5 Yoga Poses For Kids That You Can Do As A Family

Yoga is good for you and your whole family. Yep, you read that right. While you might use yoga as a time to get away and reconnect with yourself, sometimes you might need to (or want to) incorporate your entire family into your practice. Yoga for kids is a fantastic practice—it can improve cognition, sleep, and more! We put together a few of our favorite poses that are perfect for the whole family and fun ways to use your imagination in the stretches. Here are five yoga poses for the entire family.

Yoga Poses For Kids

1 | Mountain Pose

The mountain pose (or Tadasana) is a great way to start your yoga practice. It is a time in yoga to bring awareness to your body, focus on what feels tight, what needs work, and see where you feel stronger overall. It also helps with posture and avoiding flat feet. We love this as the first of our easy yoga poses for kids because they can imagine themselves up on a mountain as a hiker or explorer to begin their routine.

How to do a mountain pose: 

• Stand with your big toes touching and heels slightly apart.
• Spread your toes wide (Who in your fam can spread their toes the widest?) and stand tall—but don’t lock your knees.
• Adjust your posture so that you are standing straight up. It should feel like you are standing tall with power in your legs.
• Pull your shoulder blades down and together, and with your palms facing forward, lift your hands out beside you slightly.
• When you are in position, close your eyes and take five deep breaths. While doing so, ask your family to take five deep breaths on top of the mountain and remember what they see and smell. Afterward, you can ask them about their mountain to keep them engaged in the yoga routine for families.

What mountains did your family imagine? Who was on a snowy peak and who was in the desert? What did they smell?

2 | Tree Pose

Now it’s time to pretend to be a tree. For us yoga lovers, this is a fun pose. It asks us to test our balance and has caused many of us to wiggle and fall. With your family, you can see who can balance the longest, but the trick is to do the tree pose with proper form. Before we get into that, though, the tree pose is beneficial in balance, stretches your inner thighs, and strengthens your core and legs.

How to do the tree pose: 

• Start in a normal standing position. With one foot anchored to the floor, bring the other up to rest on your thigh. Be sure to avoid having your foot rest on the side of your knee, it should rest above it on your thigh, and your knee should be strong but not locked.
• Press your foot against your thigh while trying to keep balance. 
• Either have your arms stretched up in a Y like a tree or out in front of you in a prayer-like pose.
• Try to keep your balance for five deep breaths with your hips squared (straight in front of you).
• Lower your foot down and switch sides.

Who in your family had the best balance? Were either of your sides stronger than the other? 

3 | Puppy Pose

This feel-good pose is going to be an excellent stretch for your shoulders, chest, arms, and down your back. It is perfect for those who work in a sitting position and need to give a little extra love to the back of our body. And during family yoga, our kiddos can get in on the pose, too, because it is easy to picture an adorable puppy stretching, and this pose mimics just that. Do you have a pup at home? Ask your kid to mimic your fur family in this pose.

How to do the puppy pose: 

• Start on all fours with the bottom of your feet facing the wall (not the ceiling) and your toes curled under, facing inward.
• Now, stretch your arms forward with your fingers wide (who in your family can stretch their fingers the widest?) and slowly drop your head and chest toward the mat.
• Take 5-10 long deep breaths in puppy pose and come back up.

4 | Boat Pose

This intermediate pose is an excellent way to shift from the more relaxing poses in the previous movements. Boat pose asks you to engage your core and defy gravity with your feet and head. You can feel this pose in your entire core, and it can be challenging, but have fun with it. Ask your family to pretend they are a ship that has to stay floating above the water. To do so, they need their feet and head to be balanced.

How to do the boat pose:

• Start by sitting on your mat with your feet out in front of you.
• Bend your knees and place your feet flat on the floor.
• Straighten your legs. You should look like a V. If your back starts to arch, keep your knees bent. It is more important to maintain good posture in your back than to straighten your legs.
• With your head and back straight, try to lift your arms straight out in front of you with your palms up.
• Hold for five deep breaths.

Who had the most sturdy boat in your family? Did anyone hit some rough waters (trembling and falling)? That’s A-ok! It is all part of becoming a stronger boat over-all.

5 | Corpse Pose

Now that your family has gone through a full routine together, it is time for everyone’s favorite pose—the corpse pose (savasana). This is a relaxation pose, as you may know if you’ve accidentally fallen asleep after a yoga class (we’ve all been there tbh). However, you should try to stay aware during this pose, seeing where you feel more balanced than when you started. Remember in mountain pose when you were trying to focus on what feels tense? Does it feel different now? Is there anywhere that you want to focus more on the next time your practice? For this pose, have your family be as quiet as possible, laying flat either with their hands resting beside them or over their chest like a mummy.

How to do the corpse pose: 

• Lay down, face-up on your mat with your hands out beside you or laying across your chest—whatever is more comfortable for you.
• Release your muscles from tension, relax your jaw, relax your shoulders, remove your tongue from the roof of your mouth.
• Take deep, filling breaths.
• Stay here as long as you would like.

If you would like to try more family yoga poses, you can check out our robust yoga library on iChuze Fitness. You can try it out for free for seven whole days! Plus, you will be able to find self-care and meditation videos, workouts, and more. You can also practice yoga at all of our locations. Stop in and see the Chuze Difference!

The post 5 Yoga Poses For Kids That You Can Do As A Family appeared first on Chuze Fitness.