Yoga for Runners

Good morning, friends!

How was your weekend? I had a fabulous and glowing return to running, renewed my CPR and spent some much needed time with friends!

Last week, I had the pleasure to be involved in the first session of a Yoga for Runners workshop held at Urban Wellness Studio.

The location is a fresh, open-concept area that offers everything from wellness services such as chiropractor, massage and naturopath to fitness classes and personal training. It is classy, modern and fun!

I was excited to join in the yoga program because I knew it would be a small class tailored to individual athletes. The program is lead by Whitney Lord who is both a runner, yogi and very serious about ensuring her participants have proper posture! She clearly explained the benefits of each pose specific to runners and spent extra time doing hands on adjustments to make sure that we were in the perfect position.

We began with aligning the spine and ensuring that we were relaxing, letting go and getting ready to do some work!

One thing I really enjoyed about the first session was the attention to detail in our postures. I regularly do advanced yoga classes but it was good to take a few step back and ensuring that each pose is held perfectly. We worked on raising the ribs, squaring the hips and adjusting posture – all small details that help both on the running  trails and every day life.

Why should runners consider adding yoga to their routine?
According to our  instructor, practicing yoga on an off day will help bring balance to your routine. A weekly routine of high-mileage, workouts, and weights, help to create a strong body. Practicing yoga heightens awareness of our bodies which allows us to be in tune with all the little tweaks and impending injuries that threaten to throw us off of our training and racing schedule.

Whitney uses a wide variety of props and poses to keep you working different muscle groups and keeps high intensity participants like me from getting bored.

The one hour class flew by. It was filled with lots of discussion on how to use certain poses to effectively stretch runner’s problem areas, a lot of adjustments on my form and the sinking realization that Angela from Eat-Spin-Run-Repeat and I do NOT have a relax button.

I cannot wait to go back next week and I would love to have you join me next Thursday from 6-7 to work out our runner problems together! There are only a few spaces left and you can register here if you are interested.

In honor of taking something high energy and trying to bring it down a few notches, I have a musical track to share with you all. I love electronic and trance music for training and one of my absolute favourites is Above & Beyond. All weekend, I was listening to a beautiful acoustic version of their music rather than working away to my usual trance podcasts. Absolutely gorgeous and worth a listen.

If you are a runner, is yoga a part of your cross training?
Regular yogi? What is your favorite pose? – I love crow, just because it took me SO long to get it down pat!