Peace, Love, Shred!

August 14th, 2008 | Articles

If you think yoga is solely for gentle relaxation, think again! As a female shredder, I have definitely learned the many dimensions of my performance that have been improved by making yoga such a huge part of my life. I am stoked on yoga and spreading the word!

If you want to improve your wakeboarding then yoga can help you on all sorts of levels. This five thousand year old secret can totally give girl rippers an edge over their competition. Whether you do the iyengar, ashtanga, viniyoga or any other style of hatha yoga, it can help improve your overall state of well being as well as your athletic performance.

First things first, yoga will drastically improve your flexibility. The benefits of increasing your flexibility with yoga are endless; it leads to more ease of movement and fewer injuries and it enables you to move more freely with a greater range of motion. The more freedom your body has to move into the positions necessary for spins, inverts and crazy tweeked out grabs the more quickly you can do so, with less effort, strain or risk of injury.

Yoga will hard-core improve your balance. Some tricks, because of their necessary quickness and concentration, require your body to be able to move in a direction with ease within a split second. Especially with spinning, if your body is off balance and the upper half of the body feels disconnected from the lower half, your response time increases making that handle passed and staying on axis much more difficult. Many yoga postures require you to find your center, that is, your balance. Through the conscious practicing of balancing postures, your body learns where its center is and how to find it rapidly.

A very important benefit of yoga is that it increases your mental focus. Yoga teaches the discipline of being present in the moment through the physical postures and breath work. In learning to hold postures, you automatically become more clear in your mind. You learn to focus on what is happening that moment in your body, breath and mind. This skill of learning to be in the moment will not only help improve your athletic performance by allowing you to stay focused on the task at hand, but it will also help bring more joy into your life.

One thing that is sure is that it increases your strength (not that wakeboarding doesn’t do that enough already!) However yoga especially improves your core strength because it uses your own body as the weight you lift or hold. Many yoga postures require many major and minor muscle groups to be used simultaneously. In certain poses it feels like every muscle in your body is being used. Much different then when you are pumping iron at the gym (which you isolate one or two muscle groups per exercise). The strengthening in yoga requires your entire body to be working as a unit so the strengthening of one muscle group is connected to that of another muscle group. This improves your overall sense of strength from a centered, connected place. You’ll find it much easier to shred effortlessly on the water when your whole body feels strong as a unit.

So we’ve determined that yoga improves your mind and your body, but more importantly it improves your mind/body connection (that was deep). In yoga you learn to listen to your body through your mind and learn to quit your mind through your body. The breath is the essential tool used to unite body and mind. The more you tune into the mind/body connection, the more awareness you have of your movement and your state of being. With this tool, you can assess where your mind is when you are trying to land that new trick and you start to get flustered and draw your mind and body back into union if they become separate. You learned to take a couple deep breathes, relax, slow down and remember that wakeboarding is about fun, not stressing about landing tricks!

Speaking of stress, yoga is the most excellent way to reduce stress ever! One of the quickest and most significant benefits of yoga is the effect it has on reducing stress. How does this affect your athletic performance when your shredding the gnar? When you are stressed out, your body holds onto that stress. It can be held in the neck, back, hamstrings, stomach, head – just about anywhere. Tense muscles decrease flexibility and energy and increase pain and risk of injury. Yoga helps release stress in your body and mind so the body has more freedom to perform at its best with the least amount of pain.

Yoga 100% improves your posture, by strengthening the core muscles in your torso, especially those that support your spine. Unlike your typical fitness routine, practically every posture in yoga has a positive effect on the spine. Keeping the spine flexible and strong is one of the highest purposes of yoga. The stronger and more flexible your spine is the more your posture falls into proper alignment. The alignment becomes effortless rather than effortful and therefore your posture improves. As yoga helps to improve posture, the body begins to move in proper alignment which is where the body is naturally supposed to be. This impacts every aspect of how you move, especially in wakeboarding where you are definitely challenged to be quick, strong and balanced.

Another benefit to your practice is that it increases kinesthetic awareness. Through yoga you begin to discover and explore kinesthetic awareness, that is, where your body is in space. You learn to place your body in exact positions and know when it is in the correct place. This is at the core of leaning to balance and move your body as a unit aware of the space around you. It has a wonderful effect on your boarding because it also helps you be more aware of the wake, rail, cable, whatever you happening to be sessioning that particular day!

Perhaps one of the most important aspects of yoga is the effect it has on your agility. The combination of total body strength, flexibility, posture, balance and kinesthetic awareness is aimed at improving your body’s ability to move freely, quickly and without pain or stiffness. This, of course, is what is most important to athletes and most likely one of the main reasons to practice yoga for your athletic performance.

Last but not least, my favourite things about yoga is that it improves sportsmanship. Aside from the physical and mental aspects of yoga, there is also a spiritual element. Basically, yoga teaches you about connection with yourself and all living things. Through the discovery and realization of the connection that all living things have to each other, and element of amity, non-violence and peace begins to shine through. So, no matter if you win or lose, you can be injury free, agile and live with a sense of appreciation for your competitors and a feeling of peace.

Author: Ally

Ally Boothroyd created TID back in 2007 to help girls get some much deserved media presence on the web. She coaches several TID All Girls Clinics across Ontario, Canada. If you'd like to contribute content, photos, video or rider profiles please get in touch with her!