How to Start a Home Yoga Practice

Yoga is a great way to relax and unwind while staying active. It is a versatile activity that can be done anywhere, and is great for doing in the comfort of your own home. We’ve laid out some steps to help you get started with your own home yoga practice.

Get Your Gear  

You only need a few things to do yoga at home: a yoga mat, space, and internet access.

1. You can purchase a mat for less than $15 at most retail or fitness stores (i.e. Walmart, Target, Amazon). If you don’t want to invest in a yoga mat right away, you just need something soft to practice on, like a carpet, a rug, or a towel.

2. You’ll need to find a location (inside or outside) where you can roll it out and still have some space around you. You should be able to extend our arms up and out without hitting anything.

3. We recommend you have a laptop or phone with internet so you can follow along to online classes and videos. You can find yoga books, but its easier to learn when you can see another person moving into different poses.

You can get a slick yoga outfit if you want, but its not necessary. All you need are some comfortable clothes that allow you to move freely.

Choose an Instructional Video

If you’re new to yoga, we recommend finding a channel that offers a curated selection for beginners and a review of basic poses, this way you won’t risk hurting yourself or feeling overwhelmed. Yoga for Beginners by Yoga With Adrien is a great place to start.

Look through different YouTube channels, websites, apps, and even live Instagram feeds to find which platform works best for you. Feel free to ask your friends and colleagues for suggestions. Try a couple different videos/teachers for a few days until you find one you like. 

Start Your Practice with Patience

If this is your first time doing yoga, you may feel a little weird. That’s totally normal. If you keep practicing, you will quickly get used to it.

If you can’t do a pose exactly as instructed, that’s also normal. Just stay patient and keep practicing and you’ll get closer over time.

You may find yourself pausing or frequently looking at the teacher to learn each pose. You’re learning! You’ll find yourself doing this less often once you become familiar with the poses and flows.

Set a Goal 

Starting your home yoga practice is easy. Maintaining and building on it is the difficult part, so it may help to set a goal. Your goal can be as simple as practicing three times a week or completing a 30-day challenge. Or you can aim to become comfortable enough with the basics to attend a class at a local yoga studio.

Yoga is a practice meant to be cultivated with time, so stay patient and persistent.

Kettlebell Training Guide: Knowledge & Resources

You have kettlebells and you’re ready to start training. The great thing about kettlebells is that you don’t need to know a ton of different exercises to start.

The first thing you should learn is the kettlebell swing. This is a good base for doing cardio and strengthening your legs. Once you’ve gotten that down, there’s a large and accessible world of knowledge to expand your workouts.

Keith Weber

Keith Weber makes great instructional videos, including some free instructional videos on YouTube for how to get started with basic exercises.

His workout DVDs are also great. Anyone can start with “The Extreme Kettlebell Cardio Workout”  which is a full body workout video. It consists of short routines that you can pick and choose from. As you build your strength and conditioning, you can try doing the full video.

Onnit Academy

Onnit’s knowledge page offers tons of resources for people who want to get start with kettlebells. Their library is always changing, but they have content tailored for strength, conditioning, and muscle growth, so you can pick based on your goals.

Onnit also currently sells a comprehensive 6-week kettlebell training program called Onnit 6 for $50. The program was created by one of their head coaches who works with athletes all over the country.

Onnit is particularly great at creating content that suits both men and women, so if you’re a lady looking for fitness gains, they’re a great company to check out.

Pavel Tsatsouline

Pavel Tsatsouline is a famous strength and conditioning coach and was one of the early proponents of the kettlebell in the U.S.. He has written several books on kettlebell training.

Simple and Sinister outlines a training program consisting of nothing but swings and turkish get-ups. The program is highly structured and highly quantifiable, so you can easily track your progress, which feels nice in the early days of training.

Enter the Kettlebell is a more comprehensive guide to training with kettlebells, covering forms for more exercises and various other training programs. Enter the Kettlebell and Simple and Sinister have a significant amounts of overlapping material, but I’ve read both and have found interesting nuggets of information in each.

Other Equipment: Arm Guards

You’re going to bang up your forearms a little bit when you start, so you might want to consider arm guards. They essentially sweat bands with hard plastic strips inside. You can pick some up on Amazon for $20.

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Kettlebell Buying Guide

Kettlebells are relatively inexpensive, but before you buy your own kettlebells, you may want to borrow one from a friend or try them at a gym. Kettlebells have been cropping up at more big-box gyms, and you can definitely find them at a CrossFit gym. If you can’t find a gym or if you don’t have any friends, kettlebells are inexpensive, small, and can look cool lying around your gym, so it isn’t a huge tragedy if you buy one and it ends up gathering dust.

What to Look for in a Kettlebell

You’re probably not going to find great kettlebells at your local sporting goods store, but there are tons of great options online. At the end of the day, you’re looking for a metal ball with a handle so it’s hard to go wrong, but there are two key traits you’re looking for:

• Thick handles

• Metal handles. No plastic or rubber coating. That will tear the skin on your hands. 

The perfect balance between quality and cost come from Rogue and Onnit. Their kettlebells cost about $2 per pound, including shipping. Both of these manufacturers have solid reviews all around, and I recommend either (I have a slight preference for Rogue because of the handle size).

If you live near where one of these companies is headquartered (Onnit is in Austin, Rogue is in Columbus), you can save on shipping, cutting the costs of your training equipment nearly in half. 

Starting Kettlebell Weights

You really only need one kettlebell to start. But if you want more variety, you can get two kettlebells: a lighter kettlebell for pressing and a heavier kettlebell for swinging. If you only get one, get the heavy one for swings.

Your starting weight should meet two criteria: 1. You can safely perform a kettlebell swing and an overhead press. 2. Completing a few repetitions is not easy. It should feel challenging but safe. 

Standard kettlebells come in a few weight intervals, generally in 8kg increments:

•  8kg or 18 lb.

• 16kg or 35lb.

• 24 kg or 53 lb.

• 32 kg or 72lb.

Men can stick to 8kg increments. Women may need to go up in 4kg increments.

Most men should be able to start with 24kg (53 lb) for swings and 16 kg (35 lb) for overhead press. However, if you are like me and you work a desk job and have never been an athlete, you might have to start lower. My first kettlebell weighed 25 lb., and it kicked my ass. 

Women should be able to start with  16 kg (35 lb) for swings and 8 kg (18 lb) or 12 kg (26 lb) for overhead press.

Finding a starting weight for kettlebells is a great way to develop some inner peace around exercise: the weight doesn’t need to be perfect. Workouts don’t actually need to come in sets of 10 and you can get stronger by doing a single repetition of something heavy. If 16kg. is too heavy for you to complete 10 reps of overhead presses, do 3. Next time, you might be able to do 5. Get out and do the work, and you’ll catch up to the weight. Once you’re ready to start training, check out our knowledge and resource guide.

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Why Kettlebells are Perfect for Busy Professionals

If you’re a busy professional you might struggle to find time for the right training regimen.

A meeting runs long, and now you only have a few minutes to exercise. Or maybe you simply want to train as efficiently as possible. Or you’re looking for a home-workout to save you time. 

In any case, you should seriously consider training with kettlebells. Kettlebells are great for many reasons, but one benefit is the efficiency they bring to all aspects of training. 

Training with kettlebells can be quick and highly effective:

• Almost all kettlebell exercises consist of “compound movements,” so a few exercises replace many.

• You can use kettlebells to train your whole body, or use them like regular dumbbells and isolate specific body parts.

• High frequency workouts provide cardio and strength work. 15 minutes with a kettlebell can leave you sweaty and tapped out.

More efficient training means you have more opportunities to train, which means you’re more likely to hit whatever fitness goals you have set for yourself.

If you want an idea about what this looks like, here’s a video from kettlebell pro Keith Weber showing how much work you can do in 5 minutes:

Kettlebells themselves are small and inexpensive. You don’t need an entire rack of weights or one of those total-gym machines: one or two kettlebells is enough. These are especially great for home workouts if you live in a small apartment: you just need enough space to spread your arms in all directions, so you can workout in your living room, your backyard, or even an empty hallway (I’ve done it).

Kettlebells are cheap, about $2/pound, including shipping. If you’re like most people, you won’t need a lot of pounds.

Finally, with kettlebells, you don't have to think so much about what you’re doing. You don’t need to calculate 90% of your one-rep-max or remember the proper progression between poses. Instead, training sessions become a function of proper form, reps, and time.  

Whether you’re looking to streamline your exercise routine or find a backup plan for busy days, kettlebells are a great tool to consider. You can try kettlebells at a gym if you’re not ready to commit, but if you are, check out our kettlebell buying guide.

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