This Is The Best Time To Do Yoga Every Day

The best time of the day to do yoga may not be when you expect: For some people, there are benefits that come from a morning practice, while others find a midday reset during their lunch break to be a good way to break up the day, and others swear by an evening cooldown yoga session to end the day feeling calm and stretched. And from a scientific perspective, there are benefits to all three of those options.

For morning yoga practitioners, you may find that the early practice helps ease soreness and aches before your day gets going. "You can reduce the severity and frequency of morning joint stiffness by being more active and engaging in exercise to increase muscle strength and flexibility," Harvard Medical School's William Kormos, M.D., told Livestrong.

Lunchtime yoga may help boost your focus for the afternoon, and helps you step away from your computer for at least 30 minutes. It might even improve your mood for the rest of the day (via DoYou.com).

But practicing at night can help your body relax from a long day, aid digestion after a heavy dinner, and even improve your ability to fall asleep faster. You may even find that your overall sleep quality is higher (via Healthline).

If you're hitting the mat in the morning, you can consider a more energetic practice that gets the blood pumping and almost feels more like a workout. Evening practices, on the other hand, tend to allow more time to wind down and relax, even if they contain more active components at the beginning. In the afternoon, anything goes: Choose a more restorative practice if you want to be calm for an after lunch meeting with the boss, or opt for a more active class if you want to be energized to finish a report. Whatever practice you do, don't skip the end: "Always finish with Savasana (Corpse Pose), no matter what time of day or season your practice," yoga instructor Cindi Lee writes in the Yoga Journal.

Ultimately, the answer to the best time to do yoga every day is simple: The best time to do it is the time that you'll actually get it done. "There is no one perfect time to exercise other than the one where you'll do it," Shawn Arent, professor at the University of South Carolina and director of the Sport Science Lab there, told Insider. If you know that your mornings are packed with dealing with getting kids ready for school, walking the dog, prepping lunch, or other early-in-the-day responsibilities, squeezing in yoga every morning is going to be hard. On the other hand, if you know that by the evening, you're feeling exhausted, drained from the day, and the last thing that you want to do is spend time stretching on the floor, that could be a sign that evening yoga won't work well with your schedule. Find the time of day that feels the least difficult to fit yoga in, and set the goal of sticking with that. A steady yoga streak that feels relatively easy beats telling yourself that tomorrow, you're going to start your new routine.