There is no other more exhilarating form of exercise than running.  It does not require any formal training. It can be done by anybody and they can do it at any time or place. 

It is a wonderful cardio-vascular exercise. Like any other form of exercise, running also requires proper warm up and cooling down exercises.

This is where yoga comes into the picture. One might think that yoga and running are very different type of activities and it is not possible to correlate them.

However the practice of yoga has a lot of benefits for runners which are outlined below:

In case you have injured yourself while running, there are asanas in yoga that will help you heal the injury quickly. Running sometimes leads to a lot of issues like sore feet, tight muscles and sometimes back pain. This is on account of the fact that the feet take up so much of the pressure while running.

The practice of yoga asanas can help us to identify which part of the body needs help. You can focus at that point and can do the asanas that will enable you to get all the energy to that point. This will help the body to get back into shape much faster than the conventional form of treatment. One of the conventional forms is painkillers.

While painkillers mask the pain, they do not identify the problems and running after taking painkillers might sometimes make the problems only worse. The practice of yoga asanas helps in harmonizing all the parts of the body so that the body functions as a single complete unit.

All runners will tell you the importance of breathing while running. Breathing is the single most important aspect of running. The ability to run long distances comes from the ability to pace one’s breathing process.

The various breathing asanas of yoga not only increase the lung capacity, but also enable runners to get into the Zone and experience the peace and tranquility that comes on reaching the zone.

Thus it can be seen that yoga is a good pre and post training exercise for running and actually helps us to become better runners.