Welcome to what is essentially a long, drawn out book review of Chrys Kozak’s “Yoga for Rowers”. It is highly probable that I will get side tracked along the way, but the basic premise is this: to give the techniques in this book a go for at least a month and to see if it has any effect on my rowing.
I thought yoga would be a good thing for me to try as (1) I’m *really* not very flexible (see below), (2) I’m fairly uncoordinated and (3) I’m a pretty rage-filled person and it might help me chill out a bit.
I also think it would be quite neat to be able to do this as some sort of uber-flexible party trick:
First Impressions
This is certainly not a weighty tome (it’s 65 pages long), so I’d go for the e-book option as you might feel a little hard-done by after buying the paper copy and paying for P&P.
Besides this, I was reassured to find that it doesn’t mention re-aligning Chakras or anything like that, because to be honest, I’m not going to buy into that any time soon. In fact, it says
“And you don’t have to trade in your JL wardrobe for hemp clothing or become a vegan either”,
Which is probably a good thing as that would mean getting rid of half my clothes…
The book is organised into 4 sections – the Recovery, the Catch, the Power phase and the Finish, with 3 positions for each. It suggests to do all of these every day for at least a month, which I’m happy to commit to.
Getting down to it
So you can see if there’s any progress in my flexibility, I thought I’d include a photo of how long my hamstrings are every time I update the blog (I can’t think of any other measure I’m afraid…). With no yoga:
Excuse the socks
So, rather embarrassingly, can’t even get into a right angle. Hmm. Definitely room for improvement there.
My first complete yoga for rowers session
It took 45mins to get through it first time round, but that was with lots of reading and re-reading and falling over. How on earth you’re supposed to think about clearing your head and thinking about your breathing while trying to contort yourself into positions that NO NORMAL PERSON CAN DO is beyond me.
However, I will stick with it and let you know how I get on with it.
Anna Railton, Rob Roy Boat Club and CUWBC
Here is part 2 of Anna’s review saga
