Benefits of Yoga for Swimmers

With any type of exercise, one of the most important things is to make sure that your body is properly warmed up, stretched and mobilised, and properly recovered.

Yoga is often seen as a great away of stretching out your muscles, but there are lots of other benefits for swimmers than just that.

Swim England Para-Swimming trainer Sam Cooper has created a series of supple strength videos that will help swimmers maintain their flexibility.

Click or tap play on the warm up and sequence videos below to watch her Sun Salutation sequence for supple strength.

Warm up

Sun Salutation sequence

Below are seven benefits of yoga for Masters swimmers:

Becoming more mobile

As a swimmer, focussing on mobility during a yoga session helps to improve the range of motion that a joint has as well as lengthening the muscle tissue, which improves the integrity and strength of a joint.

Developing strength

Most elite swimmers and those people who swim for fitness will spend a reasonable amount of time in the gym, training with weights and doing core exercises to increase strength.

They can enhance this by adding a yoga programme which is tailored to use movements that are specifically aimed at swimmers. Using both dynamic and static poses, core strength is improved as well as upper and lower body strength. The strength gained is functional, which means that it is directly transferrable into swimming.

Understanding your body

Yoga is a great way of developing awareness of your body, as it gets swimmers to perform movements that they are not used to and develops more variability in the nervous system.

This helps you to achieve technical proficiency, and when you are given technical changes or advice, you will find it easier to put these into practice.

Improving breathing coordination

In swimming, coordinating your breathing along with the movements you use in your stroke technique is important. Learning to breathe in coordination with your movements helps to keep you relaxed whilst performing the action, improving the efficiency of your stroke.

Yoga teaches effortless effort and this term is often used during yoga practices. Putting in the effort while moving with ease. This skill is taught through the use of breathing, which can be directly related back to swimming.

Recovering after training

There are many different styles of yoga, each of which offers very different benefits. Often, swimmers find their muscles are feeling stiff and tight after training and so the idea of stretching, or doing a yoga session, is not appealing.

However, restorative yoga uses props to help support the body while you are performing poses, which helps the body to loosen up. It also engages the parasympathetic nervous system which helps the body to recover more effectively.

Preventing injury

By developing the aspects mentioned previously in this article; mobility, strength, awareness of your body, ease of movement and recover, you set yourself up for preventing injuries.

Creating a yoga practice which takes into account your individual needs as a swimmer, including strength imbalances and prior injuries, helps to prevent getting injuries in the future.

Developing yourself mentally

Being psychologically prepared for training, or competition if you swim competitively, is an essential part of being successful. Yoga can help you to develop mental skills to the best you can be.

Skills like reducing anxiety before racing through positive thinking, self-pep talks and visualisation and relaxation are all practices taught in yoga.