OK, I admit it. I practice Yoga. If you asked me 10 years ago if I thought Yoga was a good workout, I probably would have laughed at you being a weight lifting, running and hockey playing kind of guy. No more. I first tried it out about a year ago at the YMCA to see if it would help with some lower back pain and hamstring tightness due to years of running and cycling and also based on Terry Laughlin’s recommendation in the Total Immersion swimming book (see My Total Immersion Experience). Then, recently, I purchased Power Yoga by Rodney Yee and am totally amazed. The DVD is just over an hour and in my first session I was exhausted after about 40 minutes. Mind you, I regularly run for at least 40 minutes and usually cycle 2-3 hours at a time once a week, not to mention doing Yoga classes at the Y on a regular basis, so I didn’t think Power Yoga would be a big deal. The nice thing about the DVD is it builds and builds, so you can go as long into it as you want and then just skip ahead to the cool down phase when you have reached your limit. The other nice thing is the moves are not particularly difficult. Yee does a great job of developing a rhythm and an intensity as the workout progresses. And just as he brings you up, he then slowly brings you down to cool off.

One of the things I really took away from both Total Immersion and Daniels’ Running Formula (see the right hand menu for a link) was how important mindful training is to achieving your athletic and fitness goals. All through my early years and even into college, I was always a decent athlete and prided myself on being coachable, but I never really took my training to heart and thought about what benefits I was getting from the various drills and exercises. Thus, when I came across Daniels’ and Laughlin, the light bulb went off. To me, Yoga is a great extension of this approach to training. Not only is it making me more flexible, but it is also making me stronger (yes, stronger, I never would have thought Yoga could do that) and it makes me focus on mindful movement, which then translates into my running, cycling and even my family and work. Yoga forces you to deliberately think about how to get your body into a position and then how to hold it as well as focus on your breathing, which can have a huge impact for endurance athletes. You can’t help but translate this purposeful thinking into the rest of your life, because it becomes so ingrained in who you are. And I don’t mean it makes you sit an analyze every situation until you are paralyzed, I mean it brings clarity to your thoughts and allows you to figure out what you want much easier.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 7th, 2007 at 9:05 am and is filed under Biking, Hockey, Running, Sports, Swimming, Training, Triathlon, Yoga. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.