Yoga for climbing: A powerful combination

12 Mar, 2024

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7 minutes read

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We all started climbing for the love of climbing. Further, as time passed, routes were climbed or routes weren’t climbed. We felt frustrated or we simply moved on, we evolved into pursuing better performance and injuries arose. Questions were asked and answers were found. Those who agree say aye! Those who don’t – do share your secret with the rest of us, mere mortals!

Back in the day, climbing was all about climbing and power training. Nowadays you hear more and more about yoga and how the two disciplines go well together.

Contents

First, what is YOGA?

Yoga is an ancient Indian discipline that aims toward self-discovery, meditation, and liberation through physical, mental, and spiritual practice.

The first time I heard about Yoga was a year after I started climbing, so over 10 years ago. One day, a friend told me about a climbing yoga workshop. It was going to be held by Olivia Hsu at the gym we were going to. I must have been a cat in another life – always curious, so decided to go meet Olivia Hsu and learn about the relationship between rock climbing and yoga.

Olivia started the workshop by talking about how she discovered yoga while on hiatus from climbing. Her climbing-related injury forced her to focus all her energy on something her body allowed her to do at the time. This is how she began what later proved to be a life-long journey of balance, self-discovery, sharing, resilience, and breath.

Back then I was too young to truly appreciate the benefits of yoga. It wasn’t until 7 years later that I began practicing it regularly. However, my motivation for practicing yoga didn’t come out of my love for climbing, but to find my inner peace. After going through a tough breakup, I was left feeling emotionally exhausted. I needed a healthy daily habit to help me balance myself in the morning and cope with the rest of my day.

At first, I found yoga to be boring and struggled to quiet my mind. However, after committing to practicing it every morning for a month, I started to see its benefits. Not only in my emotional state but also in my rock climbing skills.

Yoga helped me improve my breathing and movement on the rock, it has also proven to be immensely helpful in the way I cope with life’s challenges. If it started as a way to love myself, yoga has become an important part of my daily routine for rock climbing.

OK, ok, so how is YOGA any good for climbing?

A resilient body and state of calm are to climbing what a foundation is to a building: the core, the base. To extrapolate, Yoga and the practice of it allow you to find your center of gravity and this can be seen as a good structure for climbing (*and other sports).

In my case, after I passed the fire test of integrating a new habit into my routine it was hard not to see the influence of practicing yoga daily in my climbing:

It transformed my breathing and I noticed that I tense up way less than before
It helped me move with more calm between bolts
I am not only able to stretch my body but also use my flexibility and push or pull

Years of practice as well as research have confirmed that the 5 main benefits of Yoga that translate well to climbing are: Breathing, Flexibility, Core strength, Proprioception and Injury Prevention.

Breathing

Yoga teaches the importance of focusing on the breath for a calm mind, while climbing requires a calm mind to handle fears and the physical discomfort we sometimes experience while executing strong movements in a relaxed manner. Good breathing also helps in developing confidence in your intuitive movement which is crucial when reaching that next hold!

Flexibility

Strength and flexibility are a two-way street, where each is complementing one another. Although flexibility is often considered as the ability to move your joints and muscles through a wide range of motion, it is also important to have enough strength to support those movements.

If you only focus on increasing your flexibility without improving your strength, you may be at risk of joint instability and injury. Therefore, practicing yoga not only helps you improve your overall flexibility but also helps you build strength to support and protect your joints. Many people often mistake stretching for yoga, but in reality, these two practices are completely different.

While stretching mainly focuses on extending sore muscles, yoga is a much more intricate physical practice. Yoga not only helps to stretch the muscles but also strengthens and activates them during the stretching process.

Core strength

Climbing requires the use of body tension. The more challenging the climb, the more essential it is to have strong body tension, especially during bouldering or bouldery moves. The core muscles generate power from the entire trunk of your body, including the hips and shoulders.

Therefore, it’s not just about the abs and most definitely not just about the grip strength either. A stronger core will significantly improve your athletic performance and will also play a vital role in your everyday activities, particularly as you age, as it connects your upper and lower body.

So whether you climb competitively or for leisure, it’s important to incorporate exercises in your climbing routine that engage your core and give you the power to push.

Proprioception (or body awareness)

I’m not sure if spatial awareness is a skill that humans have lost over time due to evolution. However, as a climber, I find spatial awareness to be amazing, especially when it comes to improving sports performance.

You might have heard about the importance of body posture as a climber and how figuring out the way your body should be in certain poses could save you essential energy. Being spatially aware and intuitively knowing whether you have the reach for a certain athletic move is something we learn and practice through movement.

This is why it’s such a pleasure to watch an experienced climber climb and why you often hear or use the expression: “He/she is dancing on the rock!”

Injury prevention

Needless to say all of the above teach you how to properly handle your body on the rock therefore you are less prone to injury. Climbing more relaxed, focused breathing, and knowing yourself better give you more control of your body and also contribute to pushing your limits.

There is scientific evidence that yoga plays a huge role in stress management, mental health, mindfulness, healthy habits, and overall quality of life. It also goes without saying everything mentioned helps a whole lot with climbing.

Practical steps for beginners to get started in Yoga

In the past, people believed that it takes only 21 days to develop a new habit. However, recent studies suggest that it takes an average of 66 days to integrate a new behavior into your daily routine, assuming daily engagement.

So, to get you started, my first tip would be: be kind to yourself, be patient and you will get there!

Develop a new habit by doing it in the morning. From my experience, you are less likely to have an uninvited guest or to be invited for dinner in the morning than you are in the evening. So unless you are almost always sure about your schedule after work I would suggest waking up 30 minutes earlier and tricking yourself (if needed) into starting with your yoga routine.

P.S. Even after practicing yoga for three years, I still sometimes wake up feeling lazy and tempted to skip it. But I have hacks for those days:

Hack No.1: I play with time! Instead of my usual 50-minute routine, I go for a video of only 20 minutes (more or less). The promise of a shorter time frame is enough to motivate me to do it and it also keeps me engaged even when I don’t feel like it. I promise you will not regret it – for me, it worked every time and as a bonus, it always left me feeling better about myself!

Hack No.2: Choose your theme, it’s fun! After practicing yoga for a while, you will develop an intuition for selecting the right practice according to how you feel that day. I’m not sure if it’s a marketing tactic, but there’s a plethora of yoga videos available named after different feelings and states of mind. So it works even if you don’t have a particular focus. Whenever I don’t feel like doing much but know my body will benefit from some movement, I search for something like “love yoga”, “sad yoga”, or “period yoga” – and I find something that resonates with my sensitive self.

My top 5 resources for getting started in Yoga

The best instructor to start with for me was Yoga with Adriene. Somehow she was the only one who could motivate me to continue practicing yoga. I find her YouTube channel to be very suitable for beginners and her style approachable – you don’t have to be a Yogi Master to practice her sessions.
DownDog is not bad either! I used it a lot during the confinement when I was still a beginner in yoga and I appreciated it because it gives you the option of choosing your style of practice, the duration, and what you wanna focus on.
For more than two years I discovered DoYogaWithMe and I’ve become a big fan of Fiji McAlpine, Tracey Noseworthy, and David Procyshyn. You can find a few videos on YouTube as well.
Very light yoga for newbies with TiffanySoi.
I find Ieva Luna‘s Youtube channel very useful for climbers because her yoga is adapted to a climber’s specific needs such as this particular video YogawithIevaLuna or many others you can check for yourself.