How much have your body and mind changed since you started running? How much has your way of seeing things changed?
How much have only your eating habits changed? Your priorities?
I am sure that if you have been in love with running long enough, you have seen many small aspects of your personality and habits change.
In fact, it is very likely that in grinding out mile after mile you have reached and surpassed several goals that previously seemed unattainable, and that in the very knowledge that you have improved, you have found a valid excuse to do better.
And you felt like a better person. Healthier, stronger, happier.
It’s emotions like this that give us the determination to keep running, and allow us to experience the sport not just as an aerobic exercise, but as a true self-discovery.
Because when we run we put our physique on the road, but also our minds.
Just as in Yoga.
That’s right, Yoga; an ancient Eastern discipline that has the simple goal of making us feel good.
An articulate and fascinating discipline, which over the centuries has evolved, modernized, and turned into a lifestyle example that is present in an impressive way in our society today, for one simple reason: because yoga works.
There are numerous studies done on the subject, there are especially millions of people who practice it every day, and they decide to incorporate it into their sports activity every day.
Through Yoga, in fact, you learn to relax your mind and listen to yourself, and you learn to become familiar with your limitations and the messages your body sends us.
And this is a very important benefit of yoga, especially when we consider it applied to running.
A sport where the body is subject to many kinds of trauma, where knowing how to control breathing is important, and where concentrating on the signals our body sends us is crucial to achieving the goals we set for ourselves.
Be they measurable in seconds, kilometers, calories burned, or simply in feelings of well-being.
Yoga techniques that are good for (even) us runners
Yoga consists of various techniques, and all offer benefits that you can apply to running:
ASANA
The best-known part of yoga are the asanas, or yoga postures, the practice of which allows us to increase the strength and flexibility of the whole body, and to relax the mind through the deep stretching of the postures.
PRANAYAMA
Through pranayama breathing techniques, it is possible to learn how to breathe correctly and use breathing to our advantage. This allows for better management of energy expenditure, increasing endurance to exertion.
MUDRA
Yoga is also made up of hand gestures, or mudras, which are meant to prevent the dispersion of energy from the body and direct it where it is needed.
Each mudra is associated with a particular benefit, such as the mudra of non-fear or the mudra of desire.
MEDITATION
Meditation is a very important part of yoga and is used to relax the mind. A more relaxed mind is more focused, more present, and therefore more performing, and this has an impact not only in sports activity but also in our daily activities.
By interrupting the flow of mental thoughts, yoga eliminates mental confusion and helps to put thoughts back in line and restore proper order to things.
It’s easy, more than you think
The interesting part of the whole thing is that practicing yoga is much easier than you think.
You don’t necessarily need a mat and, most importantly, you don’t need contortionist skills.
In fact, actually Yoga you can do at any time. Even now.
Would you like to try?
Then sit in a comfortable position, cross-legged, or in a chair with your feet resting on the floor. The important thing is that the spine is nice and straight and the head in line with the column.
– Rest your hands on your knees.
– It relaxes the neck and shoulders.
– Close your eyes and bring your attention to your breath. Without trying to change it, simply listen to the air going in and out only through your nostrils (unless you have a cold or special nasal septum problems, then you can breathe through your mouth ;)
– Focus on listening to the breath and try not to think about anything else….
– Try doing a mental countdown starting with the number 3 until you reach zero, inhaling think of the number three, exhaling think of the number three, and so on until you reach zero.
When you have completed, relax your breath and open your eyes again.
That’s it; you just practiced yoga!
You listened to your body, you didn’t think about anything else, you stayed focused on the present moment — and that’s what yoga is all about.
Of course, it’s not always easy–and I’m sure that even in the course of this 10-second experiment, your mind escaped to work, dinner to prepare, or tonight’s game, but in those few moments that you really listened to yourself, you gave yourself a moment of detachment from everything around you.
And this, in today’s stressed society, is a luxury that thanks to Yoga we can all afford.
But is it like stretching? Not really
When we practice yoga, the focus is completely on listening to the body and the breath, and in this detail also lies the difference between yoga and stretching.
Again, an example is ideal to clarify the concept: you know the classic exercises you do to warm up your shoulders before doing sports? The ones where you rotate your arms one way and the other?
Here, try it.
Try rotating your right arm as if you were about to dive into the pool for a swim.
Thenrepeat the same movement with your left arm, however this time associate your breath with the movement:
– Inhaling, slowly bring the arm upward,
– Exhaling, complete the rotation.
Focus on listening to the muscles and joints that are working, the sensations they return to you, and the breath combined with the movement. Now stop and listen to your shoulders. Do you feel the difference?
This applies even to the most common stretching exercises we do before running; to all of them we can add awareness, and make them more effective.
As with all things, even with yoga, you need perseverance and focus to achieve measurable benefits; but what I can assure you is that if practiced with the right awareness, and at the right times, yoga can offer you a lot of benefits.
If you feel like trying to introduce some specific yoga postures into your daily running routine, I suggest you try this yoga mini-sequence.
These are a series of useful warm-up exercises to prepare the muscles involved in running, and to increase the flexibility of the body, especially that of the legs and joints. The sequence works on opening the chest, and this allows for more efficient breathing so that we can make full use of our lung capacity.
During practice remember to:
– Always respect your body’s limits, which translated means: don’t force positions!
– Even if you feel like you are uncoordinated or too rigid at first, always listen to what your body is telling you, don’t overdo it, don’t force it, and you will see that the benefits, with time, will come.
– Focus on ‘listening to the breath, coordinate it with body movements.
– Always practice on an empty stomach — but I guess if you do them before you go for a run, you’re already on an empty or almost empty stomach.
PS: You can download the image and save it to your smartphone, which I know you take it running too!
Enjoy the ride,
Laura Visinoni
www.yoganride.com