Tara Yoga

Yoga For Beginners Guide

Yoga just like martial arts takes discipline and together they compliment each other, both disciplines teach us that an over inflated ego brings us nothing but trouble and causes problems in life and they teach us respect and humility of ourselves and others. A true practitioner of martial arts is just like a well established yogi, they both carry love for fellow man, respect and kindness and both disciplines teach us:

• Mental and physical practice to teach us more about ourselves.
• Give us a way to self reflect and meditate.
• Each discipline brings opposite forces together in harmony.

The sports and fitness industry and martial arts experts in particular have begun to recognise the therapeutic values that yoga has to offer, the yoga poses are now being used as additional training, in many sports, helping in the prevention of problems and also in the recovery from sports related problems.

Years of intense training of any sport and particularly martial arts can have a toll on the body, often knees can be damaged or are prone to problems, practicing the yoga poses as warm up has been proven to lessen this. Most people who train in martial arts will favour one side of the body more than the other, this is usually the stronger side for example a right handed person will favour the right side.

An example of how the body can come out of alignment by favouring a particular side is a person who prefers to kick with their right leg will have stronger hips muscles on that side but they will also pull more on the lower back throwing the whole pelvic area out of balance. It was found that when the same person does yoga routinely the strength on the right side remains but the pelvic area is also brought back to a balanced state.

Yoga poses are ideal for helping develop the strength and flexibility that is needed when training in martial arts and these poses can be incorporated into the martial arts training. By including yoga in their training martial arts experts have found that they quickly become more focused, calmer, stronger and more flexible, they also found that they were more proficient in martial arts for including the yoga poses in their training.

Many martial arts experts found that after years of intense and vigorous training and competitions led to chronic injuries of the neck, shoulders, hips, lower back and knees.

Studies proved however that yoga undertaken on a regular basis and practiced before the martial arts routine helped to alleviate those conditions. Whatever form of martial arts that you practice, practicing the yoga poses and breathing beforehand can benefit you greatly both in performance and health wise.