Around six years ago, I spent a month in a Yoga Ashram in India, living as a student with the Sivananda Yoga masters. This was one of the most incredible experiences of my life and taught me a great deal about the spiritual side of yoga, the origins of yoga and the more subtle side of yoga including prana (energy), chakras and higher conciousness. However, as a Pilates instructor, I am more hungry for knowledge about anatomy, function, science and the 'less subtle' effects of movement. As a fitness writer and journalist, I have also learnt that people have often shied away from yoga, perceiving it to be too 'religious', too 'spiritual' or alternative for their western lives, particularly hardcore sports people such as triathletes or footballers.
This perception is slowly starting to change: I recently talked to Ryan Giggs, who has now brought out a yoga DVD, which he claims has helped him to stay at the top of his game for an extraordinary length of time. Giggs says that yoga helped him to recover from numerous hamstring injuries which could have otherwise ended his career. Yoga Guru Hayley Winter agrees and is so sure about the incredible effects that yoga can have in sport that she has spent most of the last decade developing Yoga Sports Science - a coaching course specifically designed to help sportsmen and women (from Olympic athletes to 10k newbie runners) improve their performance and reduce the risk of injury.
Intrigued by Winter's course, I immediately contacted her, as this seemed to be the missing link in my yoga training. Winter said "It was over ten years ago when I was invited to deliver yoga to a group of athletes, that I started to question why wasn't yoga used more widely in helping develop athletic performance? I had been practicing yoga for over 25 years, teaching for 15 and had seen and experienced the many performance benefits for myself.
So, in 2001 I started working with a small group of coaches and athletes, developing my Sports-Specific Yoga techniques, putting them into practice, and assessing their impact. Over the years I went on to deliver my techniques to athletes in a wide range of sports with the outcome being the same - improved athletic performance. I believe that one of the reasons why yoga hasn't been embraced by sport is that it's not easy to quantify its effect and also its never been sports specific enough to know how it fits into an athlete's training. At Yoga Sports Science we do just that and teach others how to do it too.'
Sounds like the missing link to me, so I am now a student of YSS! Watch out for future blogs to see how I am getting on!