Yoga Day USA

There's no greater feeling than waking up in the morning, stretching your hands out in front of you and over your head and breathing the first deep breath of the day. Even if you are still in bed, stretching and breathing become an integral part of the waking up process and as humans, we tend to rely on routines to get us out of bed in the morning. Every January, the Yoga Alliance tries to bring that same fresh-from-sleep energized feeling in the form of a yoga class. The Yoga Alliance is a professional organization that certifies yoga instructors and yoga schools across the country.

The Yoga Alliance started Yoga Day USA in an effort to get people who don't normally attend a yoga class to try it out. Using the everyday techniques we all apply to living (breathing and stretching), yoga centers across the United States are offering free—or practically free, some places ask for a small charitable donation—classes on Yoga Day USA in order to get people who do not regularly attend yoga to get a feel for the ancient Indian healing practice.

If you are interested in yoga instruction or merely want an introductory course free as an alternative to your usual workout routine, go to the Yoga Day USA website to find a free class in your area. If there are no classes in your area or you are unable or unwilling to leave the comfort of your home to do simple exercises, find a spot in your house where you can lay down a yoga mat (if you have one) or a towel and work alongside any of the following yoga-at-home sites:

Yoga TV has links to a bunch of online videos showing instruction from all levels.

Yoga Today is a site you can register for, but also has a free yoga class per week, a whole 51 minutes, to put into your routine.

Free Online Animated Yoga has a variety of different poses, stretches, postures, and breathing techniques for you to choose from, acted out with animated figures.

Yoga Poses and Yoga Yak are both relatively easy sites to watch free yoga instructional videos or short sequences for certain body techniques. With Yoga Poses, you can create a personalized yoga routine for free by registering on their site and picking and choosing from any number of YouTube videos users upload to the site.

As long as you are open to having the meditative and restorative properties of yoga in your life, the time is now with Yoga Day USA to take a class without obligations to continue and then you can decide after experiencing yoga if you are a devoted cardio-only type of person or maybe just someone who would rather stretch at home.