How Power Yoga Can Help Athletes

By Scott Hughes

Whether you already practice yoga or barely know anything about it, you can greatly improve your athletic abilities by doing power yoga. Like most yoga for exercise, power yoga focuses on the performance of asanas or poses. Power yoga usually uses a vinyasa style of practice, meaning the practitioners synchronize the poses with their breath. Generally, power yoga aims to improve your athletic ability in three main ways.

Firstly, you can use power yoga to improve your physical strength. Power yoga for strength especially makes use of poses that involve holding oneself up in various ways using the limbs. Think about it like this: Simply getting down in push up position and trying to hold that position would give you a tough workout. Power yoga uses many poses like that.

Power yoga also aims to improve your stamina and endurance. Obviously, stamina and endurance play a major role in athletics. In power yoga you especially work your stamina and endurance when you hold poses for extended periods of time. Additionally, by going through the poses quickly without stopping in between, you will keep up the work and thus build your endurance.

Finally, power yoga helps you improve your flexibility. Flexibility will help you avoid injury during any athletic endeavors. Also, being rigid and inflexible will hinder your ability to perform well in sports and other athletic activities.

Doing any type of yoga will also help you recover from fitness training. It will preserve your health and improve blood circulation, which in turn will improve your physical potential. Training a lot for a specific sport can make you physically unbalanced, but doing yoga will help balance you back out.

Many athletes use almost all of their free time practicing for their sport. That dedication is almost always required from top-level athletes in any field. That may leave you little time to take on other exercise routines. Luckily, yoga does not take that much time. A simple 20 minute practice once a day or a few days per week will do you great. And once you start, you will get better and better at it.

If you are an athlete, I recommend you try power yoga. Of course, before starting any new exercise program, you are supposed to consult a medical doctor.

Whatever you do, good luck and have fun!

Scott Hughes manages Online Yoga Club at OnlineYogaClub.com, which has lots of free information and resources about yoga. You can discuss yoga and get help at the Yoga Forums The forums are completely free to use.

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