If you have incorporated a yoga practice into your life, pairing it with a tea ritual seems like a perfect match. For those of us who do yoga, I’m guessing that we all try to approach it with a meditative and ritualistic mindset…preparing for relaxation, rejuvination, and maybe even a transformative experience. Tea can be a nice part of the entire process. However, with so many teas available, all offering a variety of physiological and psychological benefits, is there a clear recommendation for whether to drink tea before and/or after yoga? Are there specific tea and yoga pairings that are best? Let’s take a look at our options.
Drinking 8 oz. of tea before and after yoga can have beneficial physiological and psychological benefits. Drinking mildly caffeinated tea before yoga can help with energy, focus, and preventing inflammation. Drinking relaxing tea after yoga can help with rehydration, immune support, and easing back into your day.
Practicing yoga and drinking tea are both highly healthy, contemplative activities. It makes sense to pair them together for an even fuller experience.
Let’s cover some of the specifics in terms of how to incorporate tea into your yoga practice and which teas are the bests fit.
You may also want to read my article The 6 Best Teas for Meditation: Calm, Alert, Open Minds.
“Drinking 8 oz. of tea before and after yoga can have beneficial physiological and psychological benefits. Drinking mildly caffeinated tea before yoga can help with energy, focus, and preventing inflammation. Drinking relaxing tea after yoga can help with rehydration, immune support, and easing back into your day.”
TEA CROSSING
Can You Drink Tea Before Yoga? Tips and Facts
Some practitioners are against drinking tea before a yoga session. Others have long practiced drinking their ritual tea to prepare for the workout.
While it remains a matter of personal preference, there is substantial research to suggest that drinking tea beforehand can be more beneficial than not drinking tea.
Hydrating is necessary before your workouts because the body loses moisture during exercise. While water is the top recommendation, tea also has multiple benefits. If you incorporate tea into your yoga practice, most studios will suggest drinking 8 oz. of tea 30 minutes prior to your session.
The best way to get the maximum benefits of both is to know the facts about how drinking tea can complement your yoga program to help meet fitness goals.
“Practicing yoga and drinking tea are both highly healthy, contemplative activities. It makes sense to pair them together for an even fuller experience.”
TEA CROSSING
Two Ancient Wellness Practices: Tea and Yoga
Yoga practices and tea drinking are ancient remedies for promoting wellness in the body and the mind.
Tea and yoga both have histories dating back thousands of years. Tea can give you a needed boost while adding a pleasant flavor in preparation for a yoga session. Tea also has therapeutic value for the body and mind.
To better understand the full benefits of drinking tea before yoga, let’s look at the specific benefits along with why tea is an excellent choice and how it works.
Tea Gives Yoga a Healthy Boost
Tea is filled with health benefits that can prime the body for your yoga session.
Small amounts of caffeine can give you a boost before you start your workout, but too much caffeine can interfere with your yoga practice.
The goal is to hydrate your body and tea does a remarkable job without giving you a big blast of caffeine. Coffee dehydrates you while tea hydrates. The natural caffeine in some teas is released more slowly in your body without the jarring impact coffee can impart. You get the mood and energy boost without the jitters.
Here are 4 additional benefits of drinking tea before yoga:
Immune System Boost
Tea is a rich source of powerful antioxidants. These compounds help to boost your immune system for better overall fitness. It can help to prevent illness and disease by building your immune system response to any invading viruses or bacteria. These antioxidants support your body’s ability to more quickly repair and promote new cell growth while fending off potential infections.
Anti-inflammatory Infusion
Tea contains anti-inflammatory properties. What this means for you is that you’re less likely to sustain any damage to the soft tissues in your body from exercising. Consider the techniques practiced in hot-yoga. Your body becomes challenged when you first begin. It helps to keep sore muscles and joints at bay by reducing inflammation, for more productive and enjoyable yoga exercises.
Improved Focus
Caffeine is a stimulant that can help to sharpen your mind and improve your focus. When it’s released slowly into the system, the results are more beneficial than the big jolt that is delivered by coffee. Tea is the perfect pairing with yoga because it gives you the right amounts of what your body and mind need just before your workout begins. It allows you to focus on the fine details of your yoga session without distraction.
Sensory Stimulation
Drinking tea before your yoga workout can help to stimulate feelings of pleasure. The flavor of your favorite tea makes you feel relaxed and happy. Drink tea because it can serve as an aid to make you feel better satisfied. Tea drinking is a small element that can become one of the most important in your ritual. It’s an act that can prepare your mind for a more successful yoga workout because of an improved mood with better focus.
What are the Best Teas to Drink Before Yoga? And Why?
Green tea and herbal teas are ideal to drink before yoga. A small amount of green tea caffeine can energize and focus your practice without overwhelming you. Non-caffeinated herbal teas can hydrate and nourish you. Both green tea and herbal teas offer immune support, help with inflammation, and offer antioxidants.
All true tea varieties come from the same plant, Camelia sinensis, but the processing changes the composition of the compounds. Some are better for yoga than others. Herbal teas are in a different category called tisanes with several varieties offering compositions and benefits to best complement your yoga goals.
Here is a look at specific teas that give you the best results when paired prior to your yoga workout.
Green Tea
Green tea is ideal before yoga.
While yoga increases your stamina and flexibility, releases tension in the body improves sleep, reduces inflammation, strengthens your immune system, and promotes inner peace, green tea matches these goals.
The compounds that exist in green tea also reduce inflammation, boosts metabolism, aids in brain and memory function, helps you relax, reduces inflammation, and slows the aging process.
The benefit of drinking green tea before doing yoga is that you become one with the tea/yoga ritual giving you sharper focus while calming you. It engages the senses and wakes them up while the taste and aroma prepare you for a yoga experience.
Herbal Tea
Try herbal teas if you prefer to avoid caffeine.
Caffeinated teas give you a mood and energy boost because of the extra dopamine and adrenaline that your body produces in response. As the stimulant starts to exit your system, you may experience a drop in mood and energy levels.
Some of us prefer the benefits of caffeine and others do not. If you would rather leave caffeine out of your yoga routine, several herbal teas will help to hydrate your body and give you a caffeine-free jumpstart.
Three top recommended herbal teas you could consider for yoga are:
Tick Tock Rooibos Green Tea
This brand ensures that the tea is naturally free of caffeine. The aroma and taste are mildly sweet and include a fresh and subtle flavor. It wakes up your taste buds slowly with the mind and body following suit. It also gives you a small energy boost without any of the effects of caffeine.
Pukka Three Cinnamon Tea
This tea is an organic blend that includes three types of fo cinnamon from Vietnam, Indonesia, and India. The blend is known for helping to balance blood sugars in the body. It helps to keep your mood on an even keel while stimulating your senses and sharpening your focus. If you enjoy the taste and aroma of cinnamon, this herbal tea can lift your mood and start you on a positive trajectory for the day without caffeine.
Twinings Lemon & Ginger Tea
This is a uniquely blended caffeine-free herbal tea. The flavor is zesty to wake up the senses and your mind. It improves focus and gives you a feeling of invigoration. This is one of the better pick-me-up teas to prepare your mind for a successful yoga workout.
Can You Drink Tea After Yoga? Tips and Facts
Drinking at least 8 oz. of tea after your yoga practice can immediately rehydrate you, help to prevent inflammation, and strengthen your immune system. It can also replenish you with essential antioxidant support.
After your yoga session, you will hopefully have gained a sense of invigoration in your body with a relaxed and peaceful mind. You’ve focused on rejuvenating your mind and body. The focus has been on you, but you are preparing for a transition period into the world and the realities of life outside of yourself.
“Drinking tea is absolutely allowed and even encouraged as a part of the yoga ritual to ease you from one state to another, and to lessen the stress on your body and mind.”
TEA CROSSING
Drinking tea can help you prepare for this transition. Both the ritual aspect of drinking tea as well as the physical benefits can support the transition from a peaceful state to the potential chaos the day may bring. If you practice yoga at night, tea an also help you transition to better sleep.
Drinking tea is absolutely allowed and even encouraged as a part of the yoga ritual to ease you from one state to another, and to lessen the stress on your body and mind.
Why Should You Drink Tea After Yoga?
You’ve just expended some of the fluids in your body through perspiration from your yoga exercises. Your body needs to receive more hydration. Tea is an excellent source of fluids because it is brewed in the water that your body needs to replenish the ideal fluid balances that keep the physical functions in perfect harmony.
Tea contains other health benefits that can stimulate your body and mind in ways that give you a boost in energy, sharper focus and mental processing, and an immune system boost.
4 Benefits of Drinking Tea after Yoga
Enjoying tea after your yoga session is an ideal way to simultaneously integrate your soulful experiences and replenish your body.
With a focus on how tea benefits your body after yoga, here are four things you can expect:
Benefit #1: Inflammation Reduction
The same anti-inflammatory compounds that helped to prepare you for your yoga workout are at work when you drink tea afterward. A cup of tea gives your body an extra dose to help prevent soreness, especially after a hot yoga workout that stretched your tendons, muscles, and other soft tissue to their limits. It’s the ideal pairing to increase flexibility and stamina in a natural way instead of taking over the counter medications to relieve soreness or stiffness.
Benefit #2: Strengthened Immune System
Tea after yoga delivers a boost of antioxidants that continue to help boost and strengthen your body’s immune system. It is a helper that improves your overall health so the body can more effectively stave off common bacteria and viruses that live in the air and on surfaces you come in contact with. The antioxidants help your cells to repair themselves more quickly and efficiently as you move through your day.
Benefit #3: Metabolism Boost
Tea also provides us with a metabolic boost so our bodies can more effectively convert food into energy. It works perfectly with the goals of yoga for promoting more stamina. It also helps us to burn fat stores more efficiently to keep off extra unwanted pounds.
Benefit #4: Mental Preparedness
Tea can help us to make the transition from a state of self-awareness to a readiness to handle the tasks that we must complete in our everyday lives. The properties of tea prepare our physical bodies for entering the world around us. They also help us mentally prepare for transitioning into the real world. The aroma and flavor have a relaxing and pleasing effect on the senses. Certain teas can deliver a better state of wakefulness and mindfulness that makes us ready for anything that comes our way. Drinking tea is the ideal transition from the meditative and self-focused state we achieve in yoga.
What Are the Best Teas To Drink After Yoga? And Why?
Teas are pleasant and stimulate each person in different ways. We’ve discussed the benefits that apply to almost all people by examining the compounds found in tea, their properties, and how they affect the body. We must also consider the psychological effects of tea on each person as an individual.
Author Shelby Kroach offer her recommendations on the best teas to drink after yoga. She lends her expertise on how to get the maximum benefits for our bodies, but it is wise to consider what blends of teas we enjoy the most.
Don’t drink tea simply because someone recommended it. Use teas with the same properties that have the aroma and flavor that you most enjoy.
I’m giving you the basics, but you can experiment with your blends as well.
Here are some top suggestions for which teas you might enjoy after yoga:
Green Tea
Green tea is best for after a morning workout. It helps to stimulate your senses with a slight boost delivered by caffeine.
Ginger Tea
Ginger is a healthy herb that prepares your body for contact with the outside world. It naturally perks your mind with a spicy sensation on the tastebuds and an aroma that stimulates mental focus and wakefulness.
Chai Tea
Chai tea is also best after your morning yoga. it’s also a spicy tea that can invigorate and stimulate you.
Chamomile
It’s best to drink chamomile tea after an evening workout. This herbal tea promotes relaxation and calmness. It can help you to unwind after evening yoga to prepare you for a restful night’s sleep.
Lavender – Mint – Jasmine
Lavender, mint, and jasmine are all herbal teas that can help you unwind. Similar to chamomile, the properties found in these teas promote relaxation and calmness. You can opt for each of these teas in its singular form or blend them to achieve the most pleasing flavor combination to complete your evening yoga ritual and prepare your mind and body for rest.
The Best Tea Pairings for Different Types of Yoga
After learning that there are different teas for different yoga practices, such as teas for before and after your session or morning or evening yoga, it’s time to discover how certain teas compliment the various types of yoga.
This examination takes us deeper into how a well-researched combination of tea and yoga practice can deliver the most beneficial pairings for the most successful results.
Recommendations from Gather Yoga can help us to understand a few of these beneficial pairings:
Vinyasa Yoga
Vinyasa yoga is vigorous. This type does require focus and energy.
The best tea to pair with this yoga type is a black tea that will provide you with the needed slow release of caffeine to keep your energy levels slightly elevated. Spicy teas that promote focus and build heat are also among the best choices. Experiment with your favorite black tea blends, Chai Pe-erh, Gunpowder Green Tea Ginseng, Yerba Mate Oolong, and others in this category.
Ashtanga Yoga
Ashtanga Yoga falls into the same category as Vinyasa.
Choose black or green tea blends that stimulate energy levels with caffeine. You can opt for plain black tea, or choose spicy blends. Green teas promote focus and give you a slight energy boost.
Power Yoga
Power yoga is another type that pairs the best with stimulating tea blends.
Select a green tea or black tea that provides a slight kick of energy. Chai tea can also give you an excellent preparatory boost. Teas that stimulate the tastebuds also have a psychological effect that prepares your mind for a challenge. Lemon and citrus-based herbal tea can have the same benefits without the caffeine.
Hot Yoga
Hot yoga is best-paired with a hydrating tea that is somewhat cooling after the workout.
Opt for asmine Green tea which can help you to unwind and slowly come down after class. Other good choices for pairing with hot yoga are Rooibos, Chamomile, Ginger, Hibiscus, or Mint teas.
Restorative Yoga
Restorative Yoga is a type that helps you feel calmer and reduces stress.
Choose teas that have a calming effect to enhance the results of your workout. The best choices include licorice vervain, chamomile, lavender, and any of the sleepy blends that encourage relaxation and calmness. Mint tea is also an excellent choice because of the aroma and flavor that have a calming psychological effect.
Meditative Yoga
Meditative yoga helps you to improve focus while promoting calmness in body and mind. The best tea to drink before your meditative yoga session is one that is calming yet helps the mind to maintain focus.
Choose Lemon Balm or Lemon Myrtle Rose which are excellent pairings for this yoga type. Lavender blends can also help to promote calmness and focus. You may also want to try Gyokuro Green tea or any of the white teas that are milder and do not deliver the strength of a full black tea in terms of caffeine.
Experiment until you’ve found the tea that provides you with the most pleasure in taste and aroma. It will become a part of the ritual experience that adds value to any yoga session.
“Creating a tea ceremony as part of your yoga practice is an act of wisdom.”
TEA CROSSING
How to Create a Tea Ceremony for your Yoga Practice
To further explore the benefits of pairing tea with your yoga lifestyle, let’s now look at the value of creating a tea ceremony for your yoga practice.
As you move from beginner to more advanced yoga, you begin to see how the lifestyle is individualized and personal. Creating a tea ceremony enhances and augments the yoga experience, creating a gestalt…a fuller picture and experience.
In this section I’ll offer suggestions to help open your mind to all of the possibilities.
Regardless of what you incorporate into your tea ceremony, in the end, it is you who orchestrates and tailors the yoga lifestyle to meet your fitness and wellness goals. You will also expand in your knowledge of the benefits to grow with the experience.
Why Create a Tea Ceremony for Yoga Practice?
A tea ceremony can also be called a ritual. Rituals are very powerful habits that we form and incorporate into our lives.
Brushing your teeth daily, combing your hair, and preparing for your day are rituals or habits that we perform daily.
They help give us structure, focus, and mindfulness.
A tea ceremony is a ritual that offers us something special to look forward to. The tea ceremony is a ritual that signals positivity, mindfulness that we are taking actions to love and care for our bodies and minds. It is preparation for self-care and it is a powerful kind of self-love.
Yoga Journal offers an excellent explanation of the benefits of a tea ritual, and the founder of ERDA Tea confirms that simply drinking a cup of tea is as powerful for creating a state of mindfulness as the yoga techniques you use.
If you are interested in creating a tea ceremony for your yoga practice, I’ve included some ideas below. Keep in mind that a ritual is a very person experience and that you will benefit the most from creating a ritual that you love and that has meaning for you.
Here are some basic steps to create a tea and yoga ceremony:
Step #1: Choose Your Tea(s)
After experimenting, you’ll have a sense of the most appropriate choices for the type of yoga you practice, the intention/desired outcomes, and the time of the session (morning or evening). Familiarity with your favorite teas stimulates your mind to focus on the tea-drinking experience during the preparation.
Step #2: Set Aside Preparation Time
Instead of multi-tasking, focus on every step involved in brewing the tea. This includes heating the water, preparing your tea (bag, loose-leaf, tea ball, strainer, etc), and steeping time. This helps you to focus on the moment and to be mindful of the total experience with all its details.
Step #3: Establish Your Routine
A ritual involves following similar steps that have become a habit. There is something almost mystical. It can be a moving and reverent experience.
Step #4: Be Mindful of the Sensory Experiences
Smell the aroma of the tea as the steam from the hot water produces a scent that moves upwards and becomes stronger. It awakens the senses and builds anticipation.
Listen to the sound that the water makes when it’s poured into the cup. Watch the tea as it swells and changes from its dry form with the addition of water. Whether the tea is consumed hot or cold, enjoy the sensation of the temperature. Get lost in the flavor and the sensation that it gives your tastebuds and enjoyment of the taste.
Consider the health benefits as you drink the tea and know that it is becoming a part of you and it is preparing you for fulfilling the intentions of your impending yoga practice.
Step #5: Establish Your Intentions
Yoga and tea both have a history of being very contemplative, intentional experiences. An essential part of your yoga practice, along with a related tea ceremony, can include your intentions. Take time to deeply consider what you want to experience.
How a Tea Ceremony Enhances Your Yoga Practice
We have many daily habits that are, in fact, rituals. When we recognize them as meaningful parts of our life, they can become even more influential and deep.
Drinking tea before and after yoga is a ritual that can deepen your practice.
Here are a few ways in which drinking tea enhances your yoga practice:
Establishes Powerful Rituals
Without even realizing it, we build our lives around rituals. A tea ceremony is one that prepares you physically and mentally for your yoga workout if before. When done after a workout, it’s your special ritual that shows you take the time to incorporate the benefits of your yoga workout into the self, and you’re making a healthy transition into the outside world around you.
Builds Anticipation
The tea ceremony is more like a celebration than anything else. It is used to build anticipation for the best possible results. This sets the expectation or even prediction of holistic yoga experience. This is the best kind of self-fulfilling prophecy we can hope to achieve. It also builds anticipation after yoga for total relaxation in the evening or being ready to take on the day if done in the morning.
Creates a State of Mindfulness
Allowing yourself to become immersed in the tea ceremony creates a state of mindfulness. You’re not thinking about anything but the processes involved in preparing and consuming the tea.
Stimulates Focus and Concentration
Focus on the tea ceremony helps you to get in the habit of concentrating on one thing at a time. The tea ceremony becomes an important ritual to prepare you for yoga. Your mind is focused on the importance of the ceremony and its benefits.
Creates an Environment of Self-Love
Establishing a ritual, such as a tea ceremony is confirmation that you have achieved a mindset that includes love of the self. You set aside time to create an environment that focuses on your health and well-being.
If you’re a person who gives to everyone else, then it’s crucial to make sure that you take care of your health and wellness first. It’s a healthy ritual that shows you are grounded and focused on being the best possible version of yourself. We can’t perform to the best of our potential unless we take the time to dedicate ourselves to our health and wellness.
It’s not selfishness, but rather, an act of great wisdom.