Are you thinking about yoga for athletes all wrong?
Many teachers and students make this common error: they go way too hard.
Yoga for athletes is not athletic yoga. It shouldn’t be a workout—as we teachers like to say, it should be a work-in.
The more serious an athlete is, the more specific conditioning they are doing for their sport. They don’t come to yoga to build strength! They come for relaxation, recovery, and maybe flexibility. They come to feel better. They come to find a complement to all the work they do in training.
Too often, though, teachers think, “Athletes! Got to make them work!” Not so.
Or teachers lead a practice that they personally enjoy. This fails to recognize that athletes might have pretty extreme sport-specific tightnesses that make many of the things we do in a typical flow yoga class, like tons of forward folding, uncomfortable at best and counterproductive at worst.
This video explains why yoga for athletes is not athletic yoga. It tells how we should be working to periodize yoga for serious athletes, so the intensity of the yoga practice is in inverse proportion to the intensity of training:
The video is from the free sample unit, unit 1, of my flagship online yoga teacher training, Teaching Yoga to Athletes. If it jibes with your approach, keep working through the sample unit. Better yet, sign up for the full course.
This summer I am leading the first in-person version of this five-day course since February 2020!
I’d love to have you join me.
When: Monday–Friday, July 8–12, 2024
Times: 10 a.m.–1 p.m. and 2 p.m.–5 p.m.
Where: Carrboro Yoga Company, Carrboro (Chapel Hill), North Carolina
Since folks come from around the world for this workshop, we have a very aggressive early bird registration date: May 1. That means we will know whether we have hit critical mass before you would need to book your travel.
It also means it’s time to commit! Send me a message with any questions about the training, I’ll happily answer them ASAP.