Description
Yoga makes good athletes better. This time-honored discipline imparts flexibility, balance, and whole-body strength, creating improvements in an athlete’s form, efficiency, and power. In addition, yoga’s attention to concentration and breath awareness improves mental focus and mental endurance—hidden assets that become especially important at the end of a long training session or race. In The Athlete’s Guide to Yoga, yoga instructor, endurance athlete, and coach Sage Rountree explains the benefits that yoga can bring to every training program. With hundreds of color photographs featuring more than 100 poses, this book treats common problem areas to make athletes stronger in their sport. Rountree helps athletes see progress from just 10 minutes of yoga each day.
In an engaging and easy-to-follow style, The Athlete’s Guide to Yoga presents:
- warm-up and cool-down routines for workouts
- simple poses to specifically target areas of inflexibility and overuse
- breath and meditation exercises
- different types of yoga for each phase of training
- recommendations for intensity and volume of yoga workouts throughout the training year
Rountree’s applications for training and racing ease the introduction to yoga, making it practical and accessible for all athletes.
Endorsements
“Endurance athletes generally have poor flexibility, core strength, balance, and posture. Improving these can really change performance for the better. The Athlete’s Guide to Yoga is a great resource to get you on the path to better training and racing.”
—Joe Friel, founder of Joe Friel’s Ultrafit and author of The Triathlete’s Training Bible, The Cyclist’s Training Bible, and The Mountain Biker’s Training Bible
“The Athlete’s Guide to Yoga is a great resource for athletes. Finally, we have an explanation of how to integrate yoga practice into daily training and within different training cycles. The Athlete’s Guide to Yoga is well laid out and easy to follow, and it includes pose adjustments to help athletes overcome sport-specific tightness. I’ve been practicing yoga to complement to my triathlon training for the past 8 years. Now I have a great tool to take on the road when I can’t make it to my usual class.”
—Samantha McGlone, second place, 2007 Hawaii Ironman World Championships and 2006 Ironman 70.3 World Champion, 2004 Olympian
“After running and racing for nearly thirty years, competing through five Olympic trials and the 1996 Olympics, and traveling the world on U.S. track, road, and cross-country teams, I thought I knew all the tricks for success and longevity in distance running. Yoga helped me set a world age-group record in the indoor mile and an outdoor American record in the 1500m at age 45. Yoga should have been—and will be from here on out—added to the mix of ingredients for success for any serious endurance athlete. Incorporate the practice of yoga into your weekly training regimen, and it will make a difference in your life as an endurance athlete. I highly recommend The Athlete’s Guide to Yoga to all athletes who want to train smarter and race faster.”
—from the foreword by long-distance runner Joan Nesbit Mabe
“This is a practical in-your-body guidebook for anyone wanting to take their fitness routine into new realms. Clearly written, beautifully illustrated, it’s a real resource for starting and deepening a practice that stays true to yoga’s depth. Postures, breathing, relaxation, meditation, training routines, it’s all here.”
—Richard Faulds, Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health
“Yoga is not only ‘good’ for athletes—it is essential, for both the physical and mental benefits. On the physical side, training for sport makes the body tight. In sports like running and cycling which involve specificity of movement, which means using the same muscles over and over, some muscles get extremely tight while others do virtually nothing. Other sports, like tennis or golf, are one-sided and cause lateral imbalance which can lead to injury. Still other sports, like climbing or volleyball have a greater variety of movements involved, but the training effect still causes tightening of the muscles which leads to imbalance and, eventually, injury! Learning yoga is about learning, ultimately, to pay attention. It is about learning to mentally focus, and that is important in any sport. Sage shares the benefits that yoga has brought to her life as an athlete and offers easy to follow yoga postures and breathing techniques to help athletes of all sports get started with a safe and effective yoga routine and to help them avoid or rehabilitate an injury.”
—Beryl Bender Birch, author of Power Yoga and Beyond Power Yoga, director/founder of the Hard and the Soft Yoga Institute, and contributor to Yoga Journal
“The Athlete’s Guide to Yoga gives a profound outline for training one’s bodymind for peak performance at the highest and most integrated level. It’s a wonderful book and Sage is a gifted teacher!”
—Baron Baptiste, author of Journey into Power and teacher to professional athletes, including the Philadelphia Eagles
