Benefits for Athletes
By Sarah Scholl
YOGA CAN IMPROVE YOUR GAME
From football players to golfers; athletes from all walks of life are discovering the key benefits of incorporating Sarah’s POWER YOGA into their exercise routine. Whether you are a serious field hockey player, marathon runner, or a fitness enthusiast of any kind, power yoga helps to improve your game by providing greater strength and mental focus. In fact many male-dominated professional sports teams have incorporated this practice into their workouts, thus supporting its importance to physical fitness for athletes requiring optimum health and peak performance.
Professional athlete and certified yoga teacher, Sarah believes that yoga is critical for an athlete to perform at their very best. Her power vinyasa approach provides a combination of dynamic movements that are designed to lengthen and strengthen the muscles, creating muscular balance and improved mind-body connection. She has worked with a number of collegiate and high school athletes throughout the year, and has personally witnessed the physical and mental transformation of swimmers, runners, lacrosse players, figure skaters and football players.
Below are some of the key physical and mental benefits of power yoga for athletes.
CORE STRENGTH
Regular yoga practice will improve core strength, which is essential to sports performance and injury preventions. A variety of yoga poses such as plank, chaturanga, and chair pose increase strength overall, including core strength. It adds a new form of resistance training to one's typical machine-based workouts.
FLEXIBILITY OF RANGE AND MOTION
Engaging in frequent yoga exercises will make the spine more flexible and muscles more supple. Yoga routines offer the steady increase in flexibility and range in motion that are ideal for athletes which can drastically decrease any risk to injuries. It lengthens the entire body and release joints, thus adding to the overall improvement of one's game.
BALANCE
Balance exercises are often overlooked by athletes, but it is actually one of the most effective ways to correct muscle imbalances mechanical problems in the body. Athletes often tend to perform repetitive motion exercises that focus on a group of muscles while the others are ignored. Yoga helps to fix these imbalances, as well as imbalances in the mind.
RELIEVING CHRONIC PAIN
Regular training is often accompanied by chronic aches and pain, something athletes are far too familiar with. Practicing yoga helps the muscles to release chronic pain and allows players with mobility and agility and play more efficiently.
FOCUS
One of the most important aspects to successful playing is mental focus. A player's mental approaches will ultimate dictate the outcome of his or her performance. The principals of yoga offer complete mind and body awareness and heighten mental focus, a crucial aspect that vastly affects any athlete's ability to perform.
Progressive Power Yoga combines breathing exercises with swift movements that WILL give you a complete workout comparable, if not better than, to cardio exercises. It is a complete total mind/body exercise.
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