With the Yoga Wake Up app, you’ll never need to hit ‘snooze’ again

is a weekly column where we review smart fitness machines and apps in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak. Thanks to technology, there are still plenty of ways to exercise if your gym is closed.

Let’s face it, the last couple of weeks have been really difficult. And, it’s likely that a lot of us aren’t in the mood to work out — myself included. 

With my brain all over the place, I needed something fairly light for the week. Enter Yoga Wake Up, an app that allows you to practice yoga from your bed. Considering that it was particularly tough to get out of bed this week, I figured it was the perfect choice.

Yoga Wake Up, available for Android and iOS, offers a mix of both yoga and meditation. Basically, it wakes you up with an alarm and then follows it with a quick yoga sequence or a meditation session for you to complete. It’s not too intense, but it allows you to ease into your morning feeling clear and refreshed.

Now, I’m the type of person who sets at least 20 alarms and hits the snooze button on each one every single morning. So, if you couldn’t tell, I’m also not the type of person who prefers early morning workouts. 

But, seeing as Yoga Wake Up allowed me to switch between yoga and meditation, I was willing to give it a try.

In terms of pricing, you can choose from three different price tiers: $9.99 per month, $34.99 for six months, and $53.99 for a year. Regardless of which one you choose, you’ll have access to all the same features for all of them. 

Those prices are on par with other meditation and yoga apps you’ll find — the Down Dog yoga app, for instance, is $7.99 per month and meditation app Headspace is $12.99 per month. With Yoga Wake up, you get a mash-up of both worlds. 

When you first sign up for the app, it’ll ask you a series of questions like whether you’re a seasoned yogi or beginner, if you’re the type who wakes up easily, and the genre of music you enjoy listening to first thing in the morning (you’ll get options including relaxing tunes, guitar, piano, and jazz). 

All of this information helps to customize your suggested sessions. Overall, Yoga Wakeup offers hundreds of sessions that range anywhere from five minutes to 15 minutes.

Once I created my profile, I set my alarm to 7 a.m. and chose a mix of different sessions to wake up to each morning. My sessions ranged from short meditations that helped clear my brain to stretches that warmed up my limbs a bit before hopping out of bed. 

On some mornings, I’d find myself either breathing in and out to the sound of rain falling while a voice reminded me to try and stay in the moment. Other mornings, I’d be doing shoulder stretches, side body extensions, and child’s pose, all from the center of my bed.

The meditations are really soothing and offer helpful guidance, especially when I start to zone out too much. Getting out of bed was also a lot easier — rather than feeling super groggy, I felt relaxed and calm.

It also felt weirdly natural practicing yoga in bed. All the sessions are clearly optimized for the setting, with instructions like “clear the blankets and pillows,” or “sit in the center of your bed.” The positions felt like more intricate morning stretches.

Since I usually wake up every morning and immediately run through all of the things I have to get done that day, it was nice to take a moment and remind myself to stop stressing out so much.

The Yoga Wake Up app also offers both afternoon and bedtime sessions. 

During the middle of the work day, I’d stop and take about 10 minutes to do a session called “Chair-Asana.” As I sat in my office chair, the instructor guided me through a meditation and stretches simultaneously. It allowed me to step back from my laptop for a bit, without actually getting up, and helped reset my scattered brain to power through the rest of the day.  

Since I’m usually exhausted at night, I tend to crash into sleep so I didn’t need to do the bedtime sessions. But for those of you who overthink to the point where you can’t fall asleep, there are plenty of soothing options to choose from — whether meditation or yoga.

Overall, the app is fairly simple to use, but it might be a bit difficult to follow along to some classes if you’re not that familiar with yoga. Since the sessions are all audio-based, the instructors sometimes identify each move by the name of the pose without explaining it. But again, with hundreds of classes, there are still plenty of options to choose from that don’t require prior knowledge.

I’d also recommend signing up for the monthly option, if you want to test the waters first. It’s free to download so you can also try the two “Free Wakeups” that are offered before committing. 

Sure, the app doesn’t offer the most intense workouts but sometimes we all need a mellower option. Especially if helps you start the day off on the right foot, no matter how stressed you are.