How to Relieve Stress with Crocodile Pose: A Kids Yoga Tool for Calm and Focus
Note: This post was updated in August 2025 with new tips, research, and activity ideas to help you teach kids yoga and mindfulness with confidence.
Feeling overwhelmed and anxious?
Is your breathing rapid and shallow?
Need to rest, relax and restore?
Create Calm With Crocodile!
Back-to-school transitions, classroom chaos, bedtime battles…sometimes kids just need a reset.
That’s where Crocodile Pose comes in.
This simple, restorative yoga pose is one of our favorite ways to help kids relax, regulate, and reconnect with themselves. It’s beginner-friendly, deeply calming, and easy to integrate into a classroom, therapy session, or home routine.
And best of all? It teaches kids a skill they’ll carry for life: how to calm their bodies and tune into their breath.
Crocodile Pose is a restorative yoga pose perfect for both beginner and long-time yoga practitioners. It relaxes the whole body and regulates the nervous system while relieving stress and associated tension in the body.
Let’s calm down in crocodile!
Why Crocodile Pose Works for Kids
Crocodile Pose isn’t flashy. In fact, it looks like kids are just lying on the floor. But underneath the stillness, something powerful is happening.
When kids rest on their stomachs with their forearms stacked and forehead down, the body sends signals of safety and grounding to the nervous system. This activates the parasympathetic “rest and digest” response, lowering stress, slowing the breath, and bringing the body back into balance.
For educators and parents, that means:
✨ Fewer meltdowns
✨ Easier transitions
✨ A calmer classroom or home
The Benefits of Crocodile Pose in Kids Yoga
Crocodile Pose supports both physical and emotional regulation. Here’s why it works so well:
Stress + Anxiety Relief → Lying prone helps kids feel safe, secure, and grounded.
Better Sleep + Focus → Relaxing the nervous system supports rest and improves attention.
Body Awareness → Kids notice their belly pressing into the floor, deepening diaphragmatic breathing.
Posture + Alignment → Relieves tension in the shoulders and back, supporting healthy spinal alignment.
Brain-Body Connection → Adding variations (like lifting one hand + opposite foot) strengthens right-left brain integration and concentration.
Combining crocodile pose with somatics-inspired backward bends strengthens muscle groups including the hamstrings, glutes, and spinal extensors, before relaxing them. It also brings heightened awareness to the back of the body, increasing sensory integration, specifically proprioception.
And because it’s an animal yoga pose, kids can use imagination to stay engaged: pretending to be sleepy crocodiles floating in the sun makes stillness fun.
Try THIS: Crocodile Pose in Yoga
Take deep breaths and yawn like a sleepy crocodile with Rachel in our yoga video below. If you enjoy this reptile yoga theme, check out our 20-minute Reptile Adventure on our kids yoga app (you can totally try the app for free if you don’t already have it.)
How to Teach Crocodile Pose
Lie down on your belly.
Stack your forearms and rest your forehead on your wrists
Extend legs long, with feet about shoulder-width apart.
Toes can turn in or out - whatever feels most relaxing.
Close eyes or soften gaze.
Relax your jaw, brow and facial muscles.
Release shoulders and shoulder blades.
Breathe slowly and deeply, noticing how the belly presses into the floor.
Stay for 1–3 minutes with younger kids, or 5–10 minutes with older students.
Tips For All Learners
Comfort is key in the pose. If it is not comfortable to rest with stacked forearms and head on wrists, you can stack palms and rest your forehead on the back of your hands instead.
Increase awareness of breathing into the back and side body, feeling the lower back expand and the lower ribs flare out to the side with every inhale.
If you have difficulty releasing and relaxing the shoulders, try tightening them even further, holding that tension as you inhale and then relaxing on the exhale.
Kid-Friendly Crocodile Pose Variations
To keep kids engaged, layer in imagination, movement, and music:
Sleepy Crocodile → Invite kids to yawn and stretch before resting down.
Snake to Crocodile → Flow from Baby Cobra into Crocodile Pose. Add hissing sounds or sing a snake song for playful engagement.
Crocodile Lift → Have kids lift one arm and opposite leg, then rest. This strengthens core and back muscles while building focus.
These variations combine sensory input + creativity, helping kids stay present and relaxed.
Kids yoga poses that invite lying on the stomach create a sense of safety and security that reduces anxiety and calms the nervous system, stimulating the parasympathetic “rest and digest” response.
Practicing crocodile pose provides a perfect foundation for other prone yoga back bends like cobra and sphinx.
Try This: Baby Cobra Pose to resting in Crocodile pose
Invite children to pretend they are slithery snakes, strengthening the back and abdominal muscles before relaxing in crocodile pose. Sing and hiss along to this snake song in Spanish with Bridget!
Many of us have ineffective breathing patterns due to factors which may include stress, trauma, anxiety, poor posture, restrictive clothing, and various respiratory conditions. Both crocodile pose and cobra pose help us expand our breath capacity and our connections to the muscles of breathing.
Crocodile pose helps us tune into our diaphragmatic breathing, causing us to take deeper and fuller inhales. Cobra pose opens the front side of the body, chest and throat to expand the breath.
Both practices increase energy and vitality while supporting optimal health and well-being.
Why Crocodile Pose Belongs in Your Routine
Incorporating yoga for kids doesn’t mean adding hours of instruction. A few minutes of Crocodile Pose can:
Reset classroom energy
Calm transitions (like after recess or before tests)
Create a bedtime or naptime ritual
Help kids practice mindfulness in a playful, accessible way
This is kids yoga at its best: simple, imaginative, and transformative!
Next Steps for Educators
If you’re ready to integrate Crocodile Pose and other mindfulness for kids strategies into your teaching practice, check out our online Kids Yoga Teacher Certification. You’ll learn how to bring musical yoga and evidence-based mindfulness tools into your classroom and be supported by a vibrant community every step of the way.
READ NEXT: More kids yoga & mindfulness for kids resources
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