Is 20 Minutes of Movement Enough?

Nothing beats the feeling after a long yoga class but if 60 minutes of uninterrupted time for yoga, or your chosen activity, sounds like a distant dream (or perhaps just a little daunting) can you still get the benefits of yoga in several short sessions?

Without a doubt having an hour or more allows us to go deeper into our practice but many of us don’t have the time to do this on a regular basis. Can you still get the benefits of yoga, pilates, or barre in 20 minutes? The growing body of yoga research tends to focus on its therapeutic use in smaller clinical groups of people so we don’t have many large scale studies to draw on.

However, a 2012 study of over 1000 yoga students found that it was the frequency of their home yoga practice that favourably predicted different health measures such as levels of mindfulness, subjective well-being, BMI, fruit and vegetable consumption, vegetarian status, sleep, and fatigue. This frequency of practice appeared to have a greater effect than the number of years they had practised or how many studio classes they attended.

Another study of over 700 people found that practising just 12 minutes of yoga poses either daily or every other day improved their bone health. And another small scale study found that 20 mins of yoga improved focus and working memory.

And of course, yoga isn’t just another form of exercise. It also includes the meditative aspects and breathing techniques so we need to look at its broader benefits. According to Headspace, the meditation app, much of the recent research into the optimal time to meditate suggests that frequency is more important than duration. So that, meditating for 10 minutes a day, every day of the week is likely to be far more beneficial than 70 minutes on one day of the week.

Shorter sessions make it easier to form habits

As we said at the start the major barriers people face for not exercising are time and motivation. We know from leading behavioural scientists like BJ Fogg and clinicians like Dr Chattergee that when we start with small behaviours we’re more likely to be consistent with them so that they become habits. So one of the main benefits of shorter yoga sessions is that they are easier to fit into our day and we’re therefore more likely to keep doing them.

The optimal time to exercise or practice yoga is whatever you can fit into your schedule and repeat. The key thing is to find something we enjoy and then to stick to it!

That’s why I’ve created this Summer Sessions program! 20-minute active yoga, chilled yin/meditation and barre/pilates classes to fit into your day, create new habits (little and often friends!) and keep up your practice when time is tight.