By Team ICG® Trainer Elliott Bringman
Growing up cycling and swimming, I never knew that without a flexibility regimen, the muscles would tighten more and more and, cumulatively, end up rigid. Rigidity, in the long run, decreases range of motion, which is detrimental to optimal performance. Performance aside, tight muscles affect how you feel in your body on a daily basis. Overly tight muscles can also lead to associated issues, such as chronic pain and unmanageable stress. All of this is avoidable, however, through integrating a yoga practice into your cardio training.
After swimming competitively in high school without much (if any) stretching, I already suffered from tight muscles by the time I entered college. I was lucky in college to take a jogging fitness class with Olympic runner Jane Kirkpatrick at UC Santa Barbara. Jane emphasized stretching for all her runners, and the benefits were immediately obvious.
It wasn”™t till the end of college that I discovered yoga. Once I began adding yoga to my repertoire, my practices really began to bloom. Muscle tightness in the legs was not as severe. In swimming, my shoulders felt more fluid and the “clicking” sounds began to dissipate.
Fast-forward ten years: I find myself professionally offering this practice to casual and serious athletes in the San Francisco Bay Area. I began by teaching early morning indoor-cycling classes, followed by a yoga practice at Club One. (I”™m now a RYT-200 Yoga Instructor.) I then teamed up with San Francisco”™s first and only dedicated cycling and yoga studio — OMpower, home of ICG® Academy — to offer a class that integrates both practices in a single session. The students who have followed me on this journey all agree: Why haven”™t they been doing this all along?!
With modern life crunching the amount of time people can spend away from home or work, a class that more or less offers two practices in the time of one extended practice simply makes practical sense.
Physically, participants receive the cardio boost and strength training for the lower body through indoor cycling, while strengthening the upper body, toning the core, opening the joints, and lengthening the muscle fibers through yoga.
Mentally, students energize themselves through the intensity of the cardio practice, and then relax with yoga.
Spiritually (and yes, there is a spiritual component), trainees push their boundaries and expand with cycling, while rooting and feeling a deep earth connection with yoga.
I could go on and on about the benefits of this practice, but I encourage everyone to take the experiential route. Try it for yourselves. It”™s through our own experience that we discover whether certain practices resonate or “work” for us.
But if my experience has shown anything, it”™s that this practice is the best balanced of them all.
Elliott Bringman, MA is a San Francisco-based athlete and yogi offering smart cardiovascular training through indoor-cycling, and yoga practices designed to strengthen, open, relax, and detox. Elliott is a Master Trainer with the Indoor-Cycling Group and is the creator of a number of hybridized spin/yoga programs. His welcoming, all-levels classes boost students”™ aerobic ability for easy application to any number of high-endurance activities, while simultaeneously working the body through classical yoga-poses to build sustainable strength and flexibility. In addition to the physical, Elliott”™s deep knowledge and dedication to both eastern and western traditions make his classes some of the most authentically uplifting and empowering around.
Originally posted 2013-02-04 05:50:23.
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While racing in college, I allowed my hamstrings to get tight ‘like the strings of a banjo’. Only when I took a step back and approached this passion with a holistic perspective did the crucial elements like stretching, diet, and RECOVERY allow my cycling go to the next level…
Thanks for sharing, Elliott.
Yoga is something great, everybody can find answear and help in it.
Since a week I introduce “skin inteligence” principle in my classes, proposing to improve the pedal stroke using the most basic and old body “reflex”. Relax you base, your feed, your toes to increase the skin sensation that will help your body to use powerfull extensors chains of musclesas we use in cycling.
Yoga is also a great complement to cycling as other sports, all the”bad” effects of cycling: stiffness, breathing restriction, imbalance, circulation restriction … can be help with Yoga.
Yoga is not just stretching, Yoga is a balence of strenght and flexibility where you find flexibility from strenght not the opposite.
Pascal….I thank you for the insight from this post.
I’m burdened right now with folk drifting into the cycle studio just to get a bit of a workout. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course…..it sure beats lying on the couch and TV channel surfing….but it’s a hard row to hoe to get through to them that there’s value to a bit of *head and skin in the game* when it comes to making the best improvements to health and wellbeing.
Most people nowadays are totelly living outside of theyr body, doing everything in automatic mode but this automatic mode is always form with bad habit … so those automatics motor or intelectual are not the best their potential.
Even if you follow the best principle of training and program most of the time aweareness is totelly forget, what is hapening with powermeter, people create a ned for feedback as they totelly forget to use theyr body as feedback.
I most of the time try to teach my classes following those four body-mind principles for learning:
1. Start within your comfort zone and make it even more conforting,
2. Not too easy not too hard, pick an interesting challenge within your reach,
3. Move away from your desired place and come back to it from different angles,
4. Play with it, connect it with other things you know, make it your own.
As you says most people are not there for it or ready for it, that is ok one day may be they will understand how to CHANGE. We can not force anybody and accepting to change is a REAL challenge and we all have to change in some way.
Wow! Great comments, team! Obviously, I’m a bit biased about the need for stretching and integrating mind-body principles into indoor-cycling classes. I like the comment about many folks living outside their bodies. I feel like getting people into their bodies, to be in the room “with me,” and to make them cognizant about things like the breath, are some of the most important tasks that I have as an instructor. Little by little, we are helping people to make lasting, positive changes.