Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Foreign.
[00:00:11] Hello. Welcome to another episode of Deep in your yoga practice. I'm Lauren Leduc, the owner and founder of True Love Yoga in Kansas City, Missouri. Today, I want to talk about why athletes and strength trainers need yoga. So something you might not know about me is I love fitness, athletic performance, strength training. I spend a lot of time doing boot camp. I freaking love it. I love the community, the music. I love challenging myself in a very different way than yoga. And I have found that my background in yoga has helped me with my strength training, with endurance, with cardio, with performance in general. So much. I'm so happy that I have the foundation of yoga.
[00:01:00] And I really think that athletics and yoga are so complimentary to each other. So someday I would love to do an episode on why strength training is so good for yogis, because it really has changed my body and practice in so many wonderful ways. But I wanted to flip that a little bit on really how yoga can support your fitness journey. So a couple misconceptions about yoga is that it's only stretching and only for flexibility.
[00:01:33] It's not true. It really challenges your balance and strength as well. But there are a lot of other subtle benefits that I'll talk about in a little bit. And a lot of people think they don't have time for yoga because of their training schedule, but I think adding in even something like 10 minutes a day can be so huge. I especially love cooling down from my workouts with yoga because I'm so warm. So it does feel very good to stretch, but it helps bring me into a really steady and focused place for my day. Yoga enhances mobility, strength, breath control, focus and recovery, all of which improve performance and longevity in training. Doesn't that sound wonderful? Isn't that something you want to add to your training? Let's dive into it a little bit more deeply. So there are so many physical benefits to including yoga in your movement practice. And by yoga, I mean asanas, but there are so many. And asanas are postures, but there are also so many other aspects of what makes yoga yoga. So we do work quite a bit on mobility and flexibility in yoga, and this can really help with your strength training or athleticism, because tight muscles and poor mobility lead to compensation patterns as your strength training and in your training that increase your risk of injury. Also, optimized mobility creates more efficient movement, which also creates stronger lifts and faster recovery. That deeper range of motion as well is going to give you more depth and power in your lifts, which is really exciting. So a couple examples. Think of Tight hips and hamstrings, which can impede your squat death, which can impede your squat depth or deadlift. In yoga we use postures like deep lunges, things like pigeon pose to help improve hip flexor mobility, as well as our rotation, which creates a lot more freedom and strength through these lifts. We also do things like deep squats, we call it molassana, and different toe stretches that can range from feeling pretty good to slightly torturous, which can help runners and lifters maintain knee stability and also increase range of motion in your lifts. And we also work quite a bit on shoulder and spine mobility. So we need both stability and mobility in all of these areas, but especially the shoulders and spine. And we do that through like downward dog cobra twists and these really help mobility for presses and snatch anything where you are pressing overhead so you're able to get more out of your. I would definitely recommend trying postures like lizard pose or low lunge, as well as downward dog and puppy pose, maybe toe sits as well. So tucking your toes and sitting back on your heels to unlock some of these benefits. I just talked about you. Yoga is also so great for strength and stability, particularly in building functional strength, particularly by working stabilizer muscles and increasing core strength and balance, which are all completely crucial for athletic movement. So we do a lot of things on one leg, such as Warrior 3. You can think of this as like a singular motion from a single leg RDL or something like that, which helps stabilize the hip and knee and ankle and also engage the core so that when you're going into loaded movement, your body exact knows exactly where to go, how to do it and how to stabilize in a really safe way as you load more and more weight. We also work a lot of core activation, a lot of planks and yoga. We really what I would call move from the core in Vinyasa yoga. And this deep core strength, particularly like through the pelvic floor, through the transverse abdominis that you find in yoga, helps so much with better lifting mechanics. Really with any strengthening, any movement that you're going to do, you need a strong core for it for safety and for longevity. Yoga also actually helps your grip and wrist strength as well. We use what's called hasta bando, which is the hand lock. So a lot of weight bearing postures on the hands and the hands are held in a really specific way that improves wrist endurance, which can again really positively affect your lifts. Or if you're a climber, it can be a really great way to strengthen your wrists and hands. For that and to also release them, which we'll go into in a minute. Yoga is also so great for recovery and injury prevention, keeps the body really resilient. Strength training, endurance training, cardio, all stress the body typically in ways that are really good. For those of us who train a lot, we really need opportunities to downregulate and recover so that we can come back stronger and avoid injury overuse. Injuries are really common in sports and lifting. And yoga aids in muscle recovery, myofascial release and nervous system regulation. Like I said, stretching, especially myofascial release, like foam rolling and using balls, which for me is a huge part of my yoga practice, helps reduce delayed onset muscle soreness or doms after heavy training so that you can recover a lot more quickly. Hydrating your tissues. And forms of yoga like yin and restorative yoga help relieve chronic tightness and they teach you how to relax your muscles. So in strength training or athletics, oftentimes we learn how to contract our muscles, but we don't learn how to fully relax them, which can cause imbalance. I went through pelvic floor physiotherapy last year and I had to relearn how to relax my pelvic floor after giving birth. And it was super strong from yoga. But. But interestingly enough, when I learned to relax it, it also made it made the muscles move more efficiently so they could contract better as well and support my organs and balance and all the wonderful things that the pelvic floor does. A mobile and well balanced body is less likely to compensate through movement patterns, especially loaded ones. So yoga is so good for preventing injury. So a couple examples of yoga poses you could try to aid in recovery and injury prevention are reclined twists. So laying on the floor, letting your knees go one way, maybe your head goes the other way, and holding that and consciously scanning your body and relaxing it the whole time. Supta baddha konasana so bringing the soles of the feet together and knees apart, which is so good for relaxing the hip flexors and pelvic floor. And one of my favorites is legs up the wall, which is laying with your bum up against the wall. Legs are straight up and improves circulation, relaxes the nervous system and slows the heart. So, so nice for recovery and to bring the body into that beautiful res. Beyond the physical, there are so many great mental benefits to yoga. So this is training the mind and also training the breath as well to help focus the mind. And we do that through breath control or pranayama. I have a whole episode on Pranayama, if you're interested in it.
[00:08:49] And this helps so much with endurance. So breath efficiency, which Pranayama trains, is key for stamina, for power output and for recovery. Many of us athletes will hold our breath during exertion, which reduces efficiency and increases fatigue. So we learn how to breathe through our lifts or through our training in a way that makes us more efficient and uses the maximum amount of oxygen that we can get right. So I recommend athletes and lifters practice diaphragmatic breathing that's expanding your belly and ribs as you inhale, softening them as you exhale, which increases your lung capacity over time, and also down regulates the nervous system as well as Ujjayi breathing. If you go to a Vinyasa yoga practice, you'll hear this breath a lot, but it's a soft whisper in the back of the throat as you exhale. It slows the breath a little bit. It can create a little bit more heat through the body, but it also is super focusing for the mind, having that touch point of the breath. If you listen to really loud music, you might turn it down sometime and really focus on slowing the breath and listening to it and noticing how that affects your focus. You also might try box breathing, which is an inhale, a hold of the breath, an exhale and then a hold of the breath. And you might imagine drawing a box in your mind as you do this. And Navy seals actually train with this to control their stress and heart rate during intense moments. So maybe between sets or you're trying to cool down, this is a really good technique to use to bring the heart back down. I would also maybe try three part breath. That's breathing through the low belly, upper belly, chest, breathing out chest, upper belly, lower belly, which slows the breath and uses all of our beautiful breathing accessory muscles in the process. And this is so simple. But using your diaphragmatic breath, maybe not fully all the time during exertion, but making sure that you're exhaling so that you can engage the core during any powerful movement can be so helpful and so good at preventing injury. Just make sure that you do an equally nice inhale to reoxygenate the blood. Yoga is so good for focus and mindset and nervous system regulation as I've talked about. So it gives you a mental edge. Many high performing athletes rely on mental clarity and resilience and stress management. And yoga trains present moment awareness, reducing mental distractions during competition. So I'll give a couple examples of what we do in yoga that I would Apply two athletics and one is drishti. So that's finding a focal point. So just something that's not moving that you can focus your attention on, which greatly improves balance, especially when you combine it with deep breathing. And when we use focus and breath with movement, it also improves proprioception, or the knowledge of where our body exactly is in space, which is nervous system regulating. But it also improves performance because obviously we want to know exactly where to place the body for a specific outcome. Also, meditation and visualization have proven to be really effective with athletes like LeBron James and Tom Brady to enhance performance and confidence. So that's visualizing yourself doing something before you actually do it. And it trains your brain to do the movement or to perform in a specific way, which is so cool. I also want to talk just a little bit about philosophy here because yoga is so much more than poses and breathing. It's a whole philosophical system. And one of the concepts I go back to over and over is called stira and sukha, which means effort and ease. So that's all about really considering when to push and when to rest. So sira is strength and stability and effort. Sukha is ease and flexibility in relaxation. It can be really easy when you're wanting to perform well, to really focus on the sira, on the pushing, on the strength, and to kind of forget about the ease as well. But we need both. We need them hand in hand for optimal performance and also for balance in our lives. So yoga reminds us to hold one in each hand and to honor our need to push and also to relax. This also teaches us to listen to our body's cues instead of forcing results, which is going to be so much better in the long term. You know, it's interesting, there are so many different moves or goals that I've had in strength training, and nothing has been more impressive than giving birth to my daughter, had a home birth with her. And the strength and ease were such a part of the preparation and the visualization too, for this endurance event, which frankly, it is. And what they teach you to do is to really focus during, like the contractions or what we'd call waves. So to use all these techniques, the breath, the focus, maybe some mantra, so repetitive phrases, something like that during the hard parts. And then they recommend when the waves stop or the. The moments between them to just relax as much as possible. And I've been able to carry that with me into yoga, into athletics, into so many different parts of my life. And I'm really grateful for that reminder to Recover to sleep well to do my more soft yoga practices in addition, you know to getting it at the gym. So you can easily add some yoga into your training without overloading by adding a 10 to 15 minute cool down post training. So that might mean hip openers, spinal twists, maybe even some breath work. Maybe you dedicate one to two yoga sessions per week. So my rest days are typically active rest days and I'll do a yoga practice but I'm not doing pushing beyond my limits. I'm keeping it pretty chill, checking in with my body, feeling my mobility, stuff like that. You might even practice breath work or visualization before your workout. So those more mental practices to enhance your performance and see how that feels. There are so many different styles of yoga so you can find what works for you. But yin yoga can be really great for athletes because it's all about the deep stretch. It's definitely a way different pace than you might be used to. It's very slow and low to the ground, but it can be so helpful. Power yoga and Vinyasa can be a great complement to the practice. They're going to have a lot of benefits that complement what you're doing in your training. And also restorative yoga. So good just to relax. That is basically like the napping and the laying on things of yoga that we all need so much. So to close yoga enhances mobility, strength, breath, focus and recovery. All so necessary for athletes and for those who strength train and who love fitness. So I challenge you to try adding 5 or 10 minutes of yoga post workout once a week or even to step into a yoga class and see how it feels. Try the different pace, let yourself slow down a little bit and really connect inwardly and then see how that benefits the rest of your training. I bet it will be bigger than you even are expecting. So if you're an athlete that practices yoga, I'd love for you to share your experience. Feel free to if you're listening on Spotify, comment underneath or to comment on Instagram. My name is Iam Lauren Leduc on there. You can always connect with me there and I'd love to see you in class too. I teach 1030 Vinyasa Yoga Sundays online and in person at True Love Yoga. Come to me, see me and I promise I'll challenge you maybe in a whole different way. So lots of love. Om Shanti, Om. Peace.
