5 Ways Yoga Benefits Trail Runners!

1. Strengthens muscles around joints – reducing risk of injury.

The standing and balancing poses within your yoga practice are fantastic at safely and naturally building strength around the structure of the joints of the ankles, knees and hips. Running itself may be building strength in the legs but if you’re running with bad habits you could be increasing misalignment, muscle imbalance and inflicting repetitive impact, resulting in injury or chronic pain! Yoga is a weight bearing exercise, without the impact, that allows you to identify your imbalances. Strengthening the feet properly (finally released from the confines of shoes!), and evenly strengthening both legs and hips. Doing poses on each side really gets you noticing those imbalances and learning how to correct them!

2. Increases flexibility – lengthening muscles, reducing risk of injury.

Yoga is all about creating balance – a balance of strength throughout the body, plus a balance of strength and flexibility – this equals power. The more you run, the more tension is built up in certain areas and the more tension that builds up, the more likely an injury to the muscles is to occur. Yoga carefully re-lengthens the muscles through mindful stretching, gradually releasing the muscular tension. Longer, more elastic muscles have a greater range of motion, whereas tight muscles are much more restricted and can easily be injured. Moving with complete awareness in yoga allows you to identify the depth to which you should be going into a stretch at any particular time.

3. Strengthens your core – improving alignment and posture.

Many runners suffer with less than optimally strengthened core muscles – yet, these are the muscles (including transverse abdominus, obliques, quadratus lumborum and rectus abdominus) that hold you upright! As soon as a runner begins to bend at the waist due to a lack of core strength all alignment is lost, severely negatively impacting running form, efficiency and pace. There are many hugely effective core strengthening postures that we can include within a yoga practice. You will start to feel the difference almost immediately in moving from the strength of your core centre and in the ease of standing and sitting tall – no sit ups required!

4. Improves your posture – and works the whole body.

Not only will stronger core muscles enable you to maintain proper alignment whilst running, but the range of yoga poses you move through will reverse the negative effects of the forward motion of running: hunched shoulders, rounded back, tight neck and shoulders. A common mistake amongst runners is that, if they  stretch, they only stretch their legs. A good yoga practice should work on all areas of the body, from your feet to your head. Our fascia links everything together, therefore each part is just as important as the rest. The forward bending poses are amazing for re-lengthening the hamstrings but the backward bending poses as equally as amazing at drawing back the shoulders to release tension in the pectorals and lengthening the spine to relieve common lower back ache.

5. Enhances lung capacity – enabling you to take in more oxygen and run for longer more easily.

Breathing should be a large focus of practising yoga, both as you move between the poses and whilst you remain in them. This focus on conscious breathing will naturally begin to expand your lung capacity, as when we take our awareness to our breath, it naturally becomes longer and deeper. An experienced yoga teacher will also be able to guide you through breathing techniques that will further enhance your lung capacity. Eventually, you may be able to run by only breathing through your nose, as your breathing rate remains slow and calm and your oxygen and energy levels remain high, enabling you to keep going for longer and faster.

Helen Clare is a yoga teacher based in Cornwall, where she loves to run the coastal paths. Helen leads regular classes, attended by many local runners but also offers several Yoga Flow Running weekend retreats throughout the year. Yoga Flow Running is a concept designed by Helen, applying the principles that she has taken from her yoga practice into her running: promoting running more naturally, with proper alignment, using core strength, enabling efficient and injury free, fun running.