Yoga for Beginners: Essential Equipment to Get Started

This video is designed for beginners and explains the basic equipment needed to start yoga. Whether you’re practicing live or using recorded videos, it will help you choose the right equipment to stay safe and comfortable.

Transcript

Hello Insight Timer community. Welcome to this class. In this class we are going to talk about things that you might need to do your yoga practice. So this is really aimed at beginners who have maybe never done any yoga and they're going to do some yoga online through the video series but they don't know about all the different equipment. So I thought I would do a little video just to go over the equipment. So the most important thing is your mat. There's loads of different mats out there. The ones with the markings on them are really good especially when you're beginning because that helps you to know where to put your feet and especially if you're doing yoga online and then having the markings on the mat can show you the different positions as the teacher goes through where to put your feet and where to put your alignment of your body. So that's good and you can find them like on lots of different shops online and reasonably priced. Yoga straps, They might be used in a practice. They're good for beginners to help you get into different positions and maybe if you're a bit tight then you can use that to help you get down a little bit further and as you progress with your yoga we use these in positions to help find the position even deeper. So that's a good addition to your yoga toolbox. One of my favourite things for yoga is an eye pillow. So these little pillows are just little bags with like either wheat husks or like couscous kind of thing in them. So they're a little bit of weight to them but they're not too heavy and you can put this over your eyes when you are in shavasana and relaxing and just that kind of weight on your eyes is just really nice and just helps you just to chill out so that's really good. Another great tool is blocks and so these are used in lots of different positions as you progress to help you get into the positions and these are cork blocks. These are the type of blocks I particularly like. You get kind of foam blocks as well. I like the cork ones because they're very stable. You can get these reasonably cheap as well on amazon or something like that but they're a little bit more expensive than the foam blocks but they're worth it I think because they give you that extra little bit of stability so you would use these to get into certain positions if you don't have the reach in your stretch you can use them to help you. So having one or two blocks is quite handy to help you in your practice there and then these kind of items are more luxury items I would say not necessary. This is like a meditation cushion or a zafu sometimes people call them so just a big comfy cushion. Where it's good in beginner yoga is if you can't sit in across leg position comfortably for long then you could set on the cushion and it just kind of gives you that bit of space round about your hips and so that it makes it a little bit easier to get into this position and a little bit more comfortable. So if you've got any issues with your hips then a zafu cushion could be good for you there and then finally a bolster. So these again are a little bit more expensive very good for certain positions more yin yoga poses but they're great to help you get into them or you could relax in child's pose on top of them you could put them under your knees to help you relax in shavasana. So there's lots of good ways to use the bolsters not necessary at the beginning but it's a nice addition to have you could also use a big pillow and things like that as well. So different things to use through classes you can adapt and use other things that you've got about like you could use like a belt instead of using the strap and the other little thing I've got here is a cushion for your knees so this is just like a little bit of wadding that I have made there just so I use that when I'm doing any positions on my knees just to protect them but again you could use a blanket or a towel so those kind of things are good to have on hand especially when you're doing an online class because you never know what you're going to get so so it's good just to have them about and then you can grab them you know just to protect you and make sure that all is well while you're doing your class. So that's all for now I'm going to be doing some little beginner shorter videos so you can join them and start your yoga practice. Thanks for looking!