Developing greater body awareness helps any athlete move more effectively and efficiently. A swimming-specific yoga practice develops this by creating a stronger awareness of the present moment through movement and breath. This awareness is one of the biggest differences between yoga and other training modalities.
There are several strategies where this awareness is applied to develop a greater understanding of how your body moves in space.
By doing movement patterns you are unaccustomed to you learn how to engage and relax muscles in different ways. This improves your ability to develop new movement patterns with greater ease, which includes developing your technical skills. Balancing poses are an amazing way to develop this type of body awareness.
One of the best ways to learn how your body responds to different stimulus is through body scanning. This is a foundational part of a swimming-specific yoga practice. To do a body scan you move your awareness it from head to toe and notice how you feel at specific point in the practice. You then revisit different poses and go through a body scan once again to understand how your body is responding to your practice. Bringing attention to how poses feel differently on each side of the body is another way body awareness is developed. By doing this you begin to understand how many small differences there are throughout the body when moving and in stillness.
