I've been doing yoga for 10 years, give or take. That seems like a long time, but it's still more of a sidebar to the activity that best defines me: running. If I wasn't a runner, yoga might be something I had more time for. But I love it anyway, even while it stays a casual thing.
Because I am a runner first and foremost, I look for the benefits that yoga brings to running. And now, I am trying to bring those benefits to the kids I coach at Albany High School. We started talking about how yoga is beneficial last summer when they were still sussing out their new--thoroughly pregnant--assistant coach. I couldn't really run with them. But, I could somehow still attempt to demonstrate some yoga positions that I use as part of my stretching routine. Throughout the season they'd ask for a yoga day. Post season and post baby, I can finally lead a weekly yoga session with a bit more, um, flexibility.
At the first session I introduced how runners benefit from doing yoga in the following ways:
1) Mindset
Learning how to deliberately quiet your mind, then focus your awareness on your physical state, is a pretty powerful exercise. Yoga teaches you how to zero in on specific parts of your body; how to ascertain what you are capable of and stretch your limits. It teaches you how powerful thought is when you are trying to accomplish a physical task. How cool is it to bring this to running, a sport that people call 70% mental?
2) Breathing
Yoga is all about breathing. So is running, really, but unlike in yoga, we don't spend the first 5 minutes of our workouts, exercising our lungs in different ways, getting our breathing right, before we get to the main event. How then are we supposed to know what our breath should be like when running? Paying attention to your breath in yoga can help you be more aware of using your breath in running, too. When you are struggling during a run, think about and practice controlled breathing. Deeper, longer breaths give your muscles more of the oxygen they need. Plus, yoga helps you develop "belly breathing" rather than "chest breathing", which is more effective for getting the oxygen you need. Runners World shares some good tips on breathing right while running.
3) Flexibility
Runners are notoriously not flexible (as opposed to inflexible, but some of the type A personalities I know may be that too). They can see stretching as a pain and just one more thing keeping them from their post workout brunch or beer. Developing flexibility through yoga, in a dedicated session, can help improve your range of motion and protect against potential injuries. Maybe you'll pay more attention post-run, too.
Coaching yoga, I'm learning a few things myself. Coaching running is completely different from teaching yoga. Running in the most basic sense is more or less intuitive; some even say we were born to run. Most people still can use help with good running form and workout components such as proper warm up or recovery. But much of it simply adjusts how we do what we do every day: put one foot in front of the other. Yoga on the other hand, involves complicated physical contortions, poses with names that are funky in English and hard to learn in Sanskrit. Plus, I am by no means an expert yogi. I can demonstrate poses and even describe some of what it takes to do them properly, but I know my downward dog needs to be more inverted and there are surely plenty of other things I'm missing. I'm being more thoughtful and deliberate about how I teach them yoga--and in the process, evaluating how I coach running, too.
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