Yoga for Runners

Yoga for Runners

After finishing their running routes, runners often experience soreness, numbness, or exhaustion in their bodies. One good way to mitigate these is to do yoga. According to Collins dictionary, yoga is an exercise where you move your body into different positions to be fit, improve breathing, and relax your mind. The moves used in yoga help practitioners ease and relax their muscles. Because of this, athletes like to add yoga moves into the recovery phase of their exercise plan. Doing yoga can help maintain a person's mental and physical health. It can improve one's flexibility, strength, endurance and help sharpen their focus. Given the definition of yoga and its benefits, it is advised for a runner to learn yoga and integrate them into their recovery activities. 

Additionally, yoga can help runners mitigate sore or numb muscles and remove exhaustion in the body. Since yoga can help you make your body flexible, you can implement yoga moves to help you improve your cadence and stride. Yoga is a good form of meditation. It can help you relax your mind and maintain peace after one stressful running routine.

Here are some yoga poses that runners can do to help them improve their body and mind:

Yoga Poses for Runners

• Legs up the Wall – This is an easy yoga pose for beginners, and it helps relieve the tension of your legs, feet, and back. To do this, you need to sidle up beside an open wall space and put your hips as close to the wall as close you can. Just make sure you are comfortable all around. Then swing your legs up the wall and then lie back. Do this pose for a good 10 minutes with ten breaths.

• Pigeon Pose – This yoga pose is very effective for increasing the mobility of your hips while also stretching the tight quads and hamstrings. You can start doing this pose by beginning with your hands and knees. Slide your left leg out behind you and make sure that the top of the foot is resting on the mat. Then, bring your right leg forward while bending your knee towards the same-side wrist bringing the foot to rest beside your left wrist. Next is to try lowering your hips onto the ground as you gently stretch with your upper body and hinging forward. You can repeat this pose on the other side after holding for a few seconds.

• Child's pose – This is a good resting and recovery pose that will help you sharpen your attention and relax with your body. Begin by going down on your knee-- then hinging back to sit on your ankles while the tops of your feet are grounded. Then proceed with leaning your upper body forward so that your arms reach the floor with your palms grounded in front of you. Your buttocks should be remaining on your heels as you go, then move your arms back while gently resting your head on the floor. Your arms should be inside your legs and palms will now be facing upward. Hold the position for approximately eight seconds, and don't forget to breathe!

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