Strike A Pose

Tim Thomas

Last summer Boston Bruins goalie Tim Thomas spent part of his offseason training learning about the downward dog and warrior positions as well as the butterfly.

The centuries-old study of yoga, which is part philosophical and part physical, has found its way into the workout routines of many top athletes. Yoga is becoming more accepted as part of an athlete’s training, and that includes hockey players.

Thomas spent a considerable part of his offseason working with Dana Edison, who uses yoga to train professional athletes as part of her business, Radius Yoga Conditioning. Thomas and Edison worked twice a week for about 75 minutes each day during the early part of the offseason. Thomas says the yoga workouts were vigorous and that after five minutes he was covered in sweat.

“People don’t really realize how hard of a workout yoga really is,” he says. “It’s not just stretching and sitting on the floor.”

“I work them really hard and there are times when they are cursing me, but by the end of it they love it,” Edison adds.

Yoga instructor Dana Edison helps Boston Bruins goaltender Tim Thomas find his inner warrior in yoga’s “Warrior II” pose.Edison says professional athletes have long used yoga techniques as part of their training. None other than Mark Messier told ESPN  The Magazine that he used meditation and yoga to help him later in his career, but Edison says athletes are using yoga today in a different way.

“Yoga as a means of corrective exercise and as a specific compliment to what they’re already doing is a new application,” she says.

Edison focuses on yoga that is specific to each sport. She says her yoga workout pays off in several areas, including functional strength, the correction of the body’s imbalances, injury prevention and mental preparation. Part of her work with any athlete includes an hourlong physical assessment, which includes a discussion with their trainer to find the athlete’s weak areas. Watching Thomas she learned that his left trapezius muscle was shorter and tighter than his right, which created an imbalance and affected the movement with his catching glove.

Thomas, who is from Flint, Mich., says the workouts with Edison helped him improve his flexibility. He feels the improvement can be seen in his improved play this season, play that won him a spot in this year’s NHL All-Star game.

“I think it’s helped my flexibility in the butterfly,” he says, “It’s opened my hips up a little bit. And it helped me mentally in the way that I knew I had prepared as much as I could [last] summer.”

For U.S. Olympian Sarah Tueting, playing goalie was a time when she could turn her mind off and concentrate on one thing – stopping the puck. When she retired from the sport in 2002, she missed that feeling.

U.S. Olympic goaltender Sarah Tueting found that yoga helped with both her concentration and focus.

“For me, it’s what I miss about hockey and it’s what I found in yoga,” she says, “a place where I can be most fully present without the mind getting in the way.”

Tueting was in net for the U.S. Women’s team gold-medal run at the 1998 Olympics in Nagano, but she then retired from the game after winning silver at Salt Lake City in 2002. She says she took the occasional yoga class when she was still playing, but wishes she’d known the broader benefits of yoga during her playing days.

“Goalies live in their head,” Tueting says. “Being able to hold these poses has a lot to do with focus. If I was playing, absolutely I would have benefited [from yoga].”

Teena Murray, the strength and conditioning coach for the USA Hockey Women’s National program, also sees the benefits of yoga for hockey players.  She has made yoga a part of the current women’s team’s training regimen.

“What we do is definitely use it in our warm-ups, and in some of our post-workout stretching we use some of the poses,” says Murray, who is the director of Olympic Sports Performance at the University of Louisville. “We mainly use it as a regeneration tool on an off day.

Murray has personally used bikram yoga, which takes place in a room heated to more than 100 degrees, for about five years. She says yoga has value for her as a cleansing tool, but for the players she says it helps them stay in tune with their bodies on a day when they are not working out. She says the practice of yoga certainly has value for goalies, whom it helps with concentration and focus, but also can help skaters with increased mobility, balance and relaxation.

Even athletes who have used yoga in their training acknowledge there can be resistance from those who think yoga means lying on the floor and chanting. Edison says she usually waits until athletes see the physical benefits of yoga before incorporating breathing work.

“I don’t necessarily position that right at the beginning with most players because I don’t want to scare them away,” she says. “The breathing is a key component of the workout. Anytime you’re stressed out someone will say to you ‘take a deep breath.’ ”

Despite the misconceptions, Tueting says yoga should be a part of any serious athlete’s training.

“I think you might run into resistance, because people at that level know their bodies so well. I could see people being so anal about their own particular world of training they might not be open to it,” she says.

“I think everybody can benefit from meditation. Hands down that should be part of everybody’s training, I think. It helps you let go of the negative thoughts, and if you’re thinking about a past goal you’re just going to get scored on again.”

Tueting, who has studied yoga in India, says the spiritual aspect of yoga where the mind and body feel truly connected is the same sense that athlete feel when they are “in the zone.”

“If you have a practice that allows you to continually visit that place, it will come back easier on the hockey rink,” she says.

Thomas is also sold on yoga, and says he plans to use it again next offseason.
“Definitely with the season I’ve had I don’t think I’m going to switch too much.”

Photos - Getty Images, NESN, USA Hockey