Photo: @gone_again__
If you needed any more inspiration on why yoga is great for your surfing, meet Barbara Peisl—surfer, yoga teacher, and creative force.
“Yoga helped me so much with my surfing and surfing changed my yoga. The biggest change was probably regarding my balance, proprioception (the body’s ability to sense its location, movements and actions), and the feeling how to move my body with ease.
Through a diverse yoga and movement practice, I have definitely refined my sense of balance and body awareness. Yoga has heightened my awareness of movement in general. Since I don’t live by the sea all year round, there are months when I don’t surf at all. When I get back in the water after these breaks, I’ve sometimes felt that my sense of movement has improved, even though I haven’t been surfing for so long. And also, my mobility in the areas of shoulders, pelvis, and spine has improved. Not just passive flexibility, but active flexibility combined with strength. In general, yoga also helps me find more ease in my movements and a greater awareness of how I move and breathe. Breathwork and apnea training (conscious breath-holding) have helped me a lot with surfing. How I can stay calm in challenging situations in the water and, among other things, calm my nervous system through breathing.”
Photo: @johannes_olszewski
“Yoga has so many faces and there are so many formats. This can be really overwhelming when you want to get into yoga – depending on what your purpose is – to get more flexible, to build up body awareness and strength for certain movements, to calm down, to establish a daily routine that’s realistic to implement. Try out various styles and teachers. Just start to incorporate a few minutes of conscious movement into your day. If you want to practice at home, online yoga can be really helpful to get an idea of what a yoga practice can feel like and which movement sequences you can do, for example. Maybe start with 5-15 mins a few times a week and you can always practice longer and more often, when you feel like it.”
Photo: @johannes_olszewski
Discover the Manduka x Gerry Lopez Collection and other performance yoga equipment at eu.manduka.com
Read more about Barbara here or follow @YogaOceanFlow for her classes, retreats and upcoming series for surfers.
