Yoga timer

How to use the online timer

Thirty minutes covers a complete home practice: a few minutes warming up the spine and hips, a sequence of standing and seated poses, and several minutes of stillness at the end. It is short enough to do on a weekday evening and long enough to be more than a token stretch. Without a class timetable to follow, the length has to be set beforehand, or the practice tends to shrink towards fifteen minutes and the favourite poses.

Breath tied to movement matters more than depth of stretch, particularly in a shorter session where there is no time to work gradually into anything extreme. Moving on the breath rather than rushing between poses is what makes half an hour feel like a practice instead of a checklist. Depth comes with months of it, and pushing past what the hips will do today is how people end up not practising next week.

The stillness at the end is the part most often cut when time is short, and it is the part that does the settling. Even three or four minutes lying flat, breathing and doing nothing, changes how the session lands. Standing up from the last pose and going straight back to a laptop spends the whole thirty minutes for very little in return.