Improving your athletic performance with Yin Yoga
Health professionals all over the world prescribe yoga as a means to stretch and balance the body and mind. Yin Yoga, a passive and more receptive style of yoga, offers as much benefit and even more than its better known power classes for athletic performance enhancement and efficiency.
Confidence and Endurance - Yin Yoga is a training in mindfulness using the body as a stimuli. As the practitioner invites in sensation, deepening the experience to meet its deepest edge, we simulate our body’s response to fear and the unknown. Working through these emotions and mindstates in class help to ensure a greater ability to meet these challenges with success, and increased responsiveness and confidence.
Flexibility - It is impossible to properly stretch connective tissue (ligaments, joints and tendons) via dynamic or short held postures. Muscles, which are very dynamic tissue with high water conent often take on the stabilizer role of the connective tissue with much lower water content, thus becoming stiff and over used adding additional stress and potential misalignments. Yin Yoga, with its long held passive poses that compress and pull the connective tissue, help nourish these tissues so they can maintain some dynamism and protect the muscles so they can do their job. Connective tissue responds best to a slow, steady load. If you gently stretch connective tissue by holding a yin pose for a long time, the body will respond by making them a little longer and stronger—which is exactly what you want. Remember the principle of exercise is to stress the tissue so the body will respond by strengthening it.
Oxygentation & Stress Reduction - The Yin breath is low in the belly, where the inhale and exhale is targeting 2 - 3 inches below the navel. This breath practiced receptively for a long duration keeps the lungs healthy and expands their capacity allowing for more oxygen to be absorbed. Low belly breathing also activates the parasympathetic nervous sytem, turning on the body’s natural stress reduction response and keeping maintaning the health of the adrenals.
Flexibility - Yin is a fantastic way to increase or maintain flexibility as it focuses on the areas around the joints. You’ll immediately notice more open hips, buttery muscles and a major mind detox. In the long run, it will lubricate joints, release the fascia of the body, increase flexibility and positively affect performance
- Reduce Inflammation - Prolonged physical and mental stress can wreak havoc on the body emotionally and physically causing the body to become inflamed and out of balance. Yin Yoga poses are intended to be cooling, designed to improve the flow of subtle energy that run through the meridian pathways housed in the connective tissue of the body as well as offer an opportunity to practice mindfulness around difficult or suppressed emotions. Improved flow of this energy improves organ health, immunity, and emotional well-being.
love,
alana
Yin classes with me at Sangha Yoga Shala
Tues / 10Am
Thurs / 7pm