Why You Don’t Need Yoga

Back in college I went through a serious yoga phase. Outside of lectures and pick-up basketball, I was trying to do the next body contorting pose.

Exercises classes ran between $5-10 at the campus rec center which encouraged dabbling.  Finally I had settled on hot room vinyasa flow yoga which was basically 90 minutes of knockoff Bikram.   After each session I would feel much more limber and relaxed. But there was an issue. It took a lot out of me. While it felt different from a weight lifting session, I was expending just as much energy.

Prior to taking up yoga, I was already lifting and playing basketball upwards of 5x a week. Having suffered shoulder and ankle sprains on occasion, I figured yoga would help remedy these ailments. After all, Eddie George wouldn’t lead me astray.

After adding the ancient indian activity to my routine, the injuries didn’t stop. In fact, they became more frequent. At the time I didn’t realize it, but I was simply overtraining.

It wasn’t until I discovered a simple full body static stretching routine that changed my approach entirely.

Over the past decade, having applied static stretching in concert with doing other physical activities has kept me off crutches and shoulder slings indefinitely.

I would say for every two intense bouts of physical exertion, include at least one session of full body static stretching to stave off injury. Of course a couple rest days a week would help as well.

The issue with yoga is that it can contribute to overtraining since the most engaging sequences are also very challenging. Static stretching solves this by performing the maintenance without expending extra energy.

I realize some people may say, well you can just do hatha yoga instead. Well to that I reply, the more direct approach would be to do mediation and static stretching instead.

So the next time you’re load managing for your intramural softball league, make sure you throw in some stretching beforehand. It’ll make you more loose, agile, and robust.