Shadowing practice: Wake Up Yoga | 11-Minute Morning Yoga Practice

This clip is Adriene from Yoga With Adriene guiding an 11 minute wake up practice, and the whole thing is one calm, continuous voiceover rather than a conversation. That makes it a clean source for american accent training: one speaker, one register, few interruptions, so you can lock onto her vowels and rhythm without losing the thread to a second voice.

The level is B1 and the pace is 194 words per minute, which is brisk for a narration but stays even because she is talking through a physical routine, not reacting to anything. She opens with "Hello and welcome to Yoga with Adriene" and moves straight into instructions, so the first minute alone gives you greetings, self introduction and simple imperatives, all worth repeating out loud before the pace picks up.

Adriene's instructions lean on short imperative sentences and soft connective phrasing, which is exactly what makes them useful for a spoken drill. A few lines worth slowing down for:

• "And then as you exhale, gentle twist to your left." The comma before "gentle twist" is where her breath actually pauses, and matching that pause is half of getting the rhythm right.
• "and wake up the spine." Four words, and every one of them gets a clear beat. Good for practising even stress instead of rushing the ending.
• "Nice and easy here." A short, relaxed closing tag she repeats as a verbal habit. Say it with the same falling, unhurried pitch she uses, not a flat reading.
• "No pushing, no forcing." Two matched two word phrases back to back. Notice how the second "no" gets slightly less stress than the first, that small drop is native rhythm, not something a textbook sentence usually shows you.

Treat this as english speaking practice for instructional speech, not conversation, since there is no back and forth to track, only one voice giving directions.

• Start with lines 1 to 4, the greeting block ending in "So let's begin right away." Repeat until the introduction feels automatic before you move on.
• Shadow this english narration for line 6 out loud: "start to lift the corners of your mouth just gently and we're going to reach the fingertips all the way up towards the sky" is long, so break it at the "and" and rebuild it in two pieces.
• Isolate the twist pair, lines 8 to 12, and loop them, since "gentle twist to your left" and "wake up the spine" sit close together and share the same falling intonation.
• Drill the countdown at lines 36 to 38. She says "lift your kneecaps up for three", then "Lift them up for two." and "Lift them up for one.", where only the number changes, useful for practising sentence stress without new vocabulary getting in the way.
• Finish the opening section on line 41, "Send your hips back", then go back to the top and shadow the whole block again at full pace to check your timing against hers.