Yoga for Athletes
Professional athletes everywhere are beginning to practice yoga to avoid injury and condition their bodies for optimal performance. Lily Dwyer Begg's past clients have included an NBA basketball team, an NCAA Diving team, as well as professional dance companies.
Regular yoga practice can help athletes increase performance, speed tissue recovery, cultivate mental clarity needed for high stress competitions and games, and foster team community in a non-competitive environment. Intensive sports training can leave athletes strong in certain areas of the body yet inflexible or even weak in others. For optimal performance, the athlete's body needs to go through its natural range of motion regularly to avoid fascial adhesions and overdevelopment/underdevelopment muscular compensation patterns in the body that can lead to injury, poor body mechanics, and fatigue. As a retired professional dancer, an experienced yoga instructor, and a massage therapist, I bring a wealth of knowledge about movement and the body as well as a lifelong passion and enthusiasm for what I do which shows up in every class I teach or session I coach. Equipped with this experience, I can create yoga sessions for sports teams or athletes designed to improve balance, flexibility, stamina, mind-body concentration for peak concentration during competitions or games, and aerobic capacity (pranayama, or yogic breathing has been proven to yield a high VO2 max, which measures your aerobic capacity for oxygenated blood pumped into working muscles, a crucial component to athletic performance.)
Off Season:
To see results I recommend twice weekly sessions during the off season. I teach a vigorous, athletic, yet alignment – rigorous style of fluid Vinyasa yoga, a dynamic form of yoga which emphasizes a strong connection to the breath as the source for every movement of the body. This style of yoga is strengthening, meditative, and improves balance, flexibility, and whole body awareness.
During Competition/Game Season
I recommend once or twice weekly sessions. I teach a slower gentler style of Hatha yoga aimed towards maintenance, recovery, injury prevention, and total body flexibility and balance.
"Researchers at UC Davis recently tested the muscular strength and endurance, flexibility, cardiorespiratory fitness, body composition, and lung function of ten college students before and after eight weeks of yoga training. (4 sessions weekly, 1 hour 20 minutes each session) After 8 weeks, the students muscular strength had increased by as much as 31%, flexibility by as much as 188%, and VO2 max by 7% -a very respectable increase given the brevity of the study."
(source: Alisa Bauman, for Yoga Journal, Sept/Oct 2002)
