There is a stereotype that has been associated with practicing yoga that many people no longer seem to believe. The players of many professional sports teams are adding yoga to their workout regimen. Yoga serves not only as a physical aid for flexibility, mobility, and strength, but it also improves mental cognition, concentration, focus and attitude. Thanks to its multi-faceted benefits, yoga has become a compelling and integral addition to athletic training.
In the typical physical workout, it is easy to miss strengthening the small stabilizing muscles that surround your joints and spine. Yoga requires your body to hold poses that question its flexibility limits, accessing those tiny muscles that play an important role in injury prevention. Athletes spend a great deal of their life contracting these muscles, and yoga helps elongate and stretch them.
Blake Griffin, an NBA basketball player for the Detroit Pistons, who practices yoga three days a week states, “Once things start to get tight, that’s when things lock down, and my back starts to hurt, my knee starts to hurt. So, keeping everything loose helps me function at my highest level.” (www.si.com)
More and more professional athletes are now practicing yoga to not only lengthen their careers by taking better care of their bodies, but also, because yoga improves the quality of a person’s overall attitude.
Lebron James, player for the Los Angeles Lakers, discloses, “Yoga isn’t just about the body. It’s also about the mind.“ (www.thesportster.com)
This practice—originally a Hindu one–disciplines the mind to maintain a specific focus. Maintaining an awareness of one’s own breath and breathing pattern, yoga asks your body to relax into its perceived limits and trains your body to be able to withstand a greater amount of stress.
Yoga has the power to improves an athlete’s overall durability and mental capacity and can do the same for you!
