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scientificamerican.com

Can You Use Yoga to Improve Your

Athletic Performance?
Get-Fit Guy Brock Armstrong
5-6 minutos

Are you ready for something a little different? This article is a full
transcript of a conversation I had about yoga and how we can use it
in specific ways to aid our athletic performance. For the audio
version of this interview (which I strongly encourage you to listen
to), I was not locked in my little closet in my own studio at home like
I usually am, I was actually in Whistler, British Columbia “on
location” with my dear friend, Abi Carver, of Yoga15.

You long-time readers have undoubtedly encountered links in my

past articles and past podcasts where I’ve highlighted Abi’s videos
and posts. But for this one, she is here in person, not across Skype,
not across the internet, but right across the table from me. So here

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we go!

Brock: Abi, how are you?

Abi: I am great. How’re you doing?

Brock: I’m good. We just went for a lovely walk around Lost Lake,
and we didn’t get lost this time.

Abi: No, not this time!

Brock: It’s in the name of the lake, so you’d think that would be
inevitable, but we didn’t get lost. And we made our way back here
to talk about yoga and whether or not—what I’m going to say
anyway—is whether yoga is all created equally or are these
different brands of yoga actually that different? And are they
actually targeting different sort of activities, and different parts of
our body, different parts of our nervous system, even? And, the
biggest question, because I know you do a lot of yoga specifically
for cyclists, can we use yoga to target specific purposes and to
really elicit specific results from our bodies and from our
performance? So, that’s the big ask. But let’s break it down a little
bit.

But first, before we dive into it, could you just fill in the audience on
your background as a ... as a yoga influencer, shall we say?

Abi: I’d like to say I was influential, but I think I can only really count
as a teacher. I have an online business, which is
called yoga15.com, which is designed specifically for athletes. It’s
called Yoga15 because all my videos are 15 minutes long. Part of
the reason being that I’m a fairly impatient person. Typically, your
classes are an hour and 15 minutes. But we can come back to that
in a little while.

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So, Yoga15 is my company. I work almost exclusively online. I do

some privates, but most of what I do is online. I make videos, and
they are targeted at different sports. I quite like extreme sports like
surfing, mountain biking, snowboarding, skiing, but also I have quite
a big audience in triathlon and running, cycling, the more
conventional sports weight lifting too.

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Brock: That’s how I found you, actually. Or is that how you found
me? No, wait. How did we find each other?

Abi: Well, I was listening to your podcasts just when I really started
this business, which was back in 2013, and I think I probably
reached out to you at the time when you could do that, and
somebody would actually respond.

Brock: Yeah. Back then we weren’t inundated with spam requests

for everything. I know even my mum gets spam requests from
people wanting a job at her “business,” and she’s been retired for a
number of years now.

But anyway, I really enjoyed the idea of the 15 minutes chunks of

yoga, and often I’d string them together and do more. But the idea
of actually being able to get through something meaningful and
useful in 15 minutes really did resonate with me and still does
resonate with me. I’m going to use those videos forever. Even
though you’ve moved on and created a lot of different stuff since
then.

Abi: Well, the crazy thing is actually that yoga, it doesn’t change.

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Brock: It’s thousands of years old.

Abi: Yes! It’s thousands of years old. And my Yoga, I would actually
say, in fairness to Yoga, I would say what I teach is yoga-inspired
because it, it is not the whole package that you get in a yoga class.
It is non-spiritual. And for me personally, I am a huge fan of all the
elements of yoga. But what I teach is a very pared-down version of
that, including the time because I am trying to bring yoga to a new
audience, so I don’t actually teach anybody who’s already pretty
good at yoga. I teach beginners, and I’m trying to open it up to
people who don’t feel that there is a yoga class for them. Either
there literally isn’t, it’s too far away, or it’s too expensive, or they’re
doing so much training for their triathlon that “how are they going to
fit in an hour and a quarter class.”

Ideally, it would be wonderful if we could all do that, but I realized

that “little and often” is so much better than none. One time that I
can get you to do maybe once a month. The benefits of doing 15
minutes or even less than 15 minutes—there’s actually a lot of
efficacy in just ... I’ve taught you all the poses, but actually when
you’re out there on the trail, you’ve just done a mountain bike ride,
you know three poses that you can do, and you’re going to do that.
And you can do that every time. And you maybe can’t go to a class
every day.

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