“the Blessing of Stiffness.”
February 16, 2014
Article
This is an excerpt from an article via mymadmethods.com discussing why athletes are (or should be) incorporating yoga into their training regimen.
The Athletic Performance Benefits Of Yoga
By improving not only flexibility but also posture, body-mechanics, and awareness, yoga can literally make every form of training you do more effective and efficient. In my experience, a regular yoga practice can give you the following and more:
Increased Power
We all know power, strength, and speed are directly related to proper body-mechanics: when our body is properly aligned, we can transmit force much more efficiently and perform better across the board.
Better Endurance
By opening posture, yoga significantly increases respiratory capacity; in fact, many have overcome asthma and other respiratory conditions through regular practice. Obviously, this is invaluable to athletes. Yoga has also been proven to dramatically enhance circulation, digestion, and efficiency of motion, which all further improve energy and endurance.
Better Balance/Proprioception
Along with opening the body, yoga builds greater body-awareness, including balance, stability, and proprioception. As a result, not only is performance enhanced but our training becomes far more effective.
Better Injury Prevention
Of course, we all know that the one thing that stalls progress even more than poor training is injury. By improving body-mechanics and awareness, yoga dramatically reduces the risk of injury, both in training and competition, in turn increasing competitive longevity and allowing more consistent progress in our sport.
Enhanced Recovery
A little-appreciated but significant benefit for athletes is improved recovery. By enhancing circulation and lymphatic flow, yoga not only increases strength and endurance but also allows muscles to process metabolic byproducts more quickly, powerfully speeding healing time and re-growth.
Improved Focus
Practiced regularly, yoga can give you the awareness and mindfulness you need to take both your training and your performance to the next level.
Of course the list goes on and on. In addition to the above, yoga’s been clinically proven to improve immune function, balance hormonal balance and improve stress management, all extremely beneficial to athletes. Put together, you can see why so many professionals have come to consider yoga every bit as indispensable to their training as strength or conditioning.
This is a point you may be thinking: “All this is great, but the fact is that I’m too stiff to do yoga.” As a teacher, I’ve heard this countless times, in fact, I used to think it myself. But the reality is the opposite: the tighter we are, the more we can benefit from yoga. In fact, yoga teacher Richard Freeman calls it “the Blessing of Stiffness,” meaning that the tighter we are, the easier we can experience a stretch and the quicker we benefit from practice (even if it’s basic).
The key is to keep it simple. For example, a more experienced practitioner might use Bow or Wheel in order to open the torso while a beginner might find that Cobra is plenty. In other words, we don’t need “hard” poses to experience these benefits, especially at the start.
Yoga For Athletic Performance: Key Principles
Along with the basic categories of movement, there are a few simple principles that can guide you in your routine. When in doubt, the following will assure you progress in a constructive way:
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Standing Poses – Build leg-strength as well as flexibility in the hips and hamstrings.
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Consistency Beats Volume – The first key is that practice doesn’t need to be long; 10-15 minutes daily is plenty and better than 90 minutes once a week. Daily is ideal, but 3-4 days a week is fine. Likewise, time in each pose can be brief: 20-30 seconds being sufficient, especially at the start. An excellent approach is to hold each pose for five slow breaths: as you become more proficient, the breath will become deeper, and in turn, you’ll hold each pose a little longer.
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Mindfulness Beats Intensity – As athletes, it’s not uncommon to approach yoga with the idea “more/harder is better,” but in this case the opposite is true, our muscles respond far better to “gentle persuasion” than force. Also, remember the primary goal of yoga is building mind-body communication which we can’t do if we’re “forcing it.” Bottom line: like any exercise, we want to challenge ourselves enough to grow but not so much that we’re breaking down rather than building up.
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Active Respiratory Openness – Another guiding principle is “active openness.” In all our poses, even forward bending poses or twists, our torso can be more “closed” or “open.” Obviously, when we’re more open we can breathe more fully, so within each pose we try to engage the core and “lengthen” the torso, again, a skill that directly translates to better energy and power during sports performance.
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Short-Term Quality, Long-Term Variety – Taking an analogy from nutrition, we all know that many foods are “highly-nutritious,” but we also know that we don’t have to eat every one of them every meal. In fact, we tend to digest better and get greater benefits if we spread them out. Yoga is the same; by focusing on “quality work” in a few poses each session and varying our selection over the course of the week, we can be sure our bodies are getting the movement they need in a form that’s “easily digestible” for us.
About the Author
Michael Lloyd-Billington
Michael Lloyd-Billington is a Certified Integral Yoga Instructor, Levels I, II, and III, with over 16 years’ teaching experience. He has worked with thousands of clients — from seniors to those with health challenges to elite athletes and believes very strongly in the importance of finding an approach to yoga that honors an individual’s unique proportions, areas that may be more open or less open, and temperaments. Michael has taught numerous teachers’ training programs, including three years as Head of Yoga Teachers’ Training at Satchidananda Ashram, an internationally-acclaimed program for aspiring yoga instructors.