Incinerate Fat With This Full-Body Workout Plan

One of the nice things about yoga is that it can be done just about anywhere. With a mat (or a pair of sticky yoga socks) and a few minutes of free time, you can get in a mind/body workout.

Sometimes, though, a little inspiration helps. Dozens of yoga apps offer this inspiration in the form of mix-and-match workouts and that can be customized to give you the difficulty level you’re looking for and take only the amount of time you have to spend. In essence, your smartphone becomes your yoga instructor.

For beginners, yoga apps can also seem less intimidating than yoga classes, but beware: No app we found can replace an in-person lesson for teaching the correct alignment and safety in postures, and it was very rare that apps offered modifications for beginners, even in beginner-level sequences. We’ll note which apps are more beginner-friendly, but if you’ve never done so much as a Mountain Pose in your life, seek out at least one beginner class before starting an app-based practice.

Caveats aside, our favorite yoga workout app is Yoga Studio (iOS, $3.99).This app is a perennial favorite in the “Top Paid Apps” category on iTunes, and for good reason. It has a clean, sleek design that is easy to navigate. Classes are sorted by level, focus, intensity and duration. And there are lots of them: 10 for beginners, 11 for intermediate yogis, nine for practitioners and more than two dozen more specialty classes, including deep meditations, quick 10-minute practices and yoga for runners. You can pick and download a class, or create and save a class that you design by picking individual poses (or preset pose sequences) to string together.

The classes themselves are led by a soothing female voice-over, with video clips of a model performing  each pose. Users can choose from a playlist of soothing and unobtrusive music, or import their own songs. The intro page to each workout lists how long it is and the number of poses it includes, followed by a list of each pose. If, at any time, you get to a pose that doesn’t work for your body, you can skip it and move on to the next. The clear instructions and video encourage proper posture, making this app one of the better choices for beginners.

Yoga Studio also features a comprehensive library of poses that includes both English and Sanskrit names. Each entry describes the proper alignment for the pose, along with modifications that can be made to make it easier, the benefits of doing the pose and the reasons you may want to avoid the pose. This is a great beginner, but it would be nice if at least some of the information on modifications could be included in the class voice-overs — it’s simply not practical to expect beginners to stop and look up every pose in the library to find modifications during a workout.

Finally, Yoga Studio has an excellent calendar feature that allows you to pick classes in and schedule a time and date to complete them. The app will then send a reminder to get you to your mat.

By , Live Science Contributor   |   January  2015

Here is a YouTube Review of Yoga Apps by :