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Whether you are an avid runner or a beginner, you probably already noticed that your muscles and joints are taking a hit. The pain that most runners experience is not due to the running itself though, but to the imbalances it causes and aggravates. Think that on an average 1-mile run, your foot strikes the ground 1000 times and the force of impact on your foot is three to four times your weight. So, no wonder runners often complain about ‘runner’s knee’, foot pain or back pain. Through yoga, you can help bring your body to balance and get better chances of avoiding injury.
From increased flexibility to improved breathing, let us break down three main reasons why runners should include yoga in their routine.
1. It helps bring the body into balance
Running impacts your joints, ligaments, muscles, and tendons. If you choose running only as your go-to exercise, it can lead to joint wear and tear, muscle damage or even injury. On the other hand, yoga increases your range of motion (we have written about the importance of increasing range of motion to maintain joint health in this blog).
Runners often train in a ‘sport specific’ manner, incurring repetitive movement that causes too much pounding, tightening, and shortening of the muscles. Without opposing movements, the body will compensate by working around the instability – if you are off balance, every step you take forces muscles to work harder in compensation. Tight muscles get tighter and weak ones get weaker. Muscles are the body’s natural shock absorbers, so ideally, they should be soft and supple. Brittle muscles, on the contrary, cause the joints to rub and grind, making them vulnerable to tear.
Runners can use yoga practice to avoid this stress on the entire skeletal system, by putting muscle to more restorative, elongating work. Yoga also helps focus on the body’s movement rather than on external performance goals. Improving your body stability will help your performance.
2. It can increase awareness and confidence as you run
Running, particularly when done competitively, is a mind game. It is a constant negotiation between the body and the mind that say ‘stop!’ when you have to keep performing. Yoga trains the mind by improving concentration and ability to control emotions. This in turn will help you keep negative thoughts and unexpected distractions while running.
Furthermore, yoga teaches you to listen to your body and pay attention to fractions of movements. The more aware you become of how your body works and reacts, the better you will be at reacting to body signals and assess how much you can push yourself. This is especially important as when running, the body produces a lot of endorphins, the body’s natural pain killers, which can mask pain or the onset of an injury or illness.
This awareness can be used in approaching your daily workouts. Through the practice of yoga you learn that your energy levels fluctuate from one day to another, even hourly, much like each run. Developing this body wisdom will help you better intuit what you can do on a given day and optimise the use of your energy reserves.
3. It teaches you how to breathe
In a way, both running and yoga are based around breathing. The breathing exercises in yoga, called pranayama, and the teaching of mindfulness are probably some of the best benefits for runners. These stimulate the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems and relax the entire body, which is key to reduce tension. Conscious breathing also makes us aware of how to use our breath during running: a slower breathing is more relaxing, while a faster breathing is more energizing – this knowledge can help runners run better on either long distance and sprint, and reduce performance anxiety at the same time.
Controlling one’s breathing will also help racing success as aerobic capacity is vital to running performance. Runners with a strong aerobic capacity can pump a large amount of oxygen-rich blood to working muscles. Maximum oxygen intake is crucial for competing runners, and pranayama and asana conditioning will help maximize the size of your pump and the quantity of fresh blood flowing through your body.
Yoga has many benefits on the body and mind, including reducing stress, improving posture, breath, strength and flexibility, all important ingredients to a runner’s success. Cultivating body wisdom and taking a holistic approach to how your body and mind function together will generally reduce the risk of injury. There is no reason to let you get side-lined by an injury if you listen to your body; it has an inherent intelligence to bring about a sense of equilibrium that will be your best ally.