Pros and Cons of Practicing Yoga on the Beach
Cons:
- Sand gets everywhere.
- Passerby feel welcome to chat with you about your yoga, which can be distracting and annoying.
- Sand shifts under your mat as you move. After your warrior sequence, the patch of firm even sand you picked out won’t be nearly as comfortable to sit on.
- If the beach is breezy, you’ll have to weigh down the corners of your mat if you don’t want to spend half your practice fixing it when it blows over.
- You don’t need to apply sunscreen before yoga class in a studio.
- Sand really gets everywhere!
- It’s easy to get distracted by all the birds, people, shells, boats, and other items you see at the beach.
Pros:
- Practicing yoga outdoors can be a welcome change to enhance your practice.
- Your beach yoga practice can be a conversation starter with people you might otherwise never have talked to.
- Shifting sand underfoot can actually help to stabilize you in postures where you tend to wobble – for example, you can wiggle your feet more deeply into the sand for extra support during balance poses.
- The ocean breeze can refresh you and cool you off as you practice. Weighing down your mat with shells adds an element of beauty to your plain ol’ mat, and finding the shells can be a fun preparation for practice.
- Once you’re sunscreened up properly, sun salutations to the actual sun add meaning to your yoga practice and remind us of where this sequence of movements came from in the first place.
- On the beach you have plenty of room to spread out so you won’t be touching (or bumping, or smelling) your yoga partners like you might in a studio class.
- Although the beach brings a whole set of distractions, it can also bring new vitality to your practice. The sounds of the birds and the waves can center us and bring us back to our true selves.
(We had a wonderful vacation! Now back to your regularly scheduled blog posts, with more beach yoga photos to follow.)
Rox Does Yoga 