As I write todays blog the Rugby World Cup is coming to its final weeks. The world cup favourites, New Zealand, practice yoga regularly in their fitness training. Nonu a consistent player of the team credits his form and lack of injuries to yoga, he has practiced yoga for over 5 years and does weekly sessions as part of his training programme. Wales have used Hot Yoga in preparation for recent matches, whereas domestic clubs use it regularly to help promote recovery.
Yoga has lots of benefits to rugby players in both injury prevention and match day performance. Yoga is proven to create length in the muscles worked during practice, enabling the muscle to become stronger and more efficient. In performance terms short muscles are compromised and inefficient in contracting due to their inherent tightness. Short muscles are also more likely to become injured too due to weakness at end ranges of movements. The lengthening of muscles that occurs within yoga moves not only helps with flexibility and reducing tightness it also enables the muscle to be strong through its full range of movement as there are no vulnerable weaknesses or reduced movement. Yoga can also help strengthen the core, making the body more efficient at transferring power produced in the muscles into an attempted movement such as a sidestep or tackle. It is also important in rugby to be able to withstand both external forces of other players and internal forces of twisting and turning during play. A strong core will help assist in this as well as help prevent players suffering with back pain.
The Rugby world also use Pilates as a key part of their training programme. The Scottish world cup team use pilates as pre-habilitation, by strengthening known weaknesses they are preventing injuries using pilates rather than having to rehabilitate after an injury has occurred. The advantage of including Pilates in a training programme is that it works on strengthening the deeper muscles of the body that normal training exercises wouldn’t recruit. For example, pilates strengthens the shoulder stabilising muscles deep in the joint, making these muscles strong and stable will help prevent shoulder injuries and allow the bigger muscles to become stronger.
If you want to find out how Yoga or Pilates can help you then get in touch!
The post Rugby players do Pilates and Yoga too appeared first on Variety Fitness .