Seen as our Yoga Wellbeing theme is Yoga for Runners this week. We thought we would include a great all round stretches for alot of runners weaknesses. The pyrmaid pose stretches your spine but mostly stretches and strengthens the hamstrings. 

Step by Step

1.Stand in the mountain pose. With an exhalation, step or lightly jump your feet 3½ to 4 feet apart. Rest your hands on your hips. Turn your left foot in 45 to 60 degrees to the right and your right foot out to the right 90 degrees. Align the right heel with the left heel. Firm your thighs and turn your right thigh outward, so that the center of the right knee cap is in line with the center of the right ankle.

2.Exhale and rotate your torso to the right, squaring the front of your pelvis as much as possible with the front edge of your mat. As the left hip point turns forward, press the head of the left femur back to ground the back heel. Press your outer thighs inward, as if squeezing a block between your thighs. Firm your scapulas against your back torso, lengthen your coccyx toward the floor, and arch your upper torso back slightly.

3.With another exhalation, lean the torso forward from the groins over the right leg. Stop when the torso is parallel to the floor. Press your fingertips to the floor on either side of the right foot. If it isn’t possible for you to touch the floor, support your hands on a pair of blocks or the seat of a folding chair. Press the thighs back and lengthen the torso forward, lifting through the top of the sternum.

4.In this pose the front-leg hip tends to lift up toward the shoulder and swing out to the side, which shortens the front-leg side. Be sure to soften the front-leg hip toward the earth and away from the same-side shoulder while you continue squeezing the outer thighs. Press the base of the big toe and the inner heel of the front foot firmly into the floor, then lift the inner groin of the front leg deep into the pelvis.

5.Hold your torso and head parallel to the floor for a few breaths. Then, if you have the flexibility, bring the front torso closer to the top of the thigh, but don’t round forward from the waist to do this. Eventually the long front torso will rest down on the thigh. Hold your maximum position for 15 to 30 seconds, then come up with an inhalation by pressing actively through the back heel and dragging the coccyx first down and then into the pelvis. Then go to the left side.

Here at Yoga Wellbeing we seem to be getting a huge amount of professional runners come to us asking for a little bit of help with flexibilty. One of the main questions is how clients can improve their classic runner’s hamstring tightness. We take classic yoga poses and alter them to take limited flexibilty into account. We play to runners strengths and adress the weaknesses.

One of our clients has ran five London Marathons and has found yoga an excellent cure for the hamstring problem. Yoga postures can correct the muscle imblances that result in high impact training. They help to realign the joints abd stretch and strengthen the muscles to prevent pain and injury. Yoga for runners is about felxibilty, so we’re not running with the brakes on and increasing the chance of injury.

A huge part of the programme is breath. Breathing through all of the stretches is key and yoga helps you to breath through some of the more challenging stretches. Running is wonderful but is not an all rounder. While most runners can run 25 miles comfortably they have difficulty touching their toes. This is because running only works mostly in one plane of motion - forward. In yoga we work in all directions. It brings balance to a running regime, strengthening to the muscles underused in running (such as the back extensors and the abs) and stretching those that get overused like the calves and the hamstrings.

If you would like to know more about our Yoga for Runners programme then please just click here.