My initial goal was to try a few different yoga routines, until I found a solid, repeatable routine that works for me, and I was aiming to do yoga 3 out of 7 days of the week. My long term goal was to be doing yoga 5 days a week and making it a part of my morning routine. I did not end up changing my goal at all, but I do feel like I need much more time to properly gauge my progress and success. Most weeks I did yoga 2/7 days, and only a handful of times in the morning. However, I think if I were to continue what I’m doing now, I could achieve my original goal within a few months. If you look at my updates, I was learning lots of different poses and the most difficult part of that was perfecting the positioning. This made it so the “quick” morning routines got
dragged out until I had practiced the pose a few times and was able to perform them quickly.

I did meet my goal in a way, because I did create a personal yoga routine in the
end (pictured above), but again, I feel that I need a bit more time to flesh it out, practice it and really make it personal to me. I chose to include poses that I was already familiar with, and a few that I learned while completing my goal. If I were to create another routine in a few months time, I would aim to learn and include an entirely new set of poses. I will say that I found some really great strategies for coping with back pain, which was one of my main motives for choosing this goal. I think that in continuing my goal, I would see some really strong progress in my physical and mental health, because I was already noticing small differences in the time I spent tracking it. The meditation aspect was so useful in the mornings and evenings to settle and clear my mind. It sounds silly but I almost felt like a “clean slate” after meditating for a few
minutes. Physically, I noticed some of the stretches becoming easier each time and my muscles and movements becoming less stiff on a daily basis. I noticed this with the poses that I routinely tried, but not with the new ones that I did once or twice only, but that is to be expected. I found some of the new poses very difficult and a few of them were painful, which discouraged me a little, but the ones that I chose to pursue became easier eventually like the pigeon pose. The small but steady progress was such an amazing tool for motivation that I never really noticed or experienced in other areas of my life.

I would use this experience to teach students about fitness by encouraging them to be realistic when creating fitness goals. Fitness doesn’t have to be extreme shredding at the gym, it can be small changes and goals in your regular life. In the same vein, I would also encourage them to find ways that they can incorporate fitness casually throughout the day. In this update, I talked about convenience and not always needing a dedicated time to engage in my fitness goal, which was an assumption I had when starting this assignment. I did that yoga routine in my bed, as soon as I woke up. Sometimes you need to manage your priorities and this day I just didn’t have the time or motivation to get out of bed and unroll my yoga mat, so I made do and I still reached my goal for the day. I also would hope that they would see that small progress like I did and experience the same motivation. That was something that I don’t feel like I could teach without having the students experience it first-hand.