Warm up and Yoga Routines
Any exercise requires warm up prior to performance. This is because the muscles need to adjust to the excessive stretching undertaken in asanas, and therefore require minor stretching to set things in motion.
Your first yoga session is designed to reduce any anxiety or fear of fatigue, and so inculcates simple exercises to get you started. These include:
- Warm-up exercises: for the shoulder muscles, spine and groin.
- Standing poses: for the feet and body posture.
- Sitting poses: to shape your buttocks and legs.
- Twists: to facilitate the flow of blood to muscle compartments
- Supine and Prone Poses: to ease the tension in abdomen and back muscles.
- Finishing poses: Cooling down exercises towards the end of a session.
Yoga focuses on uniting mind, body and spirituality at the core. Breathing exercises in yoga are one of the key elements, and yogic breathing is different from regular breathing. Yogic breathing focuses on depth of breath rather than frequency, and can be practiced in the given steps.
- Sit comfortably in a chair.
- Close your eyes and imagine a swan gliding across a lake.
- Like the swan has gentle movements as it glides, let your breath take the swan’s place. Gently inhale, hold your breath for as long as you can, then exhale. Use both your mouth and nose to breathe deeply.
- Continue this in a cycle for 20 minutes.
After 20 minutes, you’ll feel positive and energized. Breathing also sets the pace for yoga routine. Warm up is necessary to avoid injury to the body, and involves a basic routine or sequence of asanas to flex muscles. 
Remember, the key is to get the muscles going and prevent any stiffness and ache while practicing asanas. A sample warm up routine is presented in the picture above as a guide for newbies. Pre yoga warm up should not exceed more than 15 minutes and you can incorporate basic asanas for standing, meditation, back and spinal stability in your warm up as well.
