Five Yoga Poses For Rock Climbers
Rock climbing is a skill that requires strength, flexibility, balance, and full-body awareness. Whether you’re climbing outdoors or bouldering in a gym, training for the climb is just as important as climbing itself.
Why Yoga?
Yoga draws your attention inward and helps you fine-tune the muscular engagements needed to hold our body in place. These micro-adjustments made in your yoga practice, are the same adjustments needed to maneuver your way through a tough climb. Add that to all the balancing, strengthening, and stretching that yoga does for you, and you’ve covered your bases in terms of climbing skills.
In general, climbers should focus on yoga poses that strengthen shoulders, core, and hips. Whether you need to stay close to a slab wall or hang from a cave, having strength in both the front and backside of your body is crucial.
Along with building strength, climbers should focus on mobility and balance. Sometimes strength isn’t enough, and you have to get creative with body position. Having a solid range of motion and a decent sense of balance is key.
5 Yoga Poses For Rock Climbers
Eagle
Eagle pose is great for finding balance and strength in your lower body. Eagle pose also helps open up your thoracic spine and shoulders. There are multiple variations of eagle pose that you can take, the most important thing is to stay tall through your spine, and lifted through your chest.
How To
From standing, lift your right leg and cross it over your left. Bend your knees and sit back into your hips. Hug your inner thighs, and press down through all three corners of your left foot.
Cross your right arm under your left, then cross your wrists and meet your palms. Lift your elbows up to shoulder height, but stay relaxed in your shoulder heads. Breathe space between your shoulder blades, as you open up the back of your heart.
Skandasana
Skandasana moves deep into your hips and hamstrings. It helps you find the muscular engagements needed to shift your weight while maintaining strength and balance in your hips and hamstrings.
How To
From a wide-legged stance, angle your right toes out to 2:00. Bend into your right knee, keep your left leg extended and lift your left toes towards the sky. Stay long through your spine and broad through your collar bones.
Warrior C
Warrior C is a great pose to build strength and stability throughout your whole body. Focusing specifically on our core, low back, and inner thighs. Warrior C provides the structure needed to engage these spaces while maintaining balancing.
How To
From standing, place all of your weight in your right leg, lift your left leg like you’re stepping on stairs. Hinge from your hips as you lower your upper body, and extend your left leg behind you. Lift your arms overhead, reaching forward, and drop your gaze down to the earth Try to keep your body as parallel to the earth as possible. Do your best to keep your hips level. Lift your low back up towards the sky and knit your low ribs together to keep your core strong. Stay active through both legs and feet.
Side Body Stretch
Creating space through your side body can help you reach those far off holds with more ease. When you lengthen your side body, you’re also stretching key muscles in your shoulders, hips, and low back, which can get tense from climbing.
How to
There are many side body stretches but one of the easiest ones is from standing. Take your feet hip-distance apart and find a tall spine. Take your palms together, interlace your fingers, press your palms forward and raise your arms towards the sky. Stay long through your torso, and save space between your shoulders and ears. Start to laterally bend over to the right, take a few rounds of breath and then repeat on the left side.
Side Plank
Side plank helps build stability in your shoulders and core, it starts to shift your perspective of balance as we are now placing all of our weight on one side of our body. It’s not uncommon to be in a similar body position when you are climbing. Side plank helps strengthen your awareness of your body and its relationship to space. In turn, this helps you build better awareness of your body position when climbing.
How to
From a high plank position, shift on to the outer edge of your right foot. Stack your left foot on top of your right and stay flexed through your feet. Shift your weight into your right palm. Raise your left hand and lift your arm straight up towards the sky. Balance all of your weight on the right side of your body, stay lifted through your left fingers and left hip.
The practice of yoga can be an amazing tool to not only prepare your body but also your mind for rock climbing. The level of awareness in terms of acute muscular engagements lets you know when and where to engage and when and where to let go so you can conserve your energy on the wall. Yoga can also be used as a cool down to stretch out tense or sore muscles. This makes yoga the perfect complementary practice for rock climbing!
