If you’ve spent enough time on the mats, you’ve surely heard somebody talk about yoga and how it helped their jiujitsu game. On the surface, any athlete would agree that stretching is beneficial to sports performance, but yoga is so much more than simple stretching and the plethora of benefits it provides goes well beyond sports performance. The movement, concentration, and breathing techniques involved in yoga helps promote a mind/body connection that when applied to jiujitsu, can provide a fluidity and purpose in your movement that can help take your game to new levels.
The word yoga derives from the Sanskrit word “yuj” which roughly translates to “union”. The practice can be traced back as far as 5000 years ago in northern India and would later be brought to the West in the late 1800s. There are six branches of yoga; Hatha, Raja, Karma, Bhakti, Jnana, and Tantra with Hatha being the branch most commonly practiced in the West. The practice involves achieving poses and postures (asanas) with an emphasis on meditative concentration and synchronistic deep breathing between movement and the breath. philosophy of yoga as exercise is to achieve a connection between mind, body, and breath that promotes strength, balance, mobility, and general physical and mental well-being
Below we will discuss some of these benefits and how they can pay dividends for your jiujitsu:
Mind, Body & Breath
At its core, Hatha yoga is about achieving a connection between your mind, body, and breath. This connection is also essential for a developed jiujitsu game. Breath control while rolling is crucial for your stamina and efficacy from the start of the roll to its end. Rickson Gracie credits this as one of the key pieces of his success as a competitor that ultimately made him a legend and icon of the sport. Yogic breathing teaches you to engage your diaphragm, filling your lungs with each breath, and completely emptying them on each exhale. This keeps your heart rate lower, prevents hyperventilation and subsequent panic, and lowers lactic acid build-up. Without practice, maintaining this form of breathing throughout a roll would be next to impossible. Yoga requires conciseness and focus on the breath as you move from asuna to asuna which provides you with said practice that allows you to remain mindful of your breathing as you progress through a roll. Additionally, the synchronization of your movement and breath allows you to move more deliberately with more force while taxing your body less.
Strength and Balance
Similar to the strength that grappling builds, the type of strength that yoga builds is unique to the practice but is ultimately very practical and translates to several other aspects of life. Achieving and holding asunas develops muscular endurance that allows you to maintain the same level of strength throughout a roll. Additionally, the muscle contractions used in several poses are similar to those used in applying chokes and applying pressure. A consistent yoga practice will also promote strong postural alignment, which we are taught very early on in our jiujitsu journeys is essential in all aspects of the sport, especially in our passing techniques. Yoga also places a strong emphasis on movement deriving from your core and thusly is very effective for developing core strength. This same emphasis can be found in many of the fundamental movements of jiujitsu, making the core strength developed through a yoga practice very beneficial for your jiujitsu.
Mobility = Longevity
If a younger belt asks an upper belt, “how do you get better at jiujitsu”, the answer they are most often going to get back is “do more jiujitsu”. While showing up to class is the first step in this, keeping our body’s healthy and able to handle the rigors of jiujitsu is a close second. The spaciousness and mobility achieved through yoga can prove to be the difference-maker in preventing avoidable injures. The stretching involved in achieving variousness asunas helps provide strength and range of motion to the joints often targeted by various submissions. Yoga can also be a great tool as a post-class cooldown to reduce the toll on the body and prevent our joints and muscles from stiffening. Ask any of our students who attend Saturday randori the difference between how they feel leaving right after vs staying for mobility class led by Jason (need his info if you want to plug it here) where he incorporates dynamic yoga-style stretching into our cooldowns. They’d likely tell you that not only does it allow them to go through the rest of their weekend less sore, but also pays dividends for their overall jiujitsu game as well.
Beyond the Mat & Back to it
Perhaps most importantly, yoga promotes a sense of general well-being through not only its physical benefits but mental clarity provided by its meditative nature. We all live busy lives and with the plethora of distractions that the modern world provides, it can be easy to forget to take a few moments to stop for a moment and decompress. Through an emphasis on conscious breathing and concentration required to achieve the flow from asuna to asuna, yoga can help achieve an empty mind focused solely on the present. This is essential for the practice itself, and also helps train the mind to remain in the present moment, which is extremely important for our mental health. While the importance of good mental health far exceeds anything that happens on the mats, it can also prove to help your performance on them in the long run. The ability to remain present and focused in class and on your rolls allow you to yield more from them and facilitate greater growth as a jiujitsu athlete.
So where do you start? Just like jiujitsu, many tend to put several unnecessary prerequisites in the way of starting their yoga journey. Ultimately, the best thing to do is to just give it a go! There is no shortage of resources available on YouTube and beyond for every level that allows you to begin your practice without even leaving home or attending a class. Once you begin, you will see that the benefits of consistent practice will reach not only your jiujitsu but your life as a whole.
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