Yoga is a practice perceived by many in the west as simply exercise. While yoga asanas are excellent for your physical body, the whole practice of yoga and breathing is also good for the mind. Other athletic sports also challenge your mind, and even touch your soul, so I’d like to highlight here the ways that a regular yoga practice has benefit for four sports, speaking not only from personal experience, but also objective reasons.
- Hiking
As a physical sport, hiking works mostly our legs, especially the calves, quads and hamstrings. Our hips, ankles and feet can get tired and swollen after many miles of hiking, especially on uneven terrain, and certain yoga asanas can help soothe, stretch and relax the legs after a long day of walking. A simple set of sun salutations with warrior variations would be a great way to warm up before starting the day hiking to make sure we don’t strain any cold or tight muscles, and stretching throughout the day with seated folds, forward bends, and standing poses like tree pose, dancer and half-wind release pose are some good examples of taking care of the right muscles.
Doing some yoga before and after a day of hiking also helps to settle the mind, especially if you have time to clear your mind and meditate a little, since hiking can often challenge you mentally – you get tired, frustrated, or even impatient with the steep climbs or neverending kilometers left, but grounding yourself mentally could help avoid you giving up, and improve your attitude when you start to feel tired
Hiking also takes us out into nature, so we could benefit from being more aware of our surroundings, and our natural environment. Appreciating divine nature up close and personal is a great way to bring about happiness and inner peace.
- Biking
Sitting on a bike all day also works our butt and leg muscles very hard, and requires a lot of energy from our hip and knee joints. Depending on what kind of biking you do, you may be sitting in a forward lean that also tires your lower back and shoulders and wrists from leaning on the handle bars. Some slow and calm Hatha yoga warm ups could prepare all the joints used before starting a day of biking, and going thru some hip-openers can avoid any tightness in our hips. After an intense day of pedaling, getting off the bike (and that hard seat we put under our seat bones) and doing some stretching could greatly improve our muscle fitness for the next day. We get very stiff and sore in our gluteus maximus and thigh muscles if we bike many days in a row, but this could be avoided by proper warming up and cooling down, and stretching and relaxing the right muscles that we’ve been contracting all day. Lying down in wind-release pose and rolling to gently massage our spine would help any back fatigue. Seated or standing forward bends, with legs together or triangle pose would also help release tension in our lower back while stretching our hamstrings.
As with hiking, there are often mental challenges with getting over that next hill or biking head on into the wind. Meditation and an awareness and appreciation for the natural surroundings may help us overcome those challenges, and make us more present in the moment and immediate environment instead of only thinking of the finish line.
Acro yoga is also a partner dance, and tango is also a combination of asanas
- Dancing
Dancing is not only about physical fitness or a fancy dress; it’s about flexibility and flowing movement. Regular yoga practice, especially ashtanga or other dynamic flow styles of yoga, improve our smooth transitions between poses. We often dance with a partner, so being aware of another person’s body and mind is heightened during dancing, and our focus on ourselves and how we interact with our dance partner will be exercised.
Balance is very important in dancing, solo or partner style, so yoga asanas that require us to center ourselves and balance will help our balance in tight turns or spins, and avoid us becoming too heavy or dependent on our partners arms. This is especially true for Tango dance, where the partner stance is at a slight lean at the chest towards one another. Acro yoga is a great style of yoga to prepare us for this, since it also takes two to Acro. When two people tango very well together, there are a lot of intense stretches, and asanas like trikonasana and pigeon will help lengthen our legs in those beautiful poses.
Dancing always involves music, which is a powerful trigger to emotion. It is important that we are emotionally balanced, and if possible, very happy while dancing, since what is the point of celebrating music and movement if we are not happy? The regular practice of yoga is known to make us more balanced, physically and emotionally, and in turn, also happy.
Doing tripod headstands on a horse is the best combination of yoga and riding!
- Horseback riding
Those who don’t ride regularly will always know what it feels like to dismount and walk away bow-legged. Affectionately called the ‘cowboy walk,’ this happens because the muscles you use for squeezing the saddle are rarely used in our day to day lives.
Yoga not only prepares our body for horse back riding, it can also improve our equestrian seat and fix any soreness or tiredness from sitting in the saddle all day. Its important to keep our hamstrings and inner thighs warmed up and happy, before, during and after riding. Back bends like camel pose and leg balances like tree pose will also strengthen important muscles used in riding and counter any tiredness we have from sitting the way we sit in a saddle and mounting a horse always from the same side.
Animals, especially horses, are known to have an aptitude for energy we can’t see. It’s a type of 6th sense, where they can feel if we are scared, stressed, angry or weak from the moment we sit on them, so yoga is especially important for us to practice to bring about some inner calmness before sitting on this large animal that’s a lot bigger and stronger than us. Horses will not react well if you are mean or hurtful to them, and yoga teaches us awareness, which will result in patience and kindness to this animal that we are so grateful to for carrying us for miles. The horse also appreciates a gentle, flexible rider, since carrying a sack of stones is not the same as carrying someone that can also distribute and carry their own weight. We trust our horse with this, and in turn, the horse will trust us if we are present, aware and calm.
To conclude, many themes have been repeated, so we have learned that regular yoga practice makes us mentally and physically fit and ready for other activities in our life. These four sports are excellent examples because they take us out into beautiful nature, in comfortable and flexible clothes, so your yoga practice can go with us and you can do it anywhere along the way. No need for any fancy equipment or a yoga mat, no yoga studio or teacher – you only need yourself to be present and aware and enjoy with your mind body and soul the activity, surroundings, and company, whether it be a person or a horse!