Yoga: connecting your body and mind to improve your swimming.
In any type of exercise or movement of your body, you must ensure that your body is warmed up, stretched and properly recovered. Combining various forms of exercise can aide in your success with any sport. The combination of yoga and swimming can benefit your mobility, breathing function, recovery practices and more. In this 4 part series, I will be talking with the Swim Lessons Hawaii yoga master to learn more about how yoga can increase our swimming abilities.
I talked with yoga master, Murti Hower about what the benefits of yoga are and how we can practice to connect our bodies to our mind to aide in swimming success.
Hower has been practicing yoga for 45 years. He states, “The discovery of nuances of the body through Asana, is like your body is the device we have been given since birth. We were constantly changing from learning to walk to learning how to swim.”
Hower and I discussed a lot about the breath in yoga and translating it into our swimming practice. Hower can retain his breath for 3-4 minutes, called a retention breath. Being mindful and practicing a proper inhale before retaining a breath can increase your time to withhold the breath. When breathing for your strokes, it is just as important.
When you inhale, you are letting yourself fill up with prana. Hower describes prana as, “power and fuel.” While practicing swimming, you don’t want to gasp for air on your breath, but rather bring in a stream of air. “When you learn to breathe in yoga, you breathe belly up. When you release, then you gain energy,” Hower describes. He continued describing this to me with a kettle metaphor. When you fill up a kettle, you are filling from the base up, it should be the same in your breath. He gave some other tips to focus on that slow, controlled breath. Imagine yourself when you smell a flower for the first time. That long, slow inhale is the same type of breath that we should be using to fill ourselves up with prana as we swim.
When we are first learning how to swim, we are more concerned about getting our arms around and controlling our body. However as we continue to get more comfortable, using these breathing practices can help increase our speed and power. The “internal and external rotation of the arm can use the prana that you’ve brought in. People nowadays breathe really shallow, when we should be breathing from your whole torso. You start to allow yourself to move like the grace of a dolphin.”
Talking with Hower made me think a lot about using prana to really strengthen my swimming power. Thinking of breathing as power can change the way you feel in the water and what your body is capable of. However, we can’t just practice our breath while we are in the water. Taking yoga classes that are slow and focus on breathing practices will aide in success. Make sure that if you are taking a yoga class, find one that suits your goals and helps you achieve them.
If you are interested in getting your yoga journey started, Howere teaches yoga at Magic Island on Saturdays at 8 AM for a pre swim yoga class. Follow the link below if you are interested:
Written by: Caroline Cross, SLH Swim Coach