I started incorporating some yoga into my workouts a couple of weeks ago in order to improve my flexibility and range of motion. Today I discovered an unexpected benefit to doing yoga - increased body awareness. When doing poses in yoga you also practice focusing your awareness on the muscles you're activating and stretching as well as your breathing. This focus improves your body awareness. This seems to work especially well when you're doing form and muscular endurance workouts which is what I ended up doing today as a result of this revelation.
While swimming today I really focused on all the muscles being activated on the stroke. I also focused on getting my elbows bent and could feel the difference in the water flowing by me. By maintaining focus I was able to dial in a really solid and efficient feeling stroke. During spin class I focused a lot on higher tension seated intervals - really concentrating on spinning smooth circles by focusing my attention to the activation and deactivation of muscles around the entire pedal stroke. During my run on the treadmill (it was -11 degrees Fahrenheit this morning!) I cranked the incline up and kept my speed down and really drove through on my strides. All in all it was a very Zen experience and ended up being a great workout day despite the cold.
Looks like I'll be keeping yoga in my workout routines - perhaps even replacing my post workout stretching routine with yoga and also doing some yoga on my off days.
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