YOGA HELPS A SPORTS PERSON
• Yoga helps a sports person to feel and understand the body processes more accurately, thereby learning what the body needs. By understanding this, an athlete can work on areas that need attention with confidence.
• Yoga is useful for all types of sports to help prevent injuries. One gets extra agility which helps to avoid damage, provides more strength and improves a player's ability to react to a situation.
• In competitions, athletes at all ability levels tend to have a fear of losing, of other competitors, or of developing mental deterrents to excellent performance. Yoga trains us to be our best every single moment, to hold ourselves at our highest standard and to go beyond our preconceived limitations.
• Yoga postures work all around a limb and help to knit the muscle fibres thus building resilience to injury. By anticipating areas of the body that are subject to stress, one can use Yoga effectively to pre-strengthen areas of concern.
• Due to long term sports training, muscular imbalance can develop in the body which can lead to damage and injury. Yoga's practices are ideal in this respect because integration, balance and harmony are keywords of Yoga. These practices correct the one-sided effect of training by promoting general harmonious development of the body and by improving the whole physical system.
• Yoga practices offer the natural remedy because Asanas are based on the gentle stretching of muscles, which induces relaxation and increases the blood supply. These also release residual tension and speed up regeneration. It is a natural counterbalance to the muscular effort of training and competing.
• Sports’ training tends to be very intensive over an extended period of time. This again can lead to a form of imbalance where muscles or the body as a whole becomes weak through over exertion. Regeneration is a remedial process for regaining strength and for the prevention of injuries. Yoga regeneration exercises are based on the principle that after contracting for a specific time period in an isometric movement against specific resistance, muscles will release and relax. But all this would be effective only if done consciously.
