Yoga for Enhanced Recovery with Abbey Spiro
Inner Bliss teacher and athletic recovery expert, Abbey Spiro
By Abbey Spiro, Athlete, Athletic trainer, Recovery Specialist, and Yoga Teacher
What do Joe Thomas, the Guardians, Evan Longoria, Kevin Love, and Aaron Rodgers all have in common? They all incorporate yoga into their workout regime.
Yoga can help athletes be the best in their sport in so many different ways. Today, we’re talking about one way — enhancing recovery.
A key thing to remember about your yoga practice is that you don’t actually have to love every minute of it to receive its many benefits. We don’t always enjoy getting in a cold tub after practice or lifting weights to get stronger, but we do those things because we know they will benefit us. Yoga can be intimidating to start, and you might feel some resistance, but I bet once you get a few classes under your belt, you might enjoy it far more than the cold tub.
Using Yoga to Enhance Recovery
As athletes, we spend hours each day preparing to compete. Asking, or even demanding a lot from our bodies, means that we also have to give the body time to repair and replenish and time to adapt to the new demands. Many athletes, individuals and teams alike, are looking at ways they can help the body heal, repair, and regenerate in between training sessions and competitions. Like a battery, the body can become drained after each hard bout of training, and the things we do to help it recover can ensure that we’re fully charged before we step back into the arena of hard work and performance in our sport. Our body’s natural response to being stressed physically and mentally is to repair and adapt, but yoga can enhance this process through its effects on our nervous system.
It may seem counterintuitive to turn to yoga - another form of movement - to enhance the recovery process. After a hard week of practice and competition, another “workout” may be the last thing you want to do, but the use of intentional breath and movement that yoga offers can actually provide so many mind-blowing benefits! Some of these benefits include:
Decreased muscle soreness
Preventing burnout
Improved health of the fascia
Yoga and the Nervous System
While some of these benefits are easily felt - like yoga’s ability to ease muscle soreness, the gold mine lies in yoga’s profound effect on the nervous system. We live in a world of constant stimulation via phones, family, and life stress, on top of the physical and mental stress we encounter in our quest to be the best athlete we can be. In this environment, the ability to turn off the sympathetic nervous system (our “fight or flight” mode) and activate the parasympathetic nervous system (our “rest, digest, and heal” mode) is essential. Doing so can enhance the recovery process that’s already happening within us naturally, and introduce new and different patterns of movement that can also help keep you feeling your best physically and mentally. Yoga acts as a release valve of sorts as it helps release excess stress hormones, ease muscle tension, and so much more.
If you’re an athlete who wants to experiment with how yoga can help your recovery, I have some suggestions for how to begin. Like any other new modality, it is a good idea to begin incorporating yoga classes during your off-season so that by the time you are back in competition, you have a good idea of how yoga works best for you. Experiment with the different types of classes and notice how your body and mind feel before and after class - being able to listen to your body for feedback is so valuable both on the yoga mat and in your sport.
Learn about and experience the ways yoga can enhance athletic recovery in this 75-minute class designed for athletes of all sports, ages, and levels.
Learn a breathing practice that can decrease muscle soreness and increase lung capacity
Move through a beginner-friendly yoga flow designed to help the mind, body, and spirit adapt and recover from training.
Activate the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the "rest, digest, and heal mode" in our bodies.
Learn about and experience the benefits of infrared heat in our new Westlake studio.
Questions? Email aemyles@gmail.com.