Seated yoga poses are popular and good for your flexibility. And you can do some yoga to restore your daily chair and weekly car seated positions.
I’m highlighting the Spinal Twist for seated yoga poses below, that goes waaay back with me… and practical car yoga poses we all can use when doing regular driving, or taking long drives and car vacation trips.
If you’re spending time driving, car seated yoga poses can really help ease the pain especially when the thermostat reaches a new boiling point.
Seated as the driver in the lumbar position in your car seat, your back and right side get stressed.
So when you can, you want to reverse the damage. That’s different than doing chair yoga or seated yoga poses in an office chair I talked about last time.
You can do these seated yoga poses in the car!
One way is: when you’re sitting in the driver’s seat, you can put the front of your palm on the back of the passenger seat and press forward on the opposite seat.
That feels so good up the arm.
You’ll immediately feel a nice stretch up your primary arm nerve near your bicep muscles that may just be what the doctor ordered to restore any arm pain.
This is good to do at stoplights when your eyes are on the light or during driving rest breaks.
My standard car clutch driving days are over, but if you drive a standard shift, this is a really gooood small exercise that’ll help you!
You can also send your right arm back to the back part of the car between the driver and passenger seat, where there should be plenty of air space to do some car yoga tricks.
Then bend down at your right wrist.
Ohhh... that can zap the radial nerve in just the right nerve pain releasing angle.
The first few seconds can hurt so good!…
Plus, save you from physical therapy for repeated motions that irritate your body parts that get the most wear-and-tear.
And since we put our right foot down regularly to hit the accelerator and brakes, our right leg gets overly used too.
So to straighten out the leg nerve pain, ideally, you would want to lay down.
But in your car you can’t, so you can play a little game of Twister here on yourself following these instructions when you take a car park rest break… and without getting any funny stares from the people in the cars nearby. 💚💛💙❤️
You may need to push your car seat back to do this more comfortably and have more leg room away from the steering wheel.
And that’s another game you can play: to not hit the yoga car horn. That’s probably more challenging than getting in this pose. 😊
Then, rest your right foot on top of your left thigh (with a sharp bend in your right knee). And lift your left leg and foot off the car floor slightly. That’s important, so you don’t use your left leg to ground you (and some call that cheating in a game 😉). And so you can get the right resistance.
Then, take your right hand and push upwards from underneath your right knee, up towards the car ceiling. You should feel a nice feeling stretch in your right butt cheek and lower right back side and down your right hamstring where you feel tension when you put the pedal to the metal.
It’s definitely worth the effort relieving right leg strain… and well, that’s what I’m talkin’ about!
And that should restore-fix you until you pull over for your next car driving break.
…Which hopefully isn’t to fix a flat tire, that I can’t help you with. But I CAN help you restore your body vehicle! 🧘🏻♀️
And when you get back to flat land where your mat is, you can do this move laying down where both your legs are off the mat. And where you look like you’re kinda doing an abdominal crunch, that btw, wouldn’t hurt to do either since you’re already there. 😊
Your abdominals help support your back. We can give love to our gut in more than ways than one!
And after that move, don’t forget to do your supporting Bridge pose, Happy Baby …yes, you!
And then when you sit back up, you can cross your legs in your Seated yoga poses position. 🧘🏻♀️
Seated Spinal Twists
…When I was a kid, I remember we did a variation called sitting Indian style back when we were young and innocent 😉
And we’d been doing Spinal Twists since elementary school gym days to warm us up (before we knew there was a yoga name). We were sitting in seated yoga poses on a big and thick cushion mat either yellow, blue, or maroon red that I still remember being heavy vinyl material.
On those mats, we did tumble exercises like summer-saults, maybe named after the summer season that was meant to be fun and inventive. 🤸🏻
We also did our rotating torso seated spinal twists that I enjoyed, even though we didn’t need the stretch or mindfulness so much back then as we do now, older (!!).
And those twists complemented the real activities and past times.
On good summer days, my childhood was spent rafting on a lake or going to the swimming pool which are great ways to cool off. I didn’t see it as a camp staycation back then, but that’s what we did.
…And that’s the first time I remember being able to do yoga. And the inkling that I could do yoga years later was confirmed after the first few years I tried it as an adult when yoga started taking root in the Western world.
…Goes to show ya, you don’t need many yoga moves or seated yoga poses to give you that edge, in case yoga ain’t your thing. Just one pose can do.
Liked the seated Spinal Twist did for me.
And if that’s not motivation enough… a practical adult application can be working on restoring your hunched forward rolled shoulders that most of us carry daily.
Another one of the great restoring seated yoga poses where you can work on this is:
Bend one knee and thread the same side arm through the hole between your knee and the mat or floor.
Then reach and wrap that hand as far to the other side of your body as you can. It’s sort of a strange feeling if you’re not used to this pretzel-like seated position.
You could grab or rest your hand on your other inside thigh leg. Wherever your hand lands, make it purposeful where you know where each finger is. It’s like octopus tentacles grabbing onto a sturdy surface. 🐙
In yoga, when you make contact with other body parts, and you know where your arms and feet are at all times, that’s big progress!
One way to practice this is in Tree pose: you can move your opposite foot and rest it on various parts up and down your leg while skipping over your knee.
Then when you’ve settled on your temporary Tree, try different arm poses like straight up in the air or “Y” hands in the air like you’re doing the “YMCA.”
…Oh my, that’s an oldie.
Or keep at heart center in prayer hands. Now, that’s really expressing your yoga postures.
You get out of the structured metal confines of a car.
But sometimes you don’t have that choice, as most of us spend a decent amount of time in a car at some point.
And in the summer, that can be work keeping cool and staying hydrated.
Because when you’re in a car, you don’t want to drink a lot of beverages. That’ll slow you down having to make a rest stop.
For longer trips, I usually drink up a day or two before traveling to have some reserves to go off on.