Children’s Yoga & Sport

Children naturally love moving, running around and being active, building physical strength, although are they really building internal physical resilience as well?

This week’s WOCY class with children is all about how yoga can support children’s bodies to develop the physical strength, flexibility and focus required to play a whole variety of sports including:

Judo

Taekwando

Gymnastics

Ballet

Football

Running

Swimming

Cycling

Rowing,

and the list goes on….

I include yoga as an activity that helps to maintain an active, healthy lifestyle. When I mentioned this in one of my children’s yoga classes yesterday and said that we would be doing a fast Sun Salutation, one of my Year 3 yoga students queried ‘Isn’t yoga supposed to be calming?’

My response was that yoga is flexible, not just in terms of body flexibility, but also in terms of the way it can be practised.

It can include yoga flow sequences like Sun Salutations which have more active aerobic elements. This is of course important to maintain bone and muscle strength, raise our heart rate, metabolism and immunity by encouraging a greater flow of healing, energising blood around our bodies.

Then, as I’ll often talk about, yoga is also about slowing things down, co-ordinating poses with deep breathing so we can feel these stretches in our bodies.

This is where playing most sports and practising yoga differ.

Most sports focus on is on perfection, learning a skill so you can play a sport in a particular way. Perfection creates competition.

Yoga isn’t about perfection.

As I mentioned, yoga is about feeling.

Yoga is about building understanding and awareness of how our bodies feel and what we are feeling in terms of our thoughts and emotions.

These slow stretches, where children aren’t focusing on an end goal is unfamiliar to them. It’s not an everyday practise we generally encourage in them.

This why when we move into poses and stretches and movements that children aren’t used to, we’ll often hear them express themselves with noise. This is their vocal expression of release. It’s actually one way in which release tightness and tension from their bodies, which is so important for their mental and physical health.

Love Always

Namaste

Anjli

WOCY Teacher, Facilitator & Guide to Children, Teens & Families!

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