Spending hours hunched over our phones or our laptops doesn’t do our posture any favors. But this shoulder-opening yoga flow can help you stand tall instead.
The 40-minute video below, which is the sixth installment of Sweat With SELF’s Yoga for Beginners series, seeks to counteract all of that forward hunch that many of us are all too familiar with. In the video, yoga instructor Rita Murjani—the chief of staff at mindful living brand Aduri who teaches at NYC-based studios SkyTing and Equinox—demonstrates specific shoulder-opening yoga poses, as well as variations of other poses you may already know, to help relieve tightness in your deltoids and chest muscles.
To begin the flow, you’ll start with some meditative mat work, and then transition into some “flossing” to warm up your shoulders and get the blood flowing. Then Murjani will guide you through some poses that specifically seek to open up your shoulders and your chest, such as the prone cactus stretch, a forward fold variation that has your hands reaching above your head, the humble warrior, and bow pose. You’ll also tweak some other common poses, such as the cat-cow and tree pose, to really hit your shoulders and your pecs.
If some of these poses feel uncomfortable, or if you can’t quite get into them, feel free to modify. Throughout the course of the yoga flow, Murjani will show you how to use yoga props like yoga blocks—or hardcover books if you don’t have blocks—to reduce the range of motion and make these poses easier.
This shoulder-opening yoga flow is heavy on the upper-body work, but if you’re looking for yoga for your lower body, we have you covered there too. Check out Sweat With SELF’s lengthening yoga flow or forward fold yoga flow to hit your hips, hamstrings, and quads.
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