Yoga Practices for Increasing Our Body Awareness

by Kristy Manuel

In a previous blog I discussed the synergism of yoga and pickleball and explained how certain yoga practices enhance athletic skills and improve the body mapping capability in the brain. This can lead to reduced chances of injury due to changes in movement patterns. We know that pickleball is enjoying immense popularity throughout the USA and there continues to be a high rate of injury.  We’re seeing a lot of people coming on the courts that probably haven’t played sports in a long time. 

Some older players may also be dealing with aches and pains including joint pain.  With that pain comes changes in behavior, movement and mood.  Somatic Motor Amnesia (SMA) is a concept that refers to the loss or inhibition of the body's natural movement patterns. This is often due to chronic stress, poor posture, repetitive strain, or injury. In athletes, SMA can significantly impact performance by disrupting the efficient coordination of muscles required for optimal movement. Somatic Motor Amnesia occurs when the brain's connection with certain muscles or muscle groups is weakened or "forgotten." Over time, the body "forgets" how to engage these muscles properly, leading to inefficient movement patterns, reduced mobility, and decreased performance. 

Impact of SMA on Athletic Performance

SMA can result in inadequate muscle activation, meaning certain muscles do not engage when needed or else they don’t engage with the right timing or intensity. This reduces the efficiency and power of movements, impacting performance in sports requiring precision, balance, or strength. Athletes may develop compensatory movement patterns to cope with inhibited muscles, which can lead to further imbalances and increased risk of injury.

Additionally, SMA can lead to a restricted range of motion, particularly in areas like the shoulders, hips, and spine. This limitation has the potential to affect an athlete's ability to perform movements that require a full range of motion such as throwing, jumping, or twisting. Flexibility is crucial element in many sports and reduced flexibility due to SMA can limit an athlete's ability to stretch or extend fully, impacting both performance and injury risk.

Athletic performance often relies on complex motor patterns involving multiple muscle groups working in harmony. SMA disrupts these patterns, causing movements to become less fluid and more effortful. In many sports SMA can significantly degrade performance and increase risk of injury. Because SMA leads to inefficient and compensatory movements, there’s a higher chance of suffering from overuse injuries, strains, and sprains. Muscles not functioning properly force other muscles to compensate, which can lead to overloading and injury. Athletes with SMA are also more prone to acute injuries because their movement patterns are less stable and poorly coordinated.

How Yoga Can Help

Mind-body practices like yoga can improve proprioception, balance, and coordination. These are all skills essential for restoring proper motor function.

Yoga is a practice of awareness. When we practice on the mat or in meditation, we’re tuning in to our bodies, our thoughts, the depth and pace of our breath as well as sensations and how we move. If you’re like me, you probably move through much of your day on autopilot because we do many of the same things every day. Yoga gives us a chance to “work in” and increase our own interoception which is the ability to feel the sensations of the body and understand their connections to our behaviors. In yoga we’re cultivating awareness of body along with our thoughts, behavior patterns, emotions and more. Someone living with chronic pain or a healing from a past or present injury has likely compensated in movement patterns to avoid pain or discomfort. This has led to forming new movement patterns which are not always optimal. SMA can develop and then when stepping onto a court to play a sport like pickleball which requires some speed and agility, the body may be more susceptible to injury. 

A slow and mindful physical yoga practice is going to be a fantastic choice for improving our body awareness while helping to restore natural movement patterns and address muscle imbalances. Yoga provides a balanced approach to strengthening muscles, particularly those weakened or "forgotten" due to SMA.  This includes both major muscle groups and smaller stabilizing muscles. Plus, the more obvious increased flexibility resulting from a regular yoga practice includes dynamic and static stretching which helps restore range of motion and reduces muscle tension.

Designing a yoga practice to improve sports performance and reduce injury needs to focus not only on the poses but how we move into and out of the poses. As previously mentioned, slow movement is ideal to build awareness. Additionally, we want to focus on what I like to call a deconstructed practice where the focus is on small incremental movements and transitions rather than on just the poses themselves. Finding new ways to move creates more awareness as well as mimicking some of the movements we perform in pickleball. 

If you’d like to try some short practices I call “yoga snacks” that focus on mobility please visit my YouTube page to play around with some of the practices!