutes does that honestly. Thirty minutes does it better, and thirty minutes at six in the morning is a promise most people break by the second week.

In the hall I have watched this pattern for four decades. Somebody arrives full of intent, commits to forty five minutes daily, keeps it for nine days, misses one, and then never restarts because restarting means facing forty five minutes again. The person who commits to ten minutes is still practising in March. Frequency is the variable that changes people, and length is the variable that stops them.

So the honest instruction is: do these ten minutes on most mornings for a month before you consider making them longer. If a morning goes wrong, do the first three items and the savasana and call it done. Four minutes practised beats twenty minutes intended.

The order is not arbitrary and it is not a warm up followed by the good bit. It moves from the least demanding to the most demanding and back down again, and it alternates the direction the spine bends so nothing is asked twice in a row.

• Standing still, then arms overhead. The body has been horizontal for seven hours. Blood pressure and balance both need a moment. Standing quietly first is not a formality.
• Cat and cow on the floor. The spine flexes and extends without carrying any body weight. This is the safest possible first movement for a stiff back and it is why it comes before anything standing.
• Downward dog, then forward fold. The back of the legs and the whole back line, opened gradually with the knees free to bend.
• Triangle. The one sideways movement in the routine. The spine bends forward, back and sideways across these ten minutes, which is the whole point.
• Cobra, then child's pose. A backbend immediately answered by a forward one. Never leave a backbend unanswered in the morning.
• Savasana. The nervous system files what just happened. Two minutes.

If you have to cut something, cut the triangle. If you cut the savasana you have cut the wrong thing.

Practise before you eat. Not because of any mystical rule, but because a forward fold onto a full stomach is unpleasant and you will stop doing the practice. A glass of warm water twenty minutes before is fine and helps most people. Tea or coffee first is also fine if that is what gets you onto the mat, whatever the purists say. The practice you do beats the practice you skipped for being impure.

Morning bodies are stiffer than evening bodies and that is normal, not a sign of anything. Spinal discs take on fluid overnight, which is why the lower back feels tight and vulnerable in the first hour after waking. This is exactly why every forward fold in this routine says to bend the knees, and why cat and cow comes before anything loaded.

If the room is cold, add thirty seconds of walking on the spot before you start and take a minute off the savasana. Cold muscles and long holds are a poor combination.

Print this, or copy it onto a card, and put it where you will trip over it. The point of a written plan is that it removes the decision, and the decision is what most people lose to at six in the morning.

1. Tadasana, 1 minute. Six slow breaths, feet hip width, eyes soft.
2. Urdhva Hastasana, 30 seconds. Five arm raises, up on the inhale, down on the exhale.
3. Marjariasana, 90 seconds. Ten rounds of cat and cow, slowly.
4. Adho Mukha Svanasana, 1 minute. Knees bent, spine long, pedal then hold.
5. Uttanasana, 1 minute. Knees soft, head heavy, jaw loose.
6. Trikonasana, 90 seconds. Forty five seconds a side, hand to the shin.
7. Bhujangasana, 1 minute. Three lifts of twenty seconds, elbows in.
8. Balasana, 30 seconds. Forehead down, hips towards the heels.
9. Savasana, 2 minutes. Flat on the back, palms up, nothing to do.

Two optional minutes if you have them: sit up afterwards and do nine rounds of anulom vilom. It is the single best addition to this routine and it costs less than the time you spend looking for your phone.

A downloadable PDF of this plan is being prepared and is not linked yet. When it exists it will appear here rather than in a popup.

Nobody should be doing a morning routine that hurts. Every item here has a smaller version.

• Sore wrists. Cat and cow on the fists, or on the forearms. Replace downward dog with a forward fold with the hands on a chair seat, which gives the same long spine with no weight through the hands.
• Sore knees. Fold a blanket under them for cat and cow. Replace child's pose with lying on the back and hugging the knees in.
• A stiff or sensitive lower back. Bend the knees generously in both forward positions and lift only a few centimetres in the cobra. If the back is genuinely painful rather than stiff, do the cat and cow, the child's pose and the savasana only, and get the back looked at.
• Dizziness on standing. Come up from the forward fold slowly, one vertebra at a time, and hold something. If it happens repeatedly, this is worth mentioning to a doctor rather than practising through.
• Poor balance. Do the triangle with your back against a wall. The wall tells you honestly whether you are leaning forward, which almost everybody is.

When the ten minutes have stopped being an event, which for most people is somewhere between the fourth and the eighth week, there are two sensible ways to grow it, and one common way to spoil it.

• Add rounds, not poses. Three rounds of Surya Namaskar slotted in after the cat and cow turns this into a fifteen minute practice with a real cardiovascular element, and you have learned no new shapes to get wrong.
• Add breath work at the end. Five minutes of anulom vilom or bhramari after the savasana. This is what turns exercise into yoga, and it is the part most home practitioners never reach.
• Do not collect poses. The way people spoil a working routine is by adding a new shape every week from a video until the practice is twenty five minutes of half remembered instructions. Six poses done well are worth more than twenty followed.

A useful test: can you do the whole routine with your eyes closed, without thinking about what comes next? Until you can, you do not need more poses. You need more mornings.

This is the routine I give to somebody who has decided to start and has ten minutes, not the routine I would give somebody with an hour. The difference matters, because a short sequence has to earn every minute and cannot include anything that needs a warm up of its own.

If you are coming back to movement after some years away, read yoga for beginners over 40 alongside it and take the modifications offered there rather than the full versions here. If you would rather build up over a week than repeat the same ten minutes, the seven day beginner plan is the same material spread out with a rest day in it.

The order is not arbitrary and it is not a style statement. It is the order that lets a cold body move safely, which is the same principle the Iyengar tradition organises a whole class around: preparation before demand, and props rather than ambition.