Maybe you have never considered yoga as part of your training program or felt that it won't help you as an athlete. In reality, it can be an amazing tool to enhance athletic performance and recovery. It can indeed help runners and athletes of all types in many ways, here are a few:
How to get started:
More than just a physical practice, yoga is also a dynamic meditation. It uses the postures and the breath as tools to achieve mental focus and clarity.
So if you’re thinking of incorporating a yoga practice into your usual fitness routine. You can start by being aware of your breath.
Indeed, just focusing on the breath as you warm up or cool down is a good start.
From there you can perform basic postures and sequences, such as the sun salutations A, B or the moon salutations for a more traditional yoga flow.
You can start your yoga journey with an experienced teacher who will give you the knowledge, advice, and tips that you need, or you can simply study and research on your own, in order to build your own practice and sequences. Many great beginner videos can be found on YouTube including sequences specific to running or other sports.
No matter what you do, add yoga into your fitness routine and the results will soon follow.
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Of course, taking care of your body in between exercise sessions is crucial to a successful fitness routine. This means ensuring your muscles recover fully between workouts. Even if you haven't overdone it, your muscle tissue needs time to repair and strengthen after exercise. Proper nutrition and hydration can go a long way toward this end, but is there more you can do to help tired muscles recover?
Muscle soreness after a workout is among the most common complaints people experience in any fitness routine. Some may even postpone their next workout due to soreness. That can set you back when it comes to meeting your fitness goals. It makes good sense to do everything you can to help your muscles recover quickly after each session, so you can keep your exercise routine and meet your goals.
Compression Socks for Post-Workout Recovery
Many people believe compression therapy is only helpful for injured muscles. In fact, at some point, you may have had a doctor or trainer send you home to rest and elevate a sprain, strain or other injuries with instructions to wrap it snugly with an elastic bandage. It may surprise you to learn that sore, uninjured muscles can benefit from compression as well.
With compression socks, you can help tired, sore muscles recover more quickly after any workout. Due to gravity, muscles in your feet and legs are often likely to suffer swelling and poor circulation after exercise. While many people may think that pain causes swelling, it's actually the other way around.
Swelling causes pain. Reduce pain by decreasing swelling.
Habitual use of compression socks for recovery after a workout has been shown to reduce swelling, improve circulation and reduce muscle soreness in the feet and legs. This can be key to keeping your fitness routine on schedule.
Compression Socks Aid Healing of Minor Muscle Tears
Building muscle tissue actually involves tearing it--slightly. As your body rebuilds the microscopic tears, the muscle becomes denser and stronger. You can hasten this process by improving blood circulation. The improved circulation promoted by compression socks will aid your body's natural muscle building processes.
When muscle tissue tears on a larger scale, you end up with an injury, such as a strain or sprain. This type of injury responds well to compression therapy, as do bruises. In most cases, compression socks can be a valuable addition to your treatment program. They work particularly well in combination with analgesics to reduce swelling and promote healing.
Whether your muscles are sore and weak or merely tired after a workout, compression socks can help you recover quickly. They're also handy to have in case of minor injuries. In either case, wearing compression socks after a workout should become part of your fitness routine.
Wrong. That attitude will shorten your lifespan, deplete your energy and leave you feeling less confident. Maximize your trip, and maximize your life. You won’t need to devote hours or miss out on why you’re traveling. Just these 5 simple steps can do a lot when you’re a long way from home.
1. Minimize Consecutive Sitting. It’s not that sitting is such a bad thing by nature, but rather it is the amount of time that we sit which causes problems. On a plane or train for hours at a time? Set your alarm to remind yourself to get moving every hour. Head to the bathroom, stretch a little, and just take a moment to stand up before you sit back down. Muscles and joints get “stuck” when they hold a seated position for more than 20 minutes. So loosen them back up and get your blood flowing again.
2. Hydrate! One of the easiest things to do is to drink a glass of water. Then again, it is also one of the easiest things to forget. Bring water with you on all your travels. Without it, you’ll feel hungrier, moodier and less energetic. Those are the last things you want to feel you’re on a journey, so drink up!
3. Keep Nutrition A Goal. Even with our best intentions, no one eats as well as they'd like to when traveling. This is exactly why we can’t throw in the figurative towel and invoke the “That’s Ok, I’m Traveling” attitude. Nutrition isn’t a black-or-white, pass-or-fail grade. It’s not about whether, “Yes, I ate well” or, “No, I ate junk." Rather, it’s all the shades of grey between that will affect your health, weight, and wellness. Be proud when you make a nutritious meal happen, but don’t stop trying when you aren’t as successful. Balance that with enjoying yourself while on vacation.
4. Promote Recovery. Helping your body to recover is too important to ignore, especially when putting it through the physiological stressors that travel brings. While the risk of developing blood clots on a flight is pretty low for most of us, that risk does increase with prolonged travel time. This is why PRO Compression socks are a no-brainer for long plane, car or train rides. Increasing circulation is always a good thing, but it's especially important when you travel and are exercising less. Plus, you’ll reduce the risk of swelling or deep vein thrombosis (DVT) if you have to sit or stand for long periods.
5. Get Some Shut-Eye. Speaking of recovery, there is no greater form of recovery than sleep. Deep REM sleep, especially, is your friend. When you’re traveling, changing time zones and exposed to different elements, you may need more sleep (and deeper sleep) than you normally get. Besides, if your travels are work-related, you’ll perform better at your meetings. If your travels are for pleasure then added rest will help you to enjoy yourself more without fighting off a sense of depletion. Take the steps to make your slumber more effective: Block out any outside light, wear a sleep mask, get the temperature in your hotel room as comfortable as possible, and supplement with melatonin before bedtime if you’re more than three time zones from home. Together, these will add up to better, deeper sleep so that you stay healthy and energized while you’re out of town.