This 30-Minute Amazing Yoga Flow to Stretch Locked Muscle

Days spent cramped inside can leave one's body feeling cramped, crunched, and creaky due to the COVID-19 quarantine.

Days spent cramped inside can leave one's body feeling cramped, crunched, and creaky due to the COVID-19 quarantine. One of the nicest antidotes for battling this? Waking up with an intense yoga flow stretching out those contracting muscles long and wide.

To tackle the job, the co-founders at the Sky Ting yoga studio in New York City have put together a 30-minute yoga workout that is gentle but gets your blood flowing when you roll out of bed and onto your mat. "This is a short, 30-minute energizing yoga sequence that you can do to start your day every morning," says one of the co-founders of the studio, Krissy Jones,. "Hopefully it will leave you feeling a little more uplifted and energized."

If you have always considered yoga a snoozy style of exercise, know that certain forms of flow can be more cheerful than restorative (such as this). For starters, sun salutations are simply intended for you to welcome the sun, and if you flow through them quickly enough they count as cardio. Inversions, like downward-facing dog, often give a rush of blood as an instant pep-up to your brain, while backbends quash the tension that you may feel when you wake up in the morning.

Among the energizing elements of the yoga flow, the yoga poses that act as strength training, you will also be going through. Moves like chair pose, frog squat, and warrior one dry out the leg and glute muscles, and a plank — which you'll fall into over the practice many times — is, of course, a standard core reinforcer. Put it all in one yoga flow, as is the case with this Sky Ting workout, and you have a mix in your body to make it easier for you to feel ready to tackle your day. Take your mat (that's all you'll need!) and get ready to feel a lot more limber and less crunched by starting your morning with this yoga flow. To get moving, hit the video below, and don't be surprised if you feel so energized you 're skipping your a.m. Joe's cup afterward.