Blanka YogiIt may seem that yoga and surfing don’t have much in common, but the opposite is true. Yoga and surf share a deep connection, as both practices require physical and mental dicipline, balance and focus. There are a lot of similarities in terms of their focus on breath, movement and connection to nature.
Let’s bring your attention into your breath, which flows smoothly in and out. Without any effort in natural and relaxed way like a wave in the ocean that rises up and falls back down. Yoga helps us tune into this relaxed flow, the natural rhythm of ourselves. It is connecting through our breath the outer world with our inner world. Everything works together in a beautiful entirety, where we can use for our surf all the benefits of yoga at once.
▫️ Breathing exercises deepen our breath, which leads us to calm down in situations where we are underwater for longer periods of time and we can easily get panic.
▫️ Yoga will bring us fully into the present moment, balance our body and mind and improve our concentration. The world around us is gonna get synchronized with our inner environment.
▫️ Through yoga we will stretch our muscles, increase our flexibility, mobility and range of motion, which we will use especially in take-off, pivots, rotations and maneuvers
▫️ We will strengthen our muscles and build strength in the center of our body, which is essential for working with our balance
▫️ We will improve the coordination of our whole body by yoga aligns us through breath with movement
▫️ We will Increase our stamina and physical strength
▫️ It helps us improve our technique in maneuvers and rotations
▫️ Certain positions will help us to become more efficient at paddling, you will appreciate that in the water! Think about the fact that most of your time in the surf you will spent by paddling.
▫️ Yoga is an important prevention against injuries that can result from overexerting the parts of the body that suffer the most because surfing
▫️ It is a significant factor in faster healing and release of muscle tension accumulated during a surf session
▫️ And it is also important for stretching and strengthening ligaments and tendons that are significantly stressed in surfing, which is a dynamic sport
Every surfer knows that the biggest and most challenging part of surfing is paddling. Paddling is a full body affair. We need strength and endurance, strong triceps, shoulders and a good range of motion in our shoulders and rotator cuff. For more range in the shoulders, we need to lift our upper body while firming our gluteal and lower back muscles. The abdominal and lower back muscles help us maintain a stable position on the board, and the upper back muscles are engaged to keep the upper body lifted. The neck muscles are also engaged to keep our head looking ahead.
If we have successfully reached line-up, we have a while to take a breathe there. Sitting on the board we do get a little rest, but not so much our hips and hip rotators.
The next chalenge for us now will be take off. It is a transition from a low lying position on the board to an upright position standing on our feet. To make this fast and efficiant, we will need strength in the arms and engagement of the chest muscles. In the last phase for standing on an unstable surface, we put all our attention to engaging and working with the stability of our center.
If you’ve done all of this sucessfully and caught your wave, your lower body and center of the body is working in its fullest way at this point. Effective surfing requires pumping up and down to create speed, where we burden the back leg through the hips, which leads to tight hip flexors and burdening our quadriceps and hamstrings, which simultaneously work to grip our feet to the board. We need a strong core with engagement of the abdominal (rectus, transverse and oblique) and gluteal muscles for maneuvers, turns and trunk rotations.
The best way to learn to surf or improve our surfing skills is to train it. But through combination with yoga, you will see a big difference and shift after a few lessons. All you have to do is grab a mat and give yourself time to come enjoy Yoga for surfers practice. And as a bonus to improve in surfing? A stretched body, relaxed muscles and calm mind.
