INTRODUCTION
The practice of Yoga usually involves exercises like asanas, pranayama, breathing modification, meditation, and sometimes chanting. It is a great inclusion to any exercise regimen, accompanied by a multitude of benefits that will help improve exercise performance.
One of Yoga's unique features is that athletes of all ages or experience can partake to ensure better mental and physical health.
For example, many yoga poses are most effective when breathing matches movement. By matching breathing with movement, endurance athletes such as cyclists, runners, and swimmers will benefit from the exercise.
How Yoga Compliments and strengthens Athlete’s Training Regimen
● FLEXIBILITY: Flexibility is most beneficial to athletes; Yoga improves joint and muscular flexibility, vital to the body's overall structural effectiveness. Enhanced joint and muscle pliancy makes certain movements easier.
This increased range of motion provides a greater ability to relax the mind and body, sharpen concentration, free the spirit, and condition muscle strain. Beyond physical flexibility, Yoga builds mind flexibility as the peculiar poses, breathing exercises, and meditation practices encourage better focus.
Maintaining flexibility in such areas that are prone to holding tension enhances ease of movement, which means that you'll be able to maneuver your body in more ways than usual.
● INCREASED CORE STABILITY: Asana's practice increases core stability, which is important to sport performance and injury prevention in sport. This practice focuses on proper muscular and skeletal alignment. The outcome of a systematic Asana practice is an increased sense of balance and strength for whole-body movement.
● INCREASED RELAXATION: Sports demands a lot from your heart, bones, joints, mind, muscles, etc., not to mention the anxiety and pressure that accompanies competitive sports.
The yoga session usually ends with 5-10 minutes of relaxation in a corpse pose (Shavasana). During this pose, the mind/consciousness is trained in such a way that it can be indrawn/internalized.
The importance of this relaxation to an athlete cannot be overemphasized, as this relaxation ensures that muscles return to a balanced tone allowing the athlete to flush those stress hormones from the body.
● STRENGTH: Yoga strengthens the whole body as a unit. The exercises involved are all closed-chained and can be performed with hands and feet in contact with the floor. Yoga increases an athlete's core strength and helps to create whole-body functional strength.
While your sport can make you strong only in specific areas as required by your sport, Yoga practice tailored for your sport builds your undeveloped muscles and restores balance to your body by promoting full-body strength.
● BALANCE: Yoga enables balance; such balance will strengthen your lower legs as an athlete and hone your proprioception such that you'll grow to be more aware of where your body is in space.
Yoga poses also teaches you ways to be aware of your body's center of gravity in different positions. Also, it gives you dimensional balance.
● INJURY PREVENTION: The strength, flexibility, and improved body mechanics you achieve from constant yoga practice help your body maintain a healthy body and healthy joints. These joints are often prone to injuries due to repetitive training.
Suppose there is an imbalance in the body that causes it to function out of alignment. In that case, continuous athletic training with this abnormality can lead to inflammation of the body and excessive wear on the tissues. However, constant yoga practice helps align the body by correcting the soft tissues' strength and flexibility.
Yoga poses can also enable a self-awareness that can help you as an athlete notice your skeletal misalignments.
● MENTAL TRAINING: Most athletes are constantly training to exceed their physical limits, but it is often an athlete with a great mental strength that perseveres.
Yoga practices and poses like the back-bending pose, sitting quietly in mind and body for 30minutes regardless of uncomfortable sensations, teaches you mental toughness. This skill is very valuable, especially when you encounter a similar intensity in your athletic training.
Yoga practice makes you put yourself in challenging situations and teaches you how to cope with these challenges.
● CONTROL: Yoga helps with every aspect of control, such as breath control, mind control, and movement control. Mind control is developed from the objective of Yoga, which is to stay present and focused.
Movement control is acquired from an improved mind-body connection. When you control your breath and accurately pair such control with your movement, it will improve your oxygen intake and output, efficiency, and muscle function and help you reduce muscle fatigue.
Yoga in sports is vital as it complements and strengthens athletes' training regimen in multiple ways and on different levels. It can help athletes have an evenness and control over their mind, movement, and thoughts even during stress. Yoga plays a key role in cultivating concentration, which helps athletes perform at their peak.