The best of the best: free yoga online
While you might do HIIT for your cardio fitness or lift weights to reach your strength goals, what about flexibility?
If your fitness goals include increasing your balance and flexibility, channelling your inner yogi is a great idea. Free online yoga classes let you easily turn your living room into a yoga studio to enjoy the benefits of this ancient practice.
To help you get started with yoga, we’ve curated our ‘best of the best free online yoga classes’ list. Mastery of the downward dog awaits.
1. Yoga with Adriene
With 10 million YouTube subscribers and more than 500 videos, Yoga with Adriene is a leader in providing yoga videos online for free.
From short videos of under 10 minutes through to hour-long yoga workouts, Adriene caters to everyone - beginners and advanced yogis alike.
At the beginning of each video, Adriene gives a brief intro so you can get the vibe of the workout. And if you like a little puppy spam while you’re doing your core exercises at home, her dog Benji also joins in.
2. DoYogaWithMe
Almost half of the yoga videos on DoYogaWithMe are free. That’s a lot of free content! It’s also better quality content than many of the workouts that are freely available on the internet. That’s one of the reasons why we’ve included it on our list of best free online workouts.
You can select your level - beginner, intermediate or advanced. There’s a style to suit everyone from power yoga to more gentle yoga classes that incorporate positive affirmations. What’s more, there are also yoga classes focused on different parts of the body, eg. hips, lower back and the pelvic floor.
Videos run anywhere from a few minutes to over an hour.
One benefit of these free online yoga classes is you can choose from over 30 different instructors. So if you don’t like one instructor's style, there are plenty of others to try out.
3. Bad Yogi
The name alone is enough to check this channel out! But the yoga at Bad Yogi is great too.
You’ll find short explainers on the best bodyweight exercises for glute activation plus tips on how to master different yoga poses.
Most Bad Yogi videos are under 15 minutes, so they’re ideal for incorporating short yoga workouts or education into your routine.
4. Body Positive Yoga
If you’re looking for low-pressure, judgement-free yoga, you’ll find it with Body Positive Yoga.
While there aren’t many free full yoga classes, Body Positive Yoga is great at showing yoga modifications for bigger bodies. These are ideal if your size means you struggle with certain poses. They literally make yoga a practice for every body.
5. Cosmic Kids Yoga
This is one for the mums or those who enjoy a themed yoga session.
Each Cosmic Kids Yoga free online video is kid-friendly, and most are set to different kids’ stories: think My Little Pony, Goldilocks or Frozen. And while they’re for kids, parents can still get involved and enjoy the yoga benefits.
Why not get everyone on the yoga train for a 30-day family fitness challenge?
The final word on free yoga online
If you’re a beginner, you may wonder whether you should exercise every day or take a day off. Perhaps you have questions about setting smart fitness goals, whether you might be overtraining, how to get rid of sore muscles or how warming up prevents injury?
These are all great questions, but there’s one piece of wisdom that Personal Trainer Gabrielle Petterwood thinks is essential to keep in mind.
“When you’re starting out – whether it’s with yoga or any other exercise,” she says, “make sure you start with beginner-level classes. Some yoga poses can be really advanced, so do your research and find the classes that best suit your fitness and flexibility levels.”
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Gabrielle Petterwood is a Personal Trainer with a holistic approach to fitness, nourishing the body with fresh foods and living a healthy and balanced lifestyle to realise full body health.
Reviewed by the healthylife Advisory Board November 2021.