1: Yoga is awesome and so very good for you.
2: Yes, YOU.
For a long time I neglected my yoga practice in favor of lifting. I made all the excuses in the world, including the cliched “I don’t have time” hogwash, and I rationalized that lifting was better than yoga anyway, so it wasn’t a big deal. The further I got from my practice, the more off-center I became.
As an entrepreneur spinning multiple plates, I fell deeper into disarray and began to feel terribly encumbered. It took me a long while to realize that there was a giant hole where my yoga practice used to be, and an even longer while to find an instructor and a studio that would properly fill that void.
Now that I’ve resumed my place on the mat, I realize just how valuable yoga can be for gym enthusiasts, and how often it is overlooked. I also found that practicing yoga now, as an advanced lifter, has far more benefits than I had even been aware of 12 years ago when I took my first yoga class. So, if you happen to be a gym-junkie who loves to deadlift, hip thrust and kettlebell swing your glutes into submission, this list is for YOU.
Why Yoga Is Good
1. Active Recovery
Yoga is an effective and low impact way to move on your non-lifting days without compromising recovery. Many yoga experts will even go as far to say that hot yoga in particular can stimulate your metabolism and help release toxins from the body. Either way, you will always feel better leaving yoga than when you came in.
2. Kinesthetic Awareness
Flowing through poses while barefoot and mirror-less requires a great deal of control. Yoga requires you to listen to your body, tapping into your trunk, your feet, your legs-you name it-to enter and sustain postures without visual aid. This increases kinesthetic (or body) awareness and can help when moving through compound lifts at the gym such as squats and pushups. Because yoga carries such an internal focus, it can encourage you to practice more intuition during your lifts.
3. Balance
And I don’t mean stability, although you'll certainly get your fair share of that from yoga. I’m referring to the balance of activity that yoga provides an avid gym goer. Lifting sessions are typically aggressive and weighted, while yoga is intrinsic and uses the body as leverage. This can create a balance between Herculean and Buddha-like activities, which in turn, encourages balance within your life.
4. Mobility and Flexibility
No matter how many times someone tells us that we need to spend more time stretching our muscles or mobilizing our joints, we would just rather lift, wouldn’t we? I mean, who has time to do all that flexibility work when we have to make sure we snag that open power rack before someone else! But, improving your mobility and flexibility will increase your movement efficiency-benefiting your lifts exponentially. Yoga is a fun way to get bendy that won’t take up valuable gym time.
5. Breath Control
I cannot tell you how many times I have helped someone out of shoulder pain by teaching them to breathe from their diaphragm or coached a client into a stronger overhead press just by cueing them to BREATHE. Yoga places significant emphasis on the breath, which will keep you aware of your breathing during your training sessions.
6. The Goldilocks Principle
Understanding when to hold back and when to push through is a delicate dance. You can sometimes set down the weight and think, “I could’ve done more.” Inversely, you might be wishing you hadn’t pushed through that last ugly rep. Yoga teaches you how to feel free within your body, accomplishing challenging poses while fostering ease of movement. You can’t force the poses if you intend to do them correctly, but you are encouraged to look within yourself for what you might be capable of. It’s a beautiful balance of just right that can aid you in your lifting endeavors.
7. Bodyweight Strength
It wasn’t until I started practicing handstands last year that I discovered my strength training had some critical holes in it. Being able to move heavy iron relative to your bodyweight is awesome, but then discovering that you have little ability to leverage that bodyweight? Well, that was a revelation. Yoga improves bodyweight strength, and puts you in positions that you might not otherwise put yourself in at the gym.
8. Noncompetitive Environment
Most of us who lift regularly have an inherent competitive nature. We compete with our previous lifts, with others at the gym, or even in an organized environment such as powerlifting or olympic lifting competitions. This is part of what makes us so ambitious and something that should certainly be fueled. However, even when this competition is friendly, it’s still competition and can sometimes blind us.
Yoga is a noncompetitive environment that can bring you back to your center when your hunger for big lifts gets ravenous. You'll have to learn to accept your progressions and avoid comparing yourself to the person on the mat next to you.
9. Bigger Lifts
You might not typically think of yoga as something that can make you stronger, but it sneaks up on you like that. Yoga poses can translate to lifting strength by waking up muscles you don’t often use, encouraging cooperative multi-joint movements and giving you wicked upper body strength. I can deadlift over twice my bodyweight and perform multiple sets of 10 pull-ups-but crow pose humbles me. This branch of strength can only serve to make your lifts bigger.
Even after reading these convincing reasons to practice yoga, you might still be skeptical. So, in the video below I talk about some of the reasons why you might avoid yoga and discuss how to overcome those stumbling blocks. The most challenging thing I have encountered when it comes to yoga is finding the right instructor, which is why I implore you to seek out your yoga practicing friends and ask them to take you to class. If someone you trust thinks their instructor is legit, chances are that you will too.
Neghar Fonooni, fitness and lifestyle coach, entrepreneur, and founder of Eat, Lift, & Be Happy. negharfonooni.com
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