How to Create Your Own Yoga Playlist

We all love to listen to music and it must be said that yoga and music complement each other as well. It’s like going to the gym and exercising on your favorite playlist to get your flow going. Doing yoga with music is about the same thing, but it has some more things to it as well. When you’re exercising, the beat complements with your workout, and this one is quite steady and doesn’t change the rhythm. A yoga practice though isn’t just about being in one rhythm as there are a couple of stages within a yoga routine.

That’s why I wrote about it in this article, to make you aware of which stages there are when you are creating your favorite yoga playlist. And to add on top of that, I’ll be sharing my yoga playlists as well. Just to give you an idea, or if you’d rather not spend a lot of time on creating your own.

Stages of a Yoga Routine

30 Minute Yoga Routine

To start, sometimes we don’t have a lot of time to do a big yoga routine, therefore a 30-minute yoga routine might be nice to do as well, just to keep your flow going on. However, I always suggest you’d do at least a 60-minute yoga routine to get the whole benefit of yoga. Less than that is possible, but you’ll have to let out a couple of things and squeeze your time as well.

This might result in getting a rush routine, which is alright if you don’t have the time, but not advisable when you want to experience the full benefit of yoga. A 30-minute yoga routine should look a little bit like this:

Stage 1: Focus on the breath – 5 minutes

A yoga routine should always start with breathwork. This is vital to start with. If not, your whole practice shouldn’t be done at all. Why this is quite important? Well, during your whole routine you’re going to use your breath to go in and out of poses. And at the start of your practice, you’ll be observing your breath and slowing it down a bit to get it into harmony with the rest of your practice.

MUSIC: Try to add music which is quite relaxing and doesn’t have too much singing into it.

Stage 2: Warm-up/Sun Salutations – 10-20 minutes

A great way to warm up is by doing the sun salutations. If you are not used to doing the sun salutations for a long time, then I’d suggest you start with 5 – 10 rounds to begin with and after that, you can go gently into some more relaxing poses like child pose.

MUSIC: regarding the flow that you are looking for, try to add some uplifting beats to make sure that you’ve got a rhythm, also try that the songs themselves aren’t too different as that might cause your flow to change too much.

Stage 3: Cool Down – 10 Minutes

If you can’t do the sun salutations for 20 minutes, then it might be good to cool down for 10 minutes. These poses are more statically and are a great way to give your body a deeper stretch. Within a short flow, it’s advisable to keep it to a couple of poses as you won’t be having that much time, and you don’t want to squeeze in too many poses that you have to rush in.

MUSIC: make sure that you find some music that isn’t too fast-paced, you want to cool down and not rush into any poses, or come out of them too early because the rhythm isn’t suiting for the pose.

Stage 4: Savasana – 5 minutes

Although it’s advisable to go into Savasana for at least 7 minutes, within a 30-minute yoga session that isn’t going to work out if you’d like to focus on doing some yoga poses. Therefore, 5 minutes will do perfectly well too.

MUSIC: If you look at Spotify, you’ll find all kinds of music before going to sleep. Try using that kind of music as it is relaxing and doesn’t have any lyrics normally.

Down here I’ve created a playlist especially for you, this one I like to use when I don’t have a lot of time, but when I do want to do a practice.

60 Minute Yoga Routine

A flow for this kind of routine looks kind of the same, it just has a couple of extra stages into it, a longer warm-up and cool-down.

Stage 1: Focus on the breath – 5 minutes

A yoga routine should always start with breathwork. This is vital to start with. If not, your whole practice shouldn’t be done at all. Why this is quite important? Well, during your whole routine you’re going to use your breath to go in and out of poses. And at the start of your practice, you’ll be observing your breath and slowing it down a bit to get it into harmony with the rest of your practice.

MUSIC: Try to add music which is quite relaxing and doesn’t have too much singing into it.

Stage 2: Warm-up – 10 minutes

Doing some stretches before going into some sun salutations or other kinds of crazy yoga poses is a must. You also don’t start to exercise before you’ve warmed up your body. And the same goes for yoga. This is of course if you are doing a flow.

MUSIC: regarding the flow that you are looking for, try to add some uplifting beats to make sure that you’ve got a rhythm, also try that the songs themselves aren’t too different as that might cause your flow to change too much.

Stage 3: Sun Salutations – 15 minutes

The next two stages go a bit hand in hand. during the warm-up, you should’ve made sure that you tackled the areas that you are going to use the most. If you want to go into a headstand or other similar poses, you should warm up your neck, spine, and arms. It doesn’t make sense that you do a lot of exercises for the legs (like hip openers) if you’re not going to use your legs that much in the next stages.

The Sun Salutations are great to start playing around and are a great warm-up for the next stage where you’ll be incorporating the sun salutation with some other poses like warrior III, Bird of Paradise, Crow Pose, etc.

MUSIC: if you’d like to focus on the sun salutation, without doing anything extra, there are some great sequences of music available that are focusing solely on the Surya namaskar. Look at the playlist below to see what I’m talking about (Surya Namaskar 6 rounds).

Stage 4: Balancing Poses / Headstands / … – 15 minutes

Start becoming very playful in this stage, you can practically do whatever you’d like here, you can focus on balancing poses like Tree Pose or Half Moon Pose. Or you can go into headstands like Tripod Headstand, Scorpion Pose, etc.

Just make sure that you know what kind of yogi you are, if you are just starting, stick to the warrior poses and Tree Pose for example before you go into Bird of Paradise for example.

MUSIC: this can be whatever you’d like, as long if it’s fitting to your mood and flow.

Stage 5: Cool Down – 10 Minutes

If you can’t do the sun salutations for 20 minutes, then it might be good to cool down for 10 minutes. These poses are more statically and are a great way to give your body a deeper stretch. Within a short flow, it’s advisable to keep it to a couple of poses as you won’t be having that much time, and you don’t want to squeeze in too many poses that you have to rush in.

MUSIC: make sure that you find some music that isn’t too fast-paced, you want to cool down and not rush into any poses, or come out of them too early because the rhythm isn’t suiting for the pose.

Stage 6: Savasana – 5 minutes

Although it’s advisable to go into Savasana for at least 7 minutes, within a 30-minute yoga session that isn’t going to work out if you’d like to focus on doing some yoga poses. Therefore, 5 minutes will do perfectly well too.

MUSIC: If you look at Spotify, you’ll find all kinds of music before going to sleep. Try using that kind of music as it is relaxing and doesn’t have any lyrics normally.

How to Make Your Yoga Playlist?

#1 Flow

First of all, you need to see which kind of flow you like to do when you are practicing yoga. If it’s a vigorous vinyasa flow, you’re not going to add a lot of upbeat music as that will not be fitting to a yin yoga flow. Choose your music wisely and make sure that it’s fitting to the style that you love to do. You can even decide to make a couple of playlists for different styles of yoga. Just make sure as well that you stick to the sequencing that I’ve mentioned on top.

You have a couple of stages in yoga and it’s good to know about them when you are choosing your music. Ever thought about doing some breathwork with some Rock music? I’m not sure what it’s going to do for your yoga practice, but I can imagine that your breath might be a bit too chaotic.

#2 Mood

Music is great to listen to when you’re in some kind of mood, it might be a good idea to create some yoga playlists that will match those moods. Yoga is a great way as well to deal with your emotions, and by enhancing these with music, you might find yourself going deeper into your yoga practice.

Have a look at what emotions come up when you are doing yoga and what songs you might be listening to when you are having those emotions. Although, it’s best not to add the songs that are making you over-emotional as they will distract you from the goal of your yoga practice, which is to calm down and relax.

#3 Add Silence

Sometimes it’s also great to build in some songs that are just silent. If you are listening to the whole time to music that is creating some kind of vibe, it’s great to put in some silence to make sure that you are connecting to yourself again. Music can also be a distraction and therefore it’s good to make sure that you come back to yourself now and then.

#4 Timing

Make sure that your yoga playlists match the right length for your yoga practice. If you build a playlist that will run for about two hours, you won’t know when to stop and it might be that you will go over the time that you had in mind. Perfect timing is a must for your yoga practice.

#5 Don’t use Pop Songs

There are great indie artists out there that are not that known, and that you might not know about. I’m not saying that it’s wrong to use popular songs in your playlist, but chances are bigger that you know the lyrics. This will result in you singing during your yoga practice. Which is also fine if you’d like to open up your throat chakra. It’s just not the reason why you are doing yoga though.

Try to match your yoga playlists with some songs you don’t know yet, or are even in a different language than you don’t understand. Most popular songs will have a connotation to it or a memory, like that awesome party that you went to, or the break-up with your boyfriend. This will bring up your memories and get you distracted.

Vinyasa Yoga Music Playlist

Just to give you an idea of how to create a playlist, I’m going to share my favorite hand-picked vinyasa yoga playlist down here. It consists of some great indie songs and some spiritual songs as well to connect with your breathing and for the Savasana part.

The mood that I have for this playlist is kind of mellow, so it kind of fits with all kinds of emotions that you can relate to.

And another playlist that I like, which is from a very spiritual artist, contains some songs from Estas Tonne. I’ve played his CD ‘Internal Flight’ many, many times and I’ve even played his music during my yoga classes. The songs are quite lengthy and therefore I had to pick two of them.

His music is great to listen to when you are going for a vinyasa flow that will go very deep. I don’t know what it is about his music, but Estas Tonne’s songs are great to discover the depths of your soul and emotions. Somehow he knows how to touch those parts that you’ll need to work on, which makes them great for an internal journey.

Conclusion

Creating a great yoga playlist isn’t that easy as you’ve got to think about a couple of things, like the build-up of a yoga routine, mood, timing, etc. With this article, I hope I’ve informed you enough about how to create your great yoga playlist for your personal use.

And if not, then I hope you’ll enjoy the playlists that I’ve shared here with you! And you can always follow me on Spotify if you don’t want to create your yoga playlist. If you’ve got any more questions, or you’d like to share your playlist, please let me know in the comment section down below!

Nama-stay wonderful!

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