I'm taking today off of running to let my legs recover. Instead, I did yoga this morning to stretch out my muscles. It was challenging! I had a hard time keeping my balance and holding poses for extended periods of time. My arm muscles were shaking at times, but I made sure to breathe and modify the moves as necessary. Despite my inability to do yoga at the crack of dawn, I love how I feel stronger afterwards. I hope to try a couple other yoga videos on Netflicks to get the full experience.
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Here is an excerpt from Runnersworld.com
From the August 2004 issue of Runner's World by Matt Fitzgerald
Yoga. Yoga involves static-active stretching, making it a hybrid of the other forms of stretching I've just described. As in static stretching (whose proper technical name is static-passive stretching), you assume and hold positions in which certain muscles are lengthened. Like CR, yoga also involves isometric contractions, but with a crucial difference: In CR, you contract and relax the same muscle in a coordinated sequence; in yoga, you hold one set of muscles in isometric contractions while relaxing and stretching the muscles opposite them.
Yoga is seen by many as a complete form of exercise. It increases passive and dynamic flexibility as well as balance and coordination, which seems obvious. Some new research shows it also has strong, and nearly instant, powers to alleviate anxiety and stress.
It's also thought to improve strength, depending on the type of yoga practiced. For example, power yoga, in which you move quickly from one pose to the next, probably improves strength, particularly if you aren't performing any other type of strength training. Because it involves sustained isometric muscle contractions, yoga is a lot more taxing than other forms of flexibility training.
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