Become Elite
For a footballer, improved speed, strength, and muscular endurance.
Consistent yoga practice improves strength, endurance, balance, and flexibility. It also increases body awareness and concentration, promoting faster recovery and enhancing the athlete's mood. help in mobility, you work on your concentration through meditation, and you can set goals for yourself through the practice of meditation. Yoga keeps you in the present.”
Other Benefits
Yoga improves concentration and helps you stay relaxed. After doing a lot of running and sprinting in the field, yoga offers a great way to help open and clear your mind and stay in the present moment. Football players are also advised to perform yoga to help improve their flexibility in the legs, hips, and joints. Below are just some of the benefits that yoga offers football players:
1. Improves flexibility
Football is a sport that requires players to move in any direction at any given time. Hips play a significant role in many soccer movements. Despite spending hours training daily in the gym, soccer players can’t always get away with weak rigid bones. The rate of injuries on the hip’s soft tissues is exceptionally high. Flexibility won’t stop these injuries from happening but helps you move more efficiently and makes you harder to tackle.
2. Improves strength
When it comes to strength training, yoga is the last thing that comes to mind. While most fitness coaches use external loads such as barbells and dumbbells to help build resistance, yoga uses your own body weight. It not only builds strength but also enables you to maintain the right posture and positioning during regular training. Proper core bracing helps you handle loads better while doing major compound lifts like squats or deadlifts. Yoga doesn’t make you strong overnight but can add value to your strength training program.
3. Improves your speed and power
Power is measured by the speed and force applied to an object. It is what sets apart great soccer players from good ones. Yoga uses body resistance to train for force and velocity. It also helps you control your breath, coordinate breathing with movements, and manage painful side stitches. Your speed improves with your breathing.
4. Enhances your cardiovascular endurance
Soccer involves a whole 90 minutes of physical activities such as sprinting, jumping, and changing directions. This puts your cardiovascular system under a lot of stress. The least your body would need after a game is an intense aerobic session. Instead, a foundational yoga session would do. A gentle practice won’t put too much stress on your joints and soft tissues. When in season or after your heavy training, you can still do foundational yoga as a form of aerobic exercise.
5. Aids in recovery
When there is less time in between your games, you can easily get fatigued due to limited recovery time. Yoga can help relax your joints, tendons, and muscles on your recovery day. You can also do yoga immediately after your training session to help you relax.
6. Boosts emotional and mental well-being
Psychological health is the most neglected aspect of almost all sports. After having had a stressful day or in the lead-up to a big game, soccer players can benefit from many of the meditation techniques found in yoga. Practising yoga also helps you stay in the present moment, something that is highly underestimated in sports. Mindset can either make or break a great player, which is why it is vital to keep the mind as healthy as your body. Yoga can help you focus well, have mental clarity, detach from negative emotions, and stay motivated.
How does yoga help footballers and why has it gained popularity?
Elite athletes will use any means possible to get their bodies in better shape than their competitors. This is no different for footballers. It is a sport with an incredibly high injury rate, meaning staying fit is often more important than getting fit in the first place. If a footballer can avoid injuries, it lengthens their career and makes them a more attractive prospect for other clubs to buy.
A proven but not often discussed a way for footballers to lengthen their careers is yoga. Many football fans may think yoga is something that only middle-aged women do, but in reality, it’s been a key tool for some elite players who have had impressively long and injury-free careers.
The reason yoga suits footballers are because it develops muscles that get neglected by the nature of the sport. Football is a lopsided sport, so players use each leg for separate tasks. One leg is almost always used for kicking the ball, the other is planted into the ground repeatedly. This means the hip flexor and quadrilaterals are frequently engaged by the kicking leg, but they are not with the planted leg.
As this happens throughout a footballer’s entire career, it can cause imbalances in the spine and hips. Yoga is a way of training muscles that many people don’t even realize they have. For a footballer, this can translate into improved speed, strength, and muscular endurance.