When we begin to describe what we do, a common response is: “So… is it a bit like yoga? Or tai chi?” Often followed by, “I’ve tried that— it helped.”

We get why people make the connection. There are familiar elements like gentle movement, breathing, and working with the body in a more intentional way. This supports body functions in a number of ways that are beneficial for people with post-infection conditions. Yoga involves: 

• Gentle joint mobility that supports healthy brain-body connections, essential for feeling more coordinated and letting you move with a greater sense of ease and safety. 
• Breathwork that helps regulate the nervous system, letting you move more seamlessly between fight or flight to rest and repair states.  
• Stretching while muscles are activated (e.g. a downward dog where your hands and feet are both pushing down on the ground), that is key to support the health and function of vital connective tissue in the body, like fascia.    

Katie practiced yoga for over a decade before being impacted by Long COVID, and benefited enormously from it. She also noticed how quickly she felt the difference when she couldn’t get to classes or had the energy to practice it consistently. That’s the part that often gets overlooked. Practices like yoga or tai chi typically take 45 minutes to an hour. When you have energy and time, it can be a great investment. However, when your energy or time is limited or unpredictable, it can be harder to access, even if you know it helps. Even when you do have the energy, you may need to choose carefully where to spend it, including trying to balance work, family, and other parts of life you want to hold onto.

Our approach is different and goes beyond what yoga offers. At ThriveNinety, we focus on improving how your body functions as a system, and we do that in two key ways. 

1. We take a multi-faceted approach—working across the different systems that shape how you feel and perform day to day (what we call PEDAL™). We take a broader approach than yoga, and we have seen real impact by bringing together targeted elements across pacing, movement, nervous system regulation, activated stretching, supporting safe levels of exercise and activity. 
   
2. We’ve designed the physical elements to offer key benefits you find with yoga and beyond. It is also designed to be simple, accessible, and brief (around five minutes) so tools and practises can fit into your day, even when capacity or time is limited.  

Some of the movements will feel familiar. We intentionally include elements that support fascia and help regulate the nervous system, because we know those systems matter. As we explored in our recent blog on fascia, this connective tissue plays a role not just in movement, but in how the body communicates internally. When it’s functioning well, things tend to feel more coordinated, more efficient. When it’s not, effort doesn’t always translate the way you expect.

Practices like yoga can support the health of fascia. What we’ve done is widen the scope of impact by adding tools for other main body systems, and make all elements easier to access and possible to apply consistently. Access, simplicity and doable routines are especially important for people who don’t have the capacity for longer sessions right now.

Ultimately, it’s not about finding something that helps once or twice. It’s about finding something you can do regularly enough for it to make a difference. Something that supports physical function, nervous system regulation, brain-body connections, immune function, energy management, and cognitive clarity. This all together is helping your body coordinate more effectively as a whole and allows changes to compound, so improvements in one area begin to support progress in others, leading to more consistent and meaningful gains. 

If you’ve tried things that felt good but were hard to do or to sustain, you’re not alone. Often, the issue is whether the actions fit your current capacity. When it does, that’s when progress becomes more consistent.

And this brings us to one last point that separates Yoga from the approach that ThriveNinety™ takes. We include many tools that can be used throughout the day, in moments when your system needs regulation or a quick reset, and can be done without others even noticing. This can include doing ankle tilts while standing in line, an eye movement exercise during a bathroom break, or a tongue exercise while on a Zoom meeting. Yoga doesn't require much infrastructure, but does benefit from a mat, a quiet space and a dedicated chunk of time to focus. In contrast, we deliberately share tools that can be done in those quiet spaces or anytime, anywhere you may need them to support your system.

If you’d like to explore how we at ThriveNinety support symptom management, we have Unit 1 of our Long COVID Symptom Management program open to explore. 

Warmly,
Katie & Andrea

Related Blog posts: 

Fatigue, Function, and Fascia: A New Lens on Persistent Symptoms

Quick Win vs. Lasting Impact  

Rethinking Exercise for Long COVID Recovery  

The Ripple Effect of Small Steps