Cross-Training: Yoga

Last semester I discovered (the hard way) that it is absolutely impossible to keep up with my vaulting when I regress physically between training sessions during the school year. As I am in college an hour and a half away from my training barn and gas is approaching $4.00 a gallon, I cannot afford to vault once a week during the school year. If all goes well, I drive in once a month. I also can't make the practices on the nights with the other girls, so Chris and I, both being college students, have private lessons on Saturday on the weeks we come. I quickly realized last semester that doing nothing between those lessons simply was not going to cut it. While it's true, you can't help but regress a little bit as you can only imitate the kind of skills and strength and exercise of vaulting to a certain point without a practice barrel and a horse, there are still plenty of measures one can take to at least attempt to stay caught up.

One of these is yoga.

I use yoga as a cross-training tool to increase my balance and flexability. Let me tell you, I never knew an hour of deep breathing and stretching could be so painful! This is my second weekly class this semester and I am proud to report that I have already noticed improvement. While it was still a stretch, I got both hands flat on the ground without bending my kness for the first time EVER tonight, got my head down on my knees leaning over, AND almost brought my head to my thighs bending at the middle. This is after only two consecutive lessons folks. Of course, I cross-train in other ways and stretch on my own but personally, I think this is some pretty promising evidence that yoga will help.

While no amount of doing anything else can make up for missing vaulting and there will always be some amount of regression involved, any vaulter will tell you cross-training dramatically cuts down on that (especially if you're an asthmatic like myself) and can only enhance performance. I'll continue to detail my other cross-training types and my experiences there-in. Meanwhile, stock show is only 3 days away not counting today! Yikes! <:o