So when you take a 3 and a 4 year old to the pool and discover they can swim happily until their entire body is prune-like you start to get creative like, hmmm how many yoga poses can I do in the pool without drowning? 

Yoga in the water is great.  Taking away that pesky element of gravity really changes things.  I love stretching out in a hot bath in the winter, so it seems reasonable to move on to bigger bodies of water.  I was in a pool that has variable depths - here’s what I discovered works well in knee to thigh deep water:

- Upside Down Bow Pose – I think technically upside down Bow Pose is Wheel, but I really do mean Bow Pose.  To avoid the drowning thing, your face is out of the water, kneeling on the bottom, hands holding feet or ankles.  Press your chest and hips forward, take a couple of deep breaths and then for the final act, dip your head back into the water to get the full expression of the pose through your upper back. 

- Wide Leg Forward Bend Two Ways – I feel like I can get my feet wider than I can outside the pool.  Thanks to that and the bouancy thing I found you can go from seated to standing and back again.   I started in a seated position and pointed my toes straight up and rolled my thighs open to maximize the stretch.  Then to move to the other pose, I spread my arms in front and wooshed them along my sides to come to standing.  I kept a long back with my hands under my face, arms straight.  I held for a couple breaths and then slowly sat back down again.  The cool thing about going back and forth in the water is you can really feel which muscles on the inside of your thighs need it the most. 

- Hip Stretch – This hip stretch is easier to do in the water than out.  Sitting down, bend your right knee and bring the inside of your lower leg toward your chest.  You can also rest the outside of your right ankle on your opposite thigh and bend your left knee more to increase the stretch.  You’re going for a Pigeon pose-like stretch, feeling it in the outside of your right hip.

I found that chest-deep water is a great place to play with headstands.  I put my head on the bottom of the pool and found that using straight arms, hands on the bottom in front of me gave me the best balance.  Then if I felt my legs dropping behind, I could push with my arms and do a fun flip back into the water. 

Of course once the kids noticed they said, “do the flip thing again!” and I had to do it a dozen more times for them.  (Sigh), all in a day’s work for a water-logged yogi.