Yoga for high-performance sport.
For several decades now, Olympic teams, national teams and top professional athletes have been including regular yoga practice in their training programme. However, not all types of yoga are equally effective in enhancing athletic performance.
Originally, yoga was used to "counteract" the excesses of top-level sports practice. Thus, yoga was primarily used to lengthen and relax muscles that had become hypertrophied.
Within a very short time, however, the benefits of yoga were found to be far more extensive:
- Through the emphasis on correct alignment, imbalances inherent in the nature of each athlete - due not only to the sport itself but also to visual dominance, laterality and gestural memory - were compensated for.
- Thanks to the attention to posture, body, movement and breathing that a good yoga practice requires, the athletes were more present, more attentive, more alert and at the same time more serene; in short, more "in touch" with themselves and with a greater capacity for resolution and decision-making in the situation in which they found themselves.
- And, as predicted from the start, keeping muscles free of tension helped for better performance and faster recovery - both in the short and medium term.
These are just some of the reasons why yoga has not been a passing trend, but has a permanent place in the professional sports scene.
However, not all types of yoga are equally effective in enhancing athletic performance. In fact, the widespread belief that there is "one type of yoga" or that "all yogas are the same" simply because they are "yoga" is completely erroneous, and comparable to thinking that there is only one type of sport and therefore that archery is the same as chess, since both are sports.
And, of all the types of yoga practice, in my opinion, the ones that best complement a rigorous sports practice are:
- Iyengar Yogaby:
- Pay careful attention to alignment and correct execution of each movement.
- The excellent preparation of their teachers
- Yin Yogaby:
- Work on the fascia and correct the musculoskeletal structure in a very lasting way.
- To lengthen the muscles, reversing muscle hypertrophy.
- Ashtanga Yogaby:
- To be a dynamic and demanding practice
- Working on discipline and acceptance
- Tripsichore Yogaby:
- Work on balance, fluency, attention and presence.
- Its effectiveness in preventing and healing injuries
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