Why Runners Need Yoga
If you’ve ever run a 5K without any planning whatsoever, you know that you definitely need some yoga afterwards. It’s the perfect symbiotic practice that balances out all of the strain on your knees and joints with some much-deserved stretching and resting while cultivating internal strength and heat. But I’m getting ahead of myself. To answer the question of why runners need yoga, you need to first speak their language.
For runners, exercise is about endurance. Running can be sprinting, long distance running or interval training to strengthen your cardiac muscles. It all depends what your main goal is out of running. That’s what makes it different from yoga — because, more often than not, there’s a goal involved.
Yoga balances out the muscles that are used for running.
To put things very simply, yoga works for running because it stretches out the muscles that were used for the run. That’s why there are running & yoga clubs — because the two forms of fitness match each other almost perfectly. But in order to get the point across, you have to branch out of the yoga vocabulary. So instead of talking about yoga in terms of bandhas and which pose serves you best, runners could try to approach yoga by thinking about the physical benefits of it.
By stretching the calf and quadriceps muscles, runners can run for longer and ensure that they don’t get shin splits by not stretching properly. In fact, overly tight muscles are weak muscles. Your muscles need to contract and relax in order to be strong. With yoga, you strengthen and relax all parts of the muscle. Without yoga and without that much needed stretch, the muscles in the leg can break — sending any runner to the benches for four to six weeks!
Running itself can be a meditative practice.
While I have never personally experienced the meditative nature of running, I’ve been told that on a long run — it can be just like a yoga class in terms of gaining mindfulness in a short amount of time. By practicing yoga and running, a runner can work on their mindfulness both in movement and in stillness. Yoga can be a challenge in a different way for those who run. Perhaps it’s easy to meditate while running but can those same runners meditate while holding still? You might never know until you try! It’s been shown that morning yoga beats a cup of coffee — so the next obvious question is whether a morning run along with morning yoga holds up.
Running doesn’t just require leg muscles, it’s a full body practice and requires strength and flexibility.
Even though it might not seem like it, running is not purely a leg sport. To run, you need strength in all parts of your body. And to get that strength, you can practice yoga. Even better? Yoga is the perfect way to get more flexible and fight stiffness & aches from running. Perhaps you might not notice a potential injury or imbalance, but by practicing yoga — you can become more mindful about your body and notice such potential injuries before they become a big problem.
Runners are known to be some of the most prone to injury and that, most likely, is the best benefit that yoga can offer. By being more mindful, flexible and strong- runners can prevent injuries that could normally have kept that bedbound for weeks or months. Yoga and running might not seem like the perfect match — but together, they make a great combination for your next race.
