Yoga for Runners: The 10 Best Poses for Recovery
Running and yoga make a great team. Runners can benefit from yoga poses before a run or afterward to unwind.
Runners can experience tight hips, hamstrings, and quads because running is a great form of cardio and strengthens your leg muscles and core.
Mind-body integration, strength, and flexibility are essential for runners to be happy, healthy, and injury-free.
You can achieve this through yoga if you do it well. A good runner does not need to be flexible - just balanced.
Regular yoga practice can boost your balance, improve flexibility, reduce injury risk, and make you a stronger runner, so it’s a great complement to running.
10 Essential Yoga Poses For Runners
Runners can benefit from yoga poses that stretch their hamstrings and calves, open their hips, engage their glutes, and open their chests and backs.
The lower body takes the brunt of the stress when running, despite an activity that is the total body. Yoga poses good for runners should stretch the lower body and open and strengthen the upper body.
After your next run, try these yoga poses!
1. Downward Dog
Downward dogs allow gravity to increase blood flow and increase circulation by placing their hearts above their heads. It improves posture.
The downward Dog can improve posture by straightening your vertebrae and aligning your spine by opening up your chest and shoulders.
It can bring immediate relief to runners. Running can often make these areas tight because they extend from your lower back to your hamstrings and through your feet.
2. Upward Dog
A complimentary movement to the downward Dog, the upward Dog, opens the shoulders, chest, and arms. The upper body must also be strong and stable in this pose.
Runners often have a stronger lower body and a weaker upper body, providing a sense of balance to their bodies.
Upward-Facing Dog stretches and strengthens the chest, arms, and shoulders. Upward Dog improves digestion and creates suppleness in the back, torso, and abdomen.
3. Runner’s Lunge
Runners will appreciate yoga poses that are specifically designed to rest a pounding body. This pose relieves tension built up from running too much.
Pose for hip strength and stability, Runners Lunge. The exercise strengthens the quads, glutes, hips, and ankles while stretching the hamstrings, groin, calves, and calves.
4. Crescent Lunge
Crescent Lunges stretch the legs, groin, and hip flexors while opening the chest, torso, and shoulders.
As you breathe in and out of the pose, your hip flexors will be relieved, and your chest and shoulders will be opened.
This exercise focuses on strengthening thighs, hips, and butts and developing flexibility and stability.
5. Triangle Pose
In addition to softening and stretching multiple muscles in your legs, the triangle pose also allows you to open up your chest and spine.
These poses open up the chest and help runners relieve tension as they tend to hunch their upper backs or around their shoulders.
6. Sleeping Pigeon Pose
Pigeon pose provides much-needed relief to tight hips. Hip pains are commonly associated with back and knee pains; if our hips are out of alignment, not only will our running form suffer, but we can also experience pains in our backs and knees.
7. Hand To Big Toe Hold
Running frequently does a great deal of damage to the hamstrings, but this pose can help. It’s often difficult even to tell how tight your hamstrings are until you do a pose that opens them up.
They tend to get particularly compressed. The pose can also be performed lying down if you find it too challenging.
8. Dolphin Pose
It is a good stretch for the low back and the feet since the dolphin pose helps stretch them out simultaneously.
Foot pain may lead to improper form and pronation in the long run, leading to complications like stress fractures. By attempting a dolphin pose, you can avoid all those issues.
9. Bridge Pose
It strengthens the glutes, legs, and ankles. The hip flexors, chest, and heart are opened. This exercise stretches the chest, neck, shoulder, and spine.
Reduces stress, mild depression, and calms the body. Among your muscles, you have the largest one in your glutes-and they work when you run. The bridge pose relieves tight glutes and opens up the hamstrings, as well.
10. Camel Pose
In the Camel Pose, the chest, abdomen, and quadriceps are stretched. As most of the day is spent sitting or reclining, it improves spinal flexibility.
As you bend your back, you are flexing it in the opposite direction, which may improve your posture.
To fix your postural alignment and improve upper body flexibility, heart-openers like camel pose are ideal.
The Benefits of Yoga for Runners
Add yoga to your regular cross-training regimen if you are a runner of any level. Yoga has many benefits, including building muscle, preventing injuries, boosting focus, and preventing overall health problems.
Runners can benefit from yoga because it restores balance and symmetry to the body. . Reduced stiffness, increased mobility, and reduced nagging aches and pains are all benefits of increased flexibility.
Running requires a good lung capacity to maintain even breathing during all phases of running. Yoga helps runners improve strength, improve flexibility, and improve their breathing control.
Regular runners know that running helps them build lean muscle, increase cardiovascular endurance, and release endorphins, but running also causes decreased flexibility, sore muscles, and tight hips.
It’s a good thing there’s an easy way to counteract the negative effects of training: yoga! Running causes muscles to tighten, stretch, and shorten, and yoga counteracts these effects.
