One of my best training tools in my arsenal is daily yoga practice. You might think to yourself “DAILY!? But how could I fit in a whole yoga class with all the hours of biking…!?” Actually, I only do about 25-30 minutes of yoga—the key here is every morning.
It’s the best part of my morning (ok, my Stumptown coffee is the best part of my morning, but its a close second). I wake up, stumble out of my room, unfurl the yoga mat, put in my dvd, and get going. I have a dvd that’s about 25 minutes long; I always start and do the first 15 minutes of it, because then I don’t have to think about it when I wake up. After that, I start focusing on whichever part of me needs some stretching.
The best part about starting my day with yoga is that I get a daily check-in. I immediately know where I’m sore from whatever I did the previous day, or if I inadvertently pulled a muscle somewhere (yoga is great for finding weird muscles that are sore that you otherwise would never have known about). I warm up and stretch out exactly what I need. It really, really helps me recover quickly and assess my workout for later in the day (maybe I SHOULDN’T do those sprint intervals after all). I also have learned which muscles get tired from exactly which workouts, which also allows me to figure out what kind of strength training I need to do.
Of course, I also do one or two longer yoga workouts a week (1-2 hours), that involves a ton of core strengthening, balance, back bending and so on; all things vital to biking. You must be able to keep yourself stable while your legs are in motion–for hours. This is no small feat.
This brings me to the idea of “bike yoga”. It’s about bringing to principles of yoga to cycling. Keep your spine straight and tall. Keeping your hips in alignment and unwavering while your legs are moving and your knees tracking. Keeping your upper body relaxed, your chest up, abs in tight–its like doing Standing Pose on your bike while pedaling. If you’ve ever concentrated on keeping your upper body and hips completely still while pedaling, particularly on a hard climb, you know how hard this is. But trust me, the more you do it, the stronger you get, and the more energy you can conserve by not rocking back and forth on the saddle and being tight through the neck/shoulders/arms.
