Yoga For Sports Performance

(where did I put my phone?!)

Yoga…it’s been knocking around for almost 4000 years, so why don’t S&C coaches use it?

Don’t panic, I’m not about to get the smelly candles out and start getting all spiritual on you. I’ve been looking at flexibility and mobility training recently in a bit more detail ever since Duncan French first brought a resource (Yoga Hoops) to my attention when we were discussing flexibility and mobility issues faced by basketball players.

I then picked up a couple of other resources (Real Men Do Yoga and Stretch To Win) and took a look through some of the 3D flexibility concepts the Gray Cook has been working on. So all of this research was leading me to look at Yoga and see what I could take from it and apply to my clients and athletes.

I then checked in with Mark Jarvis, one of my former colleagues at the English Institute of Sport to catch up and have a chat and it turned out that he was getting into yoga and looking at it’s applications to sports performance. He was a lot further down the line than me and I brought him up to the NE to speak to a group of S&C coaches and physio’s about how Yoga could be used in sport, without having to burn smelly candles, wear lyrca or have a pony-tail.

Mark Jarvis is going to put together a more in depth overview but I’m just going to share a couple of the slides from his presentation that made me sit up (nice and straight) and take notice. Here are 4 slides for you to take a look at.

So the first slide looks at how strength and conditioning has progressed during the past 25 years. We now understand that the path to athletic development is not through isolation exercises using machines. If you want to get strong and powerful you need to train with a purpose and that means getting functional. You need to places stress on the body in a manner similar to the way that it will ultimately need to perform. So lets look at the second slide… 

We still do the same crappy stretches that we did 25 years ago! Why? Maybe it’s time to start looking for a more effective strategy.

Now what I like about Marks approach is that he has been trying to see where yoga can fit into an overall training paradigm. I was a little worried when he was coming up to see me (I’d not seen him for a year!) that he had gone a little spiritual and thrown out all of the squat racks, barbells and dumbbells from his training facility. I didn’t need to have worried. Mark has worked out how to fit it into an training programme. He’s not the yoga guy – he’s an S&C coach that may use yoga to improve the performance of his clients and athletes.

Which brings us to the final slide. Mark takes a really sensible approach – perform an evaluation and work out what you need to do to improve their performance…if yoga meets the needs then programme accordingly.

Simple really, but then simplicity really is genius!

Mark is going to lift the lid on his approach and share with you some of the key poses that he uses on a daily basis to improve his athletes performances in a more detailed post, but I thought I would wet your appetite for this fascinating subject.