General Approach

Basically I try to get in at least 2 yoga sessions per week with a monthly minimum of 4 hours.

I use short sessions in the morning (20min, maintaining flexibility) and longer sessions in the evening (e.g. Yin Yoga, 40min plus, developing flexibility).

Benefits: I clearly feel improvements in my everyday life (knitting my shoes, more reach, more handy…) but also better muscle recovery and lower strain from endurance, speed and strength exercises. No following my routine for approximately 2 to 3 weeks fades the benefits away. => Flexibility doesn’t take a lot of work, but you need to be consistant!

As I want to minimise the time effort - I do Yoga only at home, following YouTube flows.

My favourite online practice: Kino Yoga

Focus: Ankles

One of my weaknesses are my ankles. Not only in running, even extensive walking (doing my 10.000 steps a day) can lead to pain and inflammations. It seems 20% (my guess) of runners and walkers are affected in the 40plus age group and I know of several friends who basically stopped running because of this.

This is what I do for healing / prevention:

Important is to reduce the pressure of the achilles tendon on the bone and joint structure. For this the plantar fascia (sole of the feed) and the tension in the calfs need to be loosened. It seems that a short almost daily routine (5min) of ankle stretch, plantar fascia stretch with a ball and toe circles on the wobble board can help.

Focus: Hips

So far I covered hip flexibility within my Yoga flows. However, triggered by a bike fitting I realised that my hip flexibility seems to be significantly sub par. To a point of not being able to reach ergonomic positioning on the road bike.

=> To be covered once I found a good routine and was able to make progress :-)