The Athlete’s Guide to Yoga – A Personalized Practice for Strength, Flexibility, and Focus featuring Sage Rountree Endurance Films, 120 min, 2008

This is the companion DVD to the excellent book The Athlete’s Guide to Yoga by Sage Rountree. Sage Rountree is an endurance athlete, racing triathlons up to half-Ironman, and a registered yoga teacher. In this DVD she presents 20 different yoga sequences which will help you becoming a better triathlete.

With the DVD you have the possibility to choose from three preset sequences — Strength, Flexibility and Focus, or you can develop a customized routine selecting up to 12 of the following sequences:

• Centering
• The breath in space
• The breath in time
• Six moves of the spine
• Half salutations and lunges
• Standing balance flow
• Arm balance
• Sun salutations
• Moon salutations
• Lunge series
• Static core work
• Dynamic core work
• Shoulder strap series
• Camel pose
• IT band flow
• Pigeon pose flow
• Hamstring strap series
• Restorative poses
• Corpse pose
• Closing

All postures, asanas, are demonstrated at three levels of intensity. The explanations are straightforward with enough detail to ensure that you can perform the asanas safely at home.
The DVD also has a section for the frequent problem areas of endurance athletes. These are:

Building core strength, Stretching the shoulders, Opening the hips and Encouraging recovery.

The target group for this DVD is athletes, including triathletes, that want to increase their strength and flexibility to reduce chance of injury and recover faster. Above all it’s well suited for athletes that have no possibility joining a yoga class. Since the postures are very well explained, this is a good start even for beginners of yoga. And of course it can also be used by athletes merely wanting to discover some new stretching routines.

The DVD is very well made and offers a good start in the world of yoga. It is especially well suited for endurance athletes and also has suggestions for solving some of the frequent problems in endurance athletes, e.g. the IT band problem. For those people, especially interesting is the sequence Opening the hips.

If you want more information about the postures in this DVD and about yoga in general, I sincerely recommend buying the companion book The Athlete’s Guide to Yoga.

The DVD and the book can also be bought here:

In the last post we showed you a few top notch heart rate monitors. In this post we are going to discuss some reasons for using a HRM anyway.

• Measurement of intensity

The main function of a HRM is of course to measure the heart rate. It is well known, that with higher intensities the heart rate also goes high. That means that by measuring the heart rate it could be possible to estimate the intensity used. Now it’s not quite that easy. The heart rate is influenced by several different factors as e.g. temperature, stress, illness and working load. That means, that one heart rate doesn’t really correspond to one intensity. Therefore it is important to use the heart rate monitor with a little bit of care. Nonetheless it’s the simplest and exactest way of measuring intensity there is today.

• Running speed

The top HRMs today have the possibility to measure running speed. This can be very useful. We now know that the intensity is not direct proportional to the heart rate and therefore the heart rate is not always the best method to measure the intensity. When we are able to measure running speed, we have one more indicator of how intense our workout is. The next good thing about measuring speed and heart rate is that it is very easy to see if we are getting fitter or not. If we at one defined speed have a certain heart rate today and in the future see that with the same speed we need a lower heart rate, then we also know that we are becoming fitter.

• Don’t push too hard

We find it useful to use the HRM when we are training with other people (or in competitions). The HRM gives us the possibility to control our intensity. When training with other people it is very easy forget about the speed and suddenly you end up training at a much higher speed as you originally wanted. If you control your heart rate, this doesn’t have to happen.

• Motivation

For some people these high tech gadgets are a real motivation to train. If you are one of them, as we are, then go for it and start using it. The more expensive models also have the opportunity to transmit the training data to a pc. There you can see all training data, make a training log and look at all kind of statistics of your training session.

Suggested reading:
heart rate monitor watch

/Gunnar

I suppose you have all heard of heart rate monitors. This will be a series of posts about this subject. The discussion will be about:

• what HRMs are really good for triathlon race/training?

• why do you want to use a HRM anyway?

• what do the HRM really do?

• benefits of training with a HRM

• what’s not good with the HRMs

• other methods

In this first post I will show some heart rate monitors that I find suitable for triathlon training. This will be only a small excerpt and there are a lot more HRMs on the market.

There are only a few big companies that produce heart rate monitors, the more known are:

• Polar

• Suunto

• Garmin

• Timex

• Cardiosport

With the top models it’s possible to measure things like run and bike velocity and power used on the bike. It is also possible to use interval settings (time or distance) and they also come with a lot of test e.g. Polar has some Fitness-Tests, where you can measure your fitness level and thereby tracking your progress.

The simple models measure only time and heart rate.

Personally I found it very interesting and helpful to know at what velocity I am running. To be able to use the run velocity as intensity in the interval training session was also a big plus. Heart rate monitors that can do that are:

Garmin 405 GPS

Polar RS400SD

Polar RS800CX-MULTI

Polar RS200SD

A lot of other models and reviews can be found in the shop.

/Gunnar