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“A lot of people who consider themselves in great shape don’t realize they’re actually out of balance,” says Rodney Yee, a yoga expert whose three dozen yoga DVDs, including Gaiam DVD Yoga Conditioning for Athletes, have made him a household name to millions.
“I was a ballet dancer and gymnast,” says Yee. “Yoga helped me heal old injuries and prevent new ones. It helps with range of motion in every joint, and keeps the muscles supple but strong. It doesn’t just build a body for a specific activity, but brings us back into balance so our body can adapt to any movement. Yoga is cross-training.”
Tennis pros Pete Sampras and Venus and Serena Williams use yoga to improve core strength, increase flexibility, improve coordination, and help heal or prevent injuries. And pro teams including the NFL’s Miami Dolphins, Philadelphia Eagles and New York Giants, and Major League Baseball’s Chicago Cubs, are integrating yoga into their training regimens.
“I think injury prevention and core strengthening are the obvious benefits of yoga,” says competitive triathlete and former collegiate heptathlete Danielle Weiss, who now teaches yoga to the triathlon team at the University of Colorado. “But after practicing and teaching yoga for almost 7 years, now I most appreciate the mental edge yoga has given me. It’s taught me to truly ‘go to my edge,’ whether I’m trying to extend fully in Dancer’s Pose, or trying to push the last 200 meters of the running leg at collegiate nationals.”
Why is yoga good as sports cross-training?
Yoga helps strengthen the muscles that are underused while releasing the muscles that are tight from your sport. “In yoga, if we do something to the right, we do it to the left. If we do something on our head, we do something on our feet,” says Yee. “Your joints and body will also last a lot longer if they get movement in all directions.”
Professional beach volleyball player Annie Akers learned that lesson the hard way. After suffering repetitive shoulder injuries from what she calls “throwing yourself like a rag doll in the sand,” Akers found yoga six years ago. “It took one class and I noticed a significant difference in my shoulders,” says Akers. In addition to injury prevention, yoga provides flexibility and core strength for her demanding sport, helping Akers arch her back to hit the ball and remain stable while playing on sand’s shifting, uneven surface.
“Yoga improves on the biomechanical compensations an athlete has that may have been caused by acute or chronic injuries,” says Jamie Naughright, Ed.D., a Lakeland, Fla.-based certified athletic trainer and yoga teacher, who regularly witnesses this with her clients and with referral patients of Dr. Larry Padgett, an orthopedic surgeon and team physician for the Cleveland Indians and Atlanta Braves. “The poses also help me see diagnostically where the imbalances are as well as help the athlete get a clear visual of what’s going on.”
Former professional football player Carter Lord knows something about chronic over-compensation. “I used to be in a lot of pain — back pain and general tightness from years of hard charging, no stretching and football,” he says. “I had a lot of hits and even though I started doing chiropractic [therapy], nothing helped me much until I started doing yoga. I am now mostly pain free.”
While he admits his first impressions of yoga were “mellow talk and leotards and some kind of esoteric chick thing that didn’t relate to tough guys,” a decade of regular practice — mostly Bikram so he can still sweat like a guy — has changed Lord’s mind.
“It pains me to go to the gym and see these guys walking around with all their muscles,” Lord explains. “I know they don’t feel good; they’re not healthy. It doesn’t do you any good to be like a piece of steel if you are in danger of pulling muscles if you move quickly. Every weightlifter or athlete in America should have yoga as part of their regimen. If they did, you can be sure they would have far less injury.”
Read on for specific yoga poses for specific sports:
cycling, golf, running, swimming and tennis.
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