When people think of yoga they primarily think of it as “stretching,” however it provides benefits in many more areas of fitness than just flexibility. Proven to promote overall endurance, power, speed, mental wellness, and stress relief. Integrating yoga into your young athletes’ practice can provide a lot of benefits.
Yoga is not meant to replace athletes’ current training but rather enhance overall development. Below we have provided some benefits of yoga when integrated into an athlete’s regular practice.
Why Yoga?
- Better Endurance: enhanced overall circulation, digestion, range of motion, and energy level which lend themselves to endurance in play.
- Improved Balance: increased body awareness in turn ensuring your training is more effective with improved balance as a result of core strength.
- Injury Prevention: yoga works your tendons, ligaments, increases mobility, and strengthens muscles; all things that help prevent injury in play.
- Improved Focus: practicing active breath and mediation can help in other areas beyond the actual yoga practice providing the participants with strategies for focus.
- Reduced Stress: sports-related stress and anxiety are quite common in competitive sports. Yoga enables mindfulness to relax the body, mind, and create healthy psychological habits.
How To Get Started?
Use Youtube Resources
Youtube is a platform that can provide a lot of knowledge and there are many channels dedicated to yoga content. Below are a few we recommend:
- Yoga By Adriene
- Lululemon: Yoga
- Breathe and Flow: “Yoga for Athletes to Boost Recovery”
Research Local Yoga Studios
Take part in local events or yoga classes to engage with community members.
Create Team Challenges
Customize a challenge for your team members to take part in yoga training through our sports team app. League communications tools like TeamLinkt can be a vehicle for the sharing of knowledge and are valuable at this time for athletic development when social distance is important for safety.
