By Debby Lo-Dean
From Elite athletes to everyday sports persons or the everyday person on the street that wants to get fit and stay fit, they all have a common goal and that is to improve their health and performance, reduce injuries and take their minds off their troubles and workout. The benefits of yoga can address all these issues. It is a good complimentary exercise to any sport.
For many, the word yoga, conjures up stretching, pain and crazy positions that they don’t even want to attempt. Some even think it’s just a woman’s exercise. Yoga is so much more and it is for all levels of age and fitness. Yoga works on your whole self. It’s a way to use your body and mind to find out where there are deficiencies and to manage them through breathing, stretching, meditating and slowing moving through the body parts assessing where muscles and ligaments are tight and slowly stretching them out. It involves mentally focussing on a particular yoga pose or on your breath.
How does yoga improve an athlete’s performance?
There are many ways in which yoga can improve an athlete’s performance. The first is to use yoga breathing which can help to increase stamina. Many of us due to stress and anxiety in our lives breath shallowly, this decreases the amount of oxygen that is delivered to the cells in our body and causes fatigue. Through yoga you learn to breathe effectively, breathing deeply filling up with rich oxygen and exhaling all stale air from the lungs.
Breathing
Deep breathing is also the foundation for reducing performance anxiety and improving concentration. Meditation in yoga teaches us to block out any worries or concerns and focus on the present and on our breath. If an athlete is able to block out all the pressure of the game and any other worries before a game and concentrate only on the game then they are going to have a much better game than if they are mentally distracted.
Flexibility
Another major benefit of yoga for athletes is that it may help prevent injury by improving flexibility. Sports injuries often occur when a muscle or ligament is jolted when it is tight or not warmed up. Regular yoga helps the achieve the fullest range of motion by improving flexibility that allows the body to move into positions necessary for sports more quickly and effortlessly with less strain or risk of injury.
Balance
Yoga also improves balance. Many sports require a sports person t move in any direction in a split second. By practising balancing moves in yoga an athlete can learn where to find their centre of gravity or balance. Through constant practise the body learns where the athlete’s centre of gravity is and then they can adjust their movements much more fluidly when they have to. This means an athlete for example a footballer is less likely to fall and sprain themselves. They can quickly take evasive action and correct their balance, so that they don’t hurt themselves.
Mental focus
Improving mental focus through yoga meditation and relaxation teaches the athlete to quiet the mind and re-energise the body. Often you’ll hear a person say that a player’s mind wasn’t in the game. Using relaxation techniques before competition improves performance during the game. Yoga meditation, relaxation and concentration on poses helps to calm the nerves of an athlete under pressure to perform by helping them to block out external influences and concentrate on what needs to be done. When practising yoga postures you are taught to be present in the moment and concentrate on the pose and to breath properly. In learning to hold postures, your mind automatically becomes clearer.
Strength
Yoga increases your strength by building core strength and using your own body weight. Strengthening in yoga requires your entire body to be working as a unit so that the strengthening of one muscle group is connected to that of another muscle group. Major and minor muscle groups are used simultaneously. The difference between yoga and say weight training is that you are working on your whole self, strengthening all muscle groups, lung capacity and mental capacity instead of just working on one or two muscle groups. Yoga works on muscles that support the spine and strengthening them, giving the body more flexibility. Yoga also helps to balance out your posture improving alignment, impacting on every aspect of how you move. When the body is out of alignment you can suffer headaches and pain. By regularly doing yoga you stretch your body one way and always counter balance by stretching the opposite way. The result is that your whole body feels strong as a unit.
Focus
With yoga you focus on a pose and breathing. You are taught to block out all troubling thoughts and focus on the now. In sports this can help you to stay focused on the game. You train your mind as well as your body. If your mind starts to wander when you are playing sport yoga exercises can help to train you to gently bring your mind back to the game.
Reduce stress
Stress for an athlete can be majorly detrimental, physically and mentally. Stress from pressure to perform or any other sources causes muscles to tense up, neck, back, hamstring muscles tighten, you can get stomach pain and headaches. These are some of the examples of how stress can reduce an athlete’s performance. Yoga helps to reduce or release stress in the body and the mind.
Kinesthetics
When you learn to focus on your body through yoga you can learn when you are in a pose how it should feel and what muscle group you are working on. You learn to put your body in the exact position and not to extend yourself too much to the point of pain. You should feel the stretch but as soon as you feel any pain you should stop to prevent any injury. You should become aware of the space around you. When you use this technique in sport it can help you become more aware of where you are, where you team mates are and where the opposing team players are. If the sport involves a ball you can focus on where the ball is and how to decide on the best play, access the best options and achieve the best results. This awareness is called kinesthetics, being aware of where your body is in space. You learn to put your body in exact positions and know when it is in the correct place.
Yoga’s combination of building strength, flexibility, postures balance and kinesthetics all work together to improve the athlete’s agility, the body’s ability to move freely and quickly without pain or stress. It also adds variety to an athletes exercise program.
Cross training
Athletes often do the same sport or exercise routine year – around in order to maximise training they can cross train or do interval training. Yoga is a great low impact way to cross train. It can help the athlete recover from a hard aerobic and strength workout. There are man athletes that workout or train and go hell for leather instead of slowing down and really working individual muscles (groups), controlling their breathing and using their core strength. Hard quick workouts produce lactic acid in muscles that causes the muscle to fatigue. Yoga is gentler on the body and can achieve great results. While doing yoga you are taught not to compete with other students. You go at your own pace and are aware of your own body. Your body should not jerk or be in any pain. In sport you shouldn’t compete with your own teammates but work together. If each team player works on their own strengths and pool them together during a game it will make for great fluid competition.
Competitive edge
Athletes are always looking for that competitive edge. It may be tempting to use something that is banned but at what cost. Yoga can give an athlete a competitive edge to rivals by creating a strong body that has a focused mind and sharpened intuition. You increase core strength, flexibility and learn to breath the most effectively increasing oxygen in the body and cells helping increase immunity. It can help unlock potential in the athlete that they didn’t know they had.
Summary
In summary yoga is a fantastic tool for athletes to use to help them perform to their optimum capacity. It teaches deep relaxed breathing techniques that help reduce performance anxiety, and improve concentration, improve flexibility and balance, increase mental focus and increase strength. It helps to improve mind/body connection and reduce stress. Yoga also helps to improve posture and raise awareness of kinesthetics (where your body is in space). It helps improve agility and helps to reduce pain, increases sportsmanship and is a great cross training exercise and best of all gives an athlete a overall healthy mind, body and soul with a competitive edge over other athletes.
Debby Lo-Dean teaches Yoga classes in Ashmore, Queensland, Australia.
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