“Phone Yoga” is the new craze for the always-Internet-connected yoga aficionado! Don’t un-plug from the Internet for even a single waking moment with this new incredible exercise routine!

Background:

Yoga is often thought of as an activity that requires focus, and is thus incompatible with meaninglessly scrolling through random Internet content.

And it’s true that most yoga positions do not leave the yoga practitioner’s hands free to casually browse a cell phone while yoga-ing.

The issue:

Unfortunately, the result of this is that any casual yoga practitioners must make the choice between THE INTERNET and yoga.

Proposal:

In order to allow people to enjoy yoga and read memes and democracy-subverting propaganda on the Internet at the same time, we must create a new form of yoga—”Cell Phone Yoga.”

This version will consist of modified yoga positions that leave the user’s hands free for cell phone operation.

While are some positions that unavoidably require both hands (which would be omitted from Cell Phone Yoga), most yoga positions fall into one of these categories:

  1. Already leaves the practitioner with one or both hands free. These require no changes!
  2. Could be modified slightly to allow at least one hand to be free to hold a phone (e.g. tree pose).
  3. Require both hands, but the user can probably still see their cell phone screen if they put the phone on the ground first (e.g. downward dog).

See Figure 1 for a rundown of some of the most promising ideas.

Fig. 1: The modern individual can’t be expected to stop using their cell phone for upwards of twenty entire minutes, so we need to modify the exercise routine to compensate.

Poses could also be given specific cell-phone related names: for example, the shavasana could be called the candy bar phone and downward dog could be rebranded to the Motorola StarTAC (flip phone). This would also open up avenues of corporate sponsorship via naming rights.

Conclusion:

If you’ve always wanted to do yoga but didn’t want to put your phone down for 15 or more consecutive minutes, you should give this idea a shot!

Just fire up a regular online yoga video and hold your cell phone in one hand while you (mostly) follow the instructions otherwise. 

PROS: Might legitimately increase interest in low-impact exercise, leading to public health benefits.

CONS: Purists would surely turn up their noses at this groundbreaking idea!