Photo by Luke Simpson

{stand-up paddleboard yoga}

One look at the tagline stamped on Gillian Gibree’s website—“live, laugh, paddle”—says everything about Gibree’s infectious practice of yoga on a stand-up paddleboard (SUP) on the rolling waves of the ocean. “I think SUP yoga is about being outdoors and being playful,” she says. “The water is a healing environment. It’s all about finding that connection to nature. It takes you out of the studio and into the sunshine.”

SUP yoga, which is surging in popularity, calls on muscle groups that yogis and yoginis may not even realize they have. “The unstable surface of the paddleboard makes simple poses like plank more difficult,” Gibree says. “It causes little muscle groups to fire that normally wouldn’t.”

A Cape Cod native, Gibree now lives in San Diego and returns to the Cape to teach yoga clinics, including a stint later this summer. She started doing yoga as a teenager with her mother, a massage therapist. During that time, she was lifeguarding at Nauset Beach in Orleans. “I immersed myself in the ocean lifestyle, prone paddling, beach running, surfing, stand-up paddling, ocean swimming, beach yoga,” she says. Her first yoga teacher training was Yoga for Surfers.

Eventually Gibree created her own personal blend of yoga and deep love of the ocean through SUP. As she says, “It was a perfect match.”

Paddle Into Fitness: paddleintofitness.com, gillian@paddleinfofitness.com