Why You Should Combine Your Workouts With A Yoga Practice
Why You Should Combine Your Workouts With A Yoga Practice
Sometimes I feel that there is a great separation in the world of yoga and weight lifting, especially that only weightlifting can give you the results you need. But that is not true and it’s for two simple reasons. The first being that with asana, you can open your body for wider ranges of motions and for the second, it helps you avoid injuries in your workouts. If you can learn to combine your workouts with asana or at least mini yoga practices, I promise you will notice a huge difference.
Open Your Body
Most weightlifting and working out in general usually requires you to move your body in certain ranges of motions in order to receive the benefit of what you’re working towards, so without spending the time to open your body, how will you receive that new range of mobility? Very solemnly do we find time in our days to open our hips and shoulders and with working out, not only are we encouraging those areas to stay closed, we are compressing trauma that has already resonated itself within our vessel! So be very careful as you continue to workout because you will need that release that only asana can give you!
Avoid Injury
With the physical practice of asana, you gain flexibility and strength in areas we never focus on time and energy on, so if you are avidly working out, you have to remember to nurture your body! Before and after! Practicing this outside of your workouts will gain new mobility to prevent injury as you work out, and afterward, it is so important to give yourself time to slow down and relax with a nice restorative asana practice. Even if you’re just foam rolling or laying in a nice, mellowing position — it’s better than just combing muscle on top of muscle! Be kind and gentle to your body!
Take Care Of Yourself!
We never make time for ourselves anymore. We wake up, eat, work, workout, sleep, and repeat. But if you can learn to combine your workouts with a yoga practice, you will be able to balance out that side of your life. It’s all about making time. Rather than gazing at your phone for hours, maybe you can spend an additional fifteen minutes by moving through some Sun Salutes right next to your bed! You don’t have to commit to a full-blown yoga class, especially with so many online, but enough to start introducing this into your body.
Some workouts you can do:
Sun Salutes
Vinyasa flows
Holding Chaturanga
Dolphin
Yogi Push Ups
YinRestorative
Hatha classes (great for strengthening!)
Inversion practice
The list could truly go on! It’s all about finding your inspiration and what works for you and your body. Everyone is different! I personally love to tie in a heating vinyasa flow with lots of yogi pushups, downward facing dog to plank to chaturanga to upward facing dog then back to downward facing dog. Seems easy but try doing it twenty times in a row! Enjoy!