My Health Journey

I found that alternating between hard workouts and "negative exercise" reduces injuries and helps promote recovery. By "negative exercise", I mean yoga, stretching, foam rolling, massage, deep relaxation, or the like. Rather than having strength and muscle-building as the main focus, these negative workouts build flexibility and balance. Nowadays I do some form of physical activity daily.  I reserve hard workouts like runs longer than 2 miles and weight training to every other day.  I find that 10 min of basic yoga poses (neck and shoulder rolls, side bends, cat/cow, ...)  before  a weight training session helps reduce the soreness afterwards. A few hours after the hard workout, once I start feeling soreness, I follow up with a 20-min yoga session. The yoga poses help me survey my body, identify mis-alignments and soreness, and begin working sore spots for recovery. The next day, I follow up with a more comprehensive yoga and/or foam-rollin...

I have practiced yoga on and off for decades, having participated in classes and also on my own with the aid of books. When I started running, I wanted to continue my yoga practice, but in a way that is complementary to the running. I found this book called Yoga for Runners, by Christine Felstead to be really helpful. Like other yoga books, it illustrates many yoga poses. However this books goes beyond many yoga books I have seen in several useful ways: It is organized by muscle group. Each chapter opens with a section illustrating and discussing the different muscles and their relation to running, followed by yoga exercises aimed at strengthening and stretching those muscles. The book indicates the exact benefits of each pose. The section on "Restorative Yoga" teaches a number of poses where the body is supported to allow for deeper relaxation. I use some of these after a race or a particularly hard workout to reset my body. It has two tables on injuries: one ...