Yoga and Running: A Match Made in Heaven?

I'm sure you've heard that yoga can be a huge help in reducing stress, increasing your flexibility, and feeling more calm and centered in general. But yoga actually helping your running performance? Well, actually yes! Yoga, with its perfect mix of postures and breathing exercises, may offer just the right balance you're looking for. We're going to explore how yoga can be a great complement to a runner looking for better performance, training for a race, or just staying injury free.

Running is Tough
Running is a physically demanding exercise. There is a great deal of force (3 to 4 times your weight) that travels through your entire body with each step you take. And of course it's a very repetitive motion done over a long period of time. So it's no wonder that runners complain of bad backs and knees, tight hamstrings, and sore feet!

In fact, the issues above are often not necessarily a direct result of impact to the body, but of imbalances in your muscles that manifest as these symptoms over time. The repetitive motion of running focuses on particular ranges of motion and particular muscle groups for extended periods of time. This is a classic recipe for an injury! Do you have shin splints or plantar fasciitis? It might be because your calves are tight. Do you have lower back pain? Try stretching your hip flexors and see if the pain goes away. The point is that if you do not take preventive action, you can fall victim to one or more of a myriad of problems that are caused by muscle imbalances and inflexibility. But don't despair! This is where yoga can really save the day.

Yoga to the Rescue
Yoga is a collection of spiritual techniques and practices aimed at integrating mind, body and spirit to achieve a state of enlightenment. The practice is thousands of years old. And while there are multiple paths of yoga, for the sake of this discussion we're going to focus on Hatha yoga, which focuses on a combination of postures and breathing techniques to expand bodies and minds.

Flexibility
The first thing we'll address with yoga is our flexibility. For runners, it might make more sense to talk about muscle pliability. What do we mean by pliability? Basically, as runners we want our muscles to act more like a rubber band than a guitar string. Yoga postures called asanas work by safely stretching your muscles and all of the soft tissues of your body. That includes ligaments, tendons, and the fascia sheath that surrounds your muscles. When our muscles are not pliable, we will often find that our range of motion is restricted. For a runner, that means that your stride will not be as long as it could be and your performance will suffer. It can also cause muscle imbalances that can ultimately lead to injury, which we definitely don't want!

Proper Alignment
Second, let's look at proper body alignment. When we are running, the alignment of our bodies will have a huge impact on how we feel over time. If our posture is poor, we will end up putting increasing stress on areas of the body that now have to compensate for your poor posture. This is another common cause of aches and pains as well as more serious overuse injuries. Yoga postures teach proper body alignment and balance, both of which solidify our center of gravity and allow our running stride to be more efficient and powerful. This ensures that the muscles and joints that are meant to maintain our stride are working at their most efficient.

Breathing and Relaxation
Finally, yoga helps us to relax! If you've got a long run ahead of you, do you think you'll run better when your muscles and mind are tense or when they are relaxed? Yoga's focus on soothing the nervous system and relaxing our bodies through centering in on breathing exercises and postures can be a great performance enhancer while running. You will be better able to concentrate on the effort at hand, conserve energy and apply energy when needed as well.

There are many other benefits of yoga that go beyond just these topics including strengthening our core, reducing stress, increasing concentration, etc. And there are many different styles of Hatha yoga that you can try including Vinyasa, Bikram, Iyengar, and even our own Empowered yoga. Regardless of which style you choose, Hatha yoga is a practice that can take on its own meaning for you beyond just a fitness enhancer. But even if your focus is solely on building your fitness, you will find that yoga should have a firm place in your routine.

Where On the Coast?
We are very lucky to have a number of fantastic yoga studios on the coast to choose from.  A few that you may want to look into include , , and .  Take the time to seek out the style and the studio that fits you best and then practice, practice, practice!

Do you practice yoga today?  What style fits you best?  Have you found that it helps you in other athletic endeavors?  Let me know what you think!

Got Patch? Sign up for our newsletter by clicking on the "Patch Newsletter" link on the top right of our homepage.

To receive news feeds about Half Moon Bay and the unincorporated Coastside between Montara and Pescadero, visit Half Moon Bay Patch on Facebook and "like" us here. Follow us on Twitter here.

Want to blog for us? Click here.