Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #12537 in Books
• Published on: 2008-02-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 251 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781934030042
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Review
"Yoga is not only "good" for athletes--it is essential, for both the physical and mental benefits. On the physical side, training for sport makes the body tight. In sports like running and cycling which involve specificity of movement, which means using the same muscles over and over, some muscles get extremely tight while others do virtually nothing. Other sports, like tennis or golf, are one-sided and cause lateral imbalance which can lead to injury. Still other sports, like climbing or volleyball have a greater variety of movements involved, but the training effect still causes tightening of the muscles which leads to imbalance and, eventually, injury! Learning yoga is about learning, ultimately, to pay attention. It is about learning to mentally focus, and that is important in any sport. Sage shares the benefits that yoga has brought to her life as an athlete and offers easy to follow yoga postures and breathing techniques to help athletes of all sports get started with a safe and effective yoga routine and to help them avoid or rehabilitate an injury." -- Beryl Bender Birch, Director/Founder of The Hard & The Soft Yoga Institute and contributor to Yoga Journal

Endurance athletes generally have poor flexibility, core strength, balance, and posture. Improving these can really change performance for the better. The Athlete's Guide to Yoga is a great resource to get you on the path to better training and racing. -- Joe Friel, founder of Joe Friel's Ultrafit and author of The Triathlete's Training Bible, The Cyclist's Training Bible, and The Mountain Biker's Training Bible

From the Publisher

Yoga makes good athletes better. This time-honored discipline imparts flexibility, balance, and whole-body strength, creating improvements in an athlete's form, efficiency, and power. In addition, yoga's attention to concentration and breath awareness improves mental focus and mental endurance--hidden assets that become especially important at the end of a long training session or race.

In The Athlete's Guide to Yoga, yoga instructor, endurance athlete, and coach Sage Rountree explains the benefits that yoga can bring to every training program. With hundreds of color photographs featuring more than 100 poses, this book treats common problem areas to make athletes stronger in their sport. Rountree helps athletes see progress from just 10 minutes of yoga each day. In an engaging and easy-to-follow style, The Athlete's Guide to Yoga presents:

• warm-up and cool-down routines for workouts
• simple poses to specifically target areas of inflexibility and overuse
• breath and meditation exercises
• different types of yoga for each phase of training
• recommendations for intensity and volume of yoga workouts throughout the training year
• a 15-minute DVD featuring warm-up and cool-down routines for everyday workouts

Rountree's applications for training and racing ease the introduction to yoga, making it practical and accessible for all athletes.

"Endurance athletes generally have poor flexibility, core strength, balance, and posture. Improving these can really change performance for the better. The Athlete's Guide to Yoga is a great resource to get you on the path to better training and racing."--Joe Friel, founder of Joe Friel's Ultrafit and author of The Triathlete's Training Bible, The Cyclist's Training Bible, and The Mountain Biker's Training Bible

"The Athlete's Guide to Yoga is a great resource for athletes. Finally, we have an explanation of how to integrate yoga practice into daily training and within different training cycles. The Athlete's Guide to Yoga is well laid out and easy to follow, and it includes pose adjustments to help athletes overcome sport-specific tightness. I've been practicing yoga to complement to my triathlon training for the past 8 years. Now I have a great tool to take on the road when I can't make it to my usual class."--Samantha McGlone, 2nd Place 2007 Hawaii Ironman World Championships and 2006 Ironman 70.3 World Champion, 2004 Olympian

"After running and racing for nearly thirty years, competing through five Olympic trials and the 1996 Olympics, and traveling the world on U.S. track, road, and cross-country teams, I thought I knew all the tricks for success and longevity in distance running. Yoga helped me set a world age-group record in the indoor mile and an outdoor American record in the 1500m at age 45. Yoga should have been--and will be from here on out--added to the mix of ingredients for success for any serious endurance athlete. Incorporate the practice of yoga into your weekly training regimen, and it will make a difference in your life as an endurance athlete. I highly recommend The Athlete's Guide to Yoga to all athletes who want to train smarter and race faster."--from the foreword by long-distance runner Joan Nesbit Mabe

"This is a practical in-your-body guidebook for anyone wanting to take their fitness routine into new realms. Clearly written, beautifully illustrated, it's a real resource for starting and deepening a practice that stays true to yoga's depth. Postures, breathing, relaxation, meditation, training routines, it's all here."--Richard Faulds, Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health

"Yoga is not only "good" for athletes--it is essential, for both the physical and mental benefits. On the physical side, training for sport makes the body tight. In sports like running and cycling which involve specificity of movement, which means using the same muscles over and over, some muscles get extremely tight while others do virtually nothing. Other sports, like tennis or golf, are one-sided and cause lateral imbalance which can lead to injury. Still other sports, like climbing or volleyball have a greater variety of movements involved, but the training effect still causes tightening of the muscles which leads to imbalance and, eventually, injury! Learning yoga is about learning, ultimately, to pay attention. It is about learning to mentally focus, and that is important in any sport. Sage shares the benefits that yoga has brought to her life as an athlete and offers easy to follow yoga postures and breathing techniques to help athletes of all sports get started with a safe and effective yoga routine and to help them avoid or rehabilitate an injury."--Beryl Bender Birch, author of Power Yoga and Beyond Power Yoga, Director/Founder of The Hard & The Soft Yoga Institute, and contributor to Yoga Journal

"The Athlete's Guide to Yoga gives a profound outline for training one's bodymind for peak performance at the highest and most integrated level. It's a wonderful book and Sage is a gifted teacher!"--Baron Baptiste, author of Journey into Power and teacher to professional athletes, including the Philadelphia Eagles

"We athletes on the SNEWS® team just simply love The Athlete's Guide to Yoga. Somehow Sage Rountree has managed to maintain her yogic voice...while also toning it down just enough to speak directly to an athlete....The book is straightforward without all the frou-frou and implied incense-burning and ohmmm of yoga that could turn off some athletes...Since she herself is a triathlete and runner, Rountree knows exactly where you get tight and why, what it feels like before and after certain workouts, the difficulties of combining a good yoga practice with hard training, and what's realistic or not for an athlete."--SNEWS®

"Whether you're a yogini or you've never heard of downward-facing dog, you'll come away with something useful from The Athlete's Guide to Yoga." --Women's Adventure Magazine

From the Inside Flap

From the foreword by Joan Nesbit Mabe, Olympic runner:

Sage Rountree's Yoga for Athletes class was a phenomenal find in my life. After running and racing for nearly thirty years, competing through five Olympic trials from 1984 to 2000, participating in the 10,000 m at the 1996 Olympics, and traveling the world on U.S. track, road, and cross-country teams, I would say I've been rode hard and put up wet. As an old warhorse, I thought I knew all the tricks for success and longevity in distance running. I stayed injury-free throughout my career by switching to mostly soft-surface running, keeping my mileage low (skipping all the junk miles), and incorporating interval swimming, massage therapy, and systematic periodized training with planned rest. I thought I knew it all, but I didn't. Yoga should have been--and will be from here on out--added to the mix of ingredients for success for any serious endurance athlete.

I first went to Sage's class as a gesture of good faith in the athlete who had joined my seejanerun running group for moms in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I like to get to know my runners personally, so I thought I'd drop in on her yoga class at the Carrboro Yoga Company. I expected to do a little stretching and Lamaze-like breathing while patchouli incense burned and sitar music was piped in. To be honest, I thought yoga was for hippies. Imagine my surprise when I found myself nearly upside down with my legs "sitting" on the wall while all the lactic acid and crud from my last hard workout miraculously cleared my bloodstream. It felt like a cleansing breath for my war-torn legs. What the heck was going on?

Sage could explain exactly why legs up the wall (in Sanskrit, viparita karani) is restorative and then go on to suggest a half dozen other positions to isolate muscle groups and address connective tissue needs. This was no hippy voodoo; this was physiological science. I found myself craving her yoga class on Monday nights. I wanted to stretch--to really stretch--those hard-to-reach muscles and to know my neuromuscular system was realigning and righting itself before the next hard, anaerobic effort in my training week. My posture improved, both while running and not, and my awareness of my body in space was heightened. I simply felt great in my skin.

But yoga is more than just a body science. It took me a few sessions to move beyond the mere physical benefits of Sage's class. At its most basic, physiological level, yoga gives you an excuse to take the time you should to stretch and recover. However, on the psychological level, that mental realm of visualization, concentration, and focus where great athletes are made or broken, yoga opens up a whole new world of possibilities.

At the start of each class, Sage asks students to set an intention for the hour. This may be a specific physical intention--say, to be able to touch your toes or to hold pigeon position for three minutes--or it may be a mental/spiritual intention. There are days when my only intention is to turn off my busy brain and breathe deeply with gratitude. But on other days I use the intention setting to visualize my next racing or life goal. Yoga forces you to look at, and inside, yourself for not only answers but questions: Where do I want to go? and How do I intend to get there?

I wish I had known about yoga for athletes in my younger racing days. I would certainly have put it to immediate use. Yoga helped me set a world age-group record in the indoor mile and an outdoor American record in the 1,500 m at age 45. Too bad I didn't know about yoga when I was 25!

In the future I will encourage all of my athletes--young or old, wise or foolish, thoroughbred or pack mule--to incorporate the practice of yoga into their weekly training regimen. It will make a difference in your life as an endurance athlete. I highly recommend The Athlete's Guide to Yoga to all athletes who want to train smarter and race faster. Don't just buy the book; use the book. I intend to.

Customer Reviews

A Perfect Yoga Book
Not only is this a perfect book for athletes, it is also perfect for non-athletes. It is an excellent introduction for those new to yoga, and would be a great new resource for yoga instructors. As a cyclist and a yoga teacher in training, I found this writing to be the most elegant and direct explanation of the broad principles of yoga of any book I've read. It introduces the concepts of yoga and then provides examples of how they are to be applied in the real world. Resources are provided for those who want further study.

Sage Rountree's introduction to yoga in the first part of the book is worth the price itself. For anyone curious about yoga, this explains everything needed to approach it safely and with confidence. For athletes, she specifically discusses how the different types of yoga can be appropriately incorporated into their training program. The middle of the book is dedicated to the poses, breathing and meditation. Each pose is illustrated and fully described as to how to safely get into the pose, along with modifications. Relaxation and breathing are well covered with an emphasis on how important they are to an athlete's recovery time. The last part of the book discusses how to use yoga within the cycles of a training plan and finishes with several sequences for specific needs, such as stretching, warming up and restorative poses. Many of these sequences are great for any busy person wanting to "sneak" in some yoga during their hectic day. This author seems to be one of the few who understands that many who are interested in yoga are also very busy.

This is just a wonderful book. I hope it gets the attention of a very broad audience because it has so much to offer. It has now become the first book I would recommend to anyone asking about yoga.

The Yoga Guide I've Been Looking For
As a busy professional, dedicated age group triathlete, and regular yoga class student, I've experienced both the physical and mental benefits of yoga in my racing and my life. However, I've really struggled to practice yoga at home - without a teacher telling when, where, and how. Sage Rountree's book is what I've been looking for: a practical, user-friendly guide that speaks my "athlete language" and includes step-by-step yoga rountines that complement specific portions of my training. The pictures are beautiful - and depict realistic pose modifications that make yoga much more enjoyable when I'm feeling especially tight. I also have a deeper (and more functional!) understanding of yoga's history and philosophy thanks to Sage's clear description of yoga's 8 limbs - and how they translate to the athlete's world. A helpful book for those very new to yoga AND those hoping to practice outside the gym or studio.

Athlete's guide to Yoga
While yoga is an extensive topic and can be difficult to understand, Sage keeps it simple to understand and easy to follow. I love the way she breaks it down to incorporate into various training programs as an adjunct to the primary training.