Yoga For Marathoners

Seven tips to boost your body and mind so you can go the distance. Published 01/08/2008

Doing yoga during your marathon doesn’t involve Sun Salutes while sandwiched between thousands of racers or Downward Dogging it to the finish line. It’s about applying little tricks you’ve learned on the mat, like using form principles of an asana and practicing mindfulness exercises at the mile-markers. Doing so will keep you injury free and running at your peak.

“When you apply the holistic philosophy of yoga to running you really change running from a sport to a practice,” says Danny Dreyer, author of ChiRunning. “Many people run with a mind-over-body mentality-they will get to the finish no matter how-but true mind-body work is working with your mind and body as a team.” Taking your yoga practice from your 2×6-foot yoga mat to the 26.2-mile course can help you find this mind-body synergy, and ensures you’ll recover easily.

These 7 tips will keep the blood flowing to all of your muscles and ensure you have textbook posture, which protects your joints (by relieving compression) despite hours of pounding the pavement. They will also improve your form, boost endurance, and most importantly, take your mental game to a new level to help you finish strong and ready for your next race.

Pre-Gun Pose
Center yourself and prevent your body from stiffening while crammed behind the starting gate with Equal Standing Pose (Tadasana). “Equal standing will help realign your body,” says Christine Felstead, founder of Yoga For Runners in Toronto. Taking a few seconds to breathe and plant your feet in the ground will help calm your mind and ground your body before the race. Remember this posture as you run. Keeping your shoulders down and lifting your chest will stretch out your spine and reduce all-over tension, and she says.

How to: Stand with your feet hip distance apart, and spread your toes as much as you can in your running shoes. Keep your legs straight and contract your quadriceps. Your hips are in a neutral position with your tailbone pressing toward the ground. Focus on grounding your feet and legs while lifting up through the spine and the sides of your body. Think about stacking all of your weight-bearing joints-shoulders over hips, hips over knees, and knees over ankles. Next, press your shoulders down, with your arms by your sides. Feel the crown of your head lifting up with your neck long. Hold for three full, deep breaths. Release tension in your shoulders by lifting your arms straight above your head.

Body Sweeps
Running mindfully means staying in tune with your body throughout the race. “Use the mile markers as alarm clocks to check in with your posture, breathing and any tension in your body,” Dreyer says. “It’s like hitting the refresh button on your computer, going back to the beginning at every mile.” Checking in with yourself and making adjustments starting at mile one will prevent you from hitting the wall at mile 18 or 20. If you find yourself out of breath or tense when you check in with your body, try some of the breathing or posture techniques listed below.

Run Like a Warrior
“When you’re hunched over, you lose up to 30 percent of your lung capacity,” Dreyer says. Keep airflow easy and smooth by making your spine straight and tall as your run. Lift up your head as if a string were holding up the crown, like in Warrior pose.

Do the Twist
It’s actually the counter-rotation between the hips and shoulders that moves your legs as you run. Allowing your pelvis to rotate as you run will make your strides more fluid and improves your endurance by reducing the energy you exert as you move. “Think of the seated twist in yoga, where your hips are stationary and you rotate your upper body,” Dreyer says. Then, do the reverse while running. “You want your upper body stationary and your lower body free to rotate,” he says. This rotation creates a rubber-band effect as your ligaments and tendons return your spinal twist to its neutral position, moving your arms and legs. The result of this nonmuscular action is greatly reduced perceived effort level, because it is incredibly energy-efficient. Your ligaments and tendons do not require oxygen or glycogen, so less lactic acid is produced when you run. Since your muscles are not being broken down, less recovery time is needed.

Don’t Wait, Exhale
Breathing is your body’s biofeedback. It can signal inefficiency, overexertion, or even tell you when it’s time to pick up the pace. While form and training are the foundation for your performance, adjusting your breathing can boost your time. “If you’re out of breath, it’s not because you aren’t breathing in enough, it’s because you aren’t breathing out enough,” Dreyer says. Belly breathing can help by focusing on big exhales, clearing air out for fresh oxygen to get in. Here’s how: Put your hand over your belly button. After an inhale, purse your lips and blow out while pulling your belly in toward your spine. Then, breathe in through the nose. If you are uncomfortable breathing through your nose while running, that’s fine too, but try it both ways to feel the difference.

Loosen Up
In running, like in yoga, your muscles are strong, but they are open, too. Focus on staying as relaxed while running as you are in an asana. When your muscles are loose, they absorb the oxygen from your blood like syrup into a pancake-and oxygen is the fuel that keeps your muscles working, and your body running.

Good Dog
To decrease post-marathon stiffness, yoga poses can offer more instant full-body relief than traditional running stretches. “Nothing beats Downward-Facing Dog,” Felstead says. “It gets into the calves, hamstrings, and back.” Immediately stretching the three muscle groups you just worked for hours on end will minimize next-day soreness.

Here’s how: Put your hands on the ground, shoulder distance apart. Spread your fingers, straighten (but don’t lock) your arms, and rotate your shoulders down your back. Bend your legs so your shins are almost parallel to the floor. Then, think about drawing your hips as far away from your hands as you can as you lift up and press your legs back through the quads to straighten your legs. Stay here for 5 or 6 long, deep breaths. Finish in Child’s pose for extra lower back relief. Repeat this three or four times as needed.

6 Yoga Poses to Improve Your Running

By Sage Roundtree
Runner’s World

Strung together, these six yoga poses form a routine that builds the abdominals, back, quadriceps, hamstrings, glutes, and upper body while also improving balance.

Targeting these areas will give you a strong foundation—which means more power, less chance of injury. Two days a week, cut your runs just a mile short to fit in this 10-minute sequence.

Do the first three poses twice (one side, then the other). Then do the second three poses in the same manner.

You can also try these eight tips from a master yoga teacher to help make your practice flawless.

Chair

Builds:core, legs, glutes, arms

With your feet, knees, thighs touching, sit into a squat. Extend your arms.

Twisting Chair

Builds: core, legs, glutes, arms

While in chair, press your palms together, and rotate to the right.

Twisting Lunge

Builds: core, legs, glutes, arms

Step your left foot back while holding the twist. Keep your knee over your ankle.

Warrior III

Builds: balance and overall strength

Balance on your left foot. Fold forward, lifting your right leg. Extend your arms.

Arrow Lunge

Builds: core, legs, glutes, arms

Step your right leg back into a lunge, keeping arms extended.

Extended-Leg Balance

Builds: posture, balance, legs

Swing your right leg up and hold it extended in front of you.

Gain flexibility and strength at a yoga class.

Sage Rountree, author of The Athlete’s Guide to Yoga, developed this routine. Watch her demonstrate it at runnerworld.com/bodyshop. You can also order her strength plan (designed to be paired with marathon training) at runnersworld.com/trainingplans.

 

Cross-Training Marathon Plan

Great cardio alternatives include cycling, inline skating, pool running and elliptical machines.

By Matt Fitzgerald
For Active.com Here’s your conundrum:

You want to run a personal best marathon, but every time you build up to the running mileage you believe is required to achieve this goal, you get injured. Should you just give up and find another goal to pursue?

Not at all! By taking a cross-training-based approach to training, you can run a lifetime-best marathon on just three or four runs a week. Incorporating non-impact cardio workouts and functional strength workouts into your program will reduce your chances of getting injured not only by limiting your running mileage, but also by increasing the stability of your joints (as joint instability is the primary cause of most running injuries).

Your cross-training workouts will also enhance your running performance, more than making up for the running miles that are cut from your program to make room for cross-training.

In my book Runner’s World Guide to Cross-Training, I outline a 24-week plan that provides an example of how to cross-train your way to a personal best marathon. It’s appropriate for runners who are currently able to run three or four times a week, up to one hour per run. In addition to three weekly runs, the schedule includes an optional fourth run, an alternative cardio workout and two strength workouts a week.

Such a minimalist approach to training requires that you make each run really count. Therefore, most of the three weekly scheduled run workouts are rather challenging, with high-intensity work on Tuesdays and Thursdays and a long run on Sundays. Here’s a key to the workout types:

• Foundation run – A steady run at a comfortable, moderate aerobic pace
• Strides – 20-second relaxed sprints with 40-second jogging recoveries
• Long run – A long run done at the same pace as your foundation runs
• Hill repetitions – Uphill running intervals done at near maximum intensity with two-minute jogging recoveries
• Fartlek run – Foundation run with scattered 30-second bursts at one-mile race pace (i.e. the fastest pace you could sustain for five to seven minutes)
• Tempo run – Steady run at a threshold pace (i.e. between 10K and half-marathon race pace) sandwiched between a long warm-up and cool-down
• Speed intervals – One-minute running intervals done at speed pace (one-mile race pace) with three-minute active recoveries
• Lactate intervals — One- to three-minute running intervals done at VO₂max pace (i.e. 5K race pace) with jogging recoveries of equal duration

The alternative cardio workouts are foundation-intensity workouts in your choice of the following activities: pool running, elliptical training, bicycling (indoors or outdoors) or inline skating.

Your strength workouts should incorporate strength-building movements with functional carryover to running, such as forward lunges, as well as core strengthening movements and jumping drills to build stride power. Do a total of nine to 12 different movements in each strength workout. For detailed strength-training guidelines for runners, check out my book, Runner’s World Guide to Cross-Training.

Every fourth week of the plan is a recovery week, with reduced training to allow your body absorb and adapt to your recent hard training and prepare for even more challenging workouts in the coming weeks. A 5K tune-up race is scheduled for the end of Week 12, a 10K tune-up race at the end of Week 16, and a half-marathon tune-up race at the end of Week 16. If you can’t find formal races to do on those days, run time trials instead.

Active Expert Matt Fitzgerald is the author of several books for triathletes and runners, including Runner’s World Performance Nutrition for Runners (Rodale, 2005). This article is an excerpt from the the book Runner’s World Guide to Cross-Training.

4 Exercises to Reach Any Fitness Goal

By the Editors of Men’s Health
Men’s Health

You don’t need separate workouts to build strength, pump up muscle, and burn fat. All you need is a smart, adjustable circuit like this one from Mike Boyle, M.A., A.T.C., owner of Mike Boyle Strength and Conditioning, in Massachusetts. Select your goal, and for the squat and the row, use the heaviest weight you can lift for the required reps.

Goal: Strength (helps you lift more weight)

Reps: 5

Circuits: 3

Rest between circuits: 60 seconds

Goal: Muscle building (sparks growth)

Reps: 8 to 12

Circuits: 3

Rest between circuits: 45 seconds

Goal: Fat loss (turbocharges cardio)

Reps: 8 to 12

Circuits: 4

Rest between circuits: None

Do 1 set of each exercise with no rest between sets.

1. Decline pushup

Assume a pushup position, but place your feet on a bench. Your body should form a straight line from your ankles to your head. Bend your elbows and lower your body until your chest nearly touches the floor. Pause, and push back up quickly.

2. Bulgarian goblet split squat

Cup the end of a dumbbell with both hands, elbows pointed down. Stand upright with your back foot on a bench. Lower yourself as close to the floor as you can. Pause, and then push up. Do all reps. Switch legs. Repeat.

3. Dumbbell row

Holding a pair of dumbbells, bend at your hips and knees until your torso is almost parallel to the floor. Let the weights hang, your palms facing behind you. Bend your elbows and pull the weights to the sides of your torso. Pause, and lower them slowly. That’s 1 repetition.

4. Barbell rollout

Load a barbell. Kneel and grab the bar with an overhand, shoulder-width grip, shoulders above the bar. Roll the bar forward, extending your body. (Don’t let your hips sag.) Use your abs to pull the bar back. That’s 1 rep.

Increase your metabolism and tone up faster. Find a fat-burning class.