You know, this one.
- Mountain Pose
- This one is good at stretching the muscles of the front shoulders (surprisingly) and the wrists/forearms. It's weird where you feel stretches as long as you keep your second thumb knuckle on your sternum and your shoulders dropped.
- Upward Salute
- Really great at stretching the ribcage, the intercostals, abdominals... the whole front of you body. Heck, even good at stretching your deltoids and, if you drop your head back, also stretches those front neck muscles.
- Standing Forward Bend
- If you don't know, I'm not telling you.
- Bah, I guess I will. Good at stretching your back and ribcage as well as your hamstrings. It's a gods-sent for my upper back.
- Lunges
- This is a great one. I initially added it to an ex-routine as a hip opener and found out it's also great at the hip flexors. You just have to focus on your form and make sure your back leg is as straight and high as possible. Get your foot between your hands or in front, almost like you're working for forward splits, and it's more emphasized.
- Plank Pose
- Good strength isotonic. Also good for the wrists (I wouldn't have believed this except my bad wrist tells me loudly that it's getting focus)
- Four-Limbed Staff Pose
- Same features as Plank Pose, but your arms are bent and you're close to the ground. You can get some good isometrics if you move from plank to FLSP nice and slow.
- Upward-Facing Dog
- Front torso, abdominals and hip flexors stretched with this one. Also isometric for shoulders, triceps, and lower pecs. Oh, and those wrists.
- Downward-Facing Dog
- This is the beast position. You stretch hips, glutes, hamstrings, calves, back, rib cage. Good isometrics on shoulders, upper pecs, triceps and back (I think emphasis on lower back but not certain)
Let's think of the core taekwondo muscle groups and see which ones are stretched and strengthened
Focused Stretching:
- Hamstrings
- Hip flexors
- Rest of hips
- Calves (nice front stance)
- Glutes (oh, those axe kicks...)
Strengthened (top down):
- Deltoids
- Triceps (duh)
- Forearms (stabilizing for punches)
- Abdominals
- Hip flexors
- Glutes
- Hamstrings
- Deltoids
- Calves
Has anyone else missed what seems like the only taekwondo-specific area that isn't hit by this lovely routine? Yep, it looks like the groin muscles are completly neglected. I am going to ruminate on this for a day or so and I'm going to figure out how to add either warrior II poses (which wouldn't be that hard) or wide-angle forward bends (which I'm having problems right now conceptualizing where to add without breaking the flow).
Oh, and a final note. If you're thinking that doing a yoga routine might be good for stretching but isn't really good on energy or strength training because the closest you get is isotonics, which even NASA showed isn't as good as isometrics, and it's not really fast-paced; I'll say this. Per this article on YogaJournal, it's traditional to do this routine 108 times! WOW! Which means that unless you want to be doing this for a couple hours (my routine takes at least 2.5 minutes per repetition), you'll need to be moving between the poses fast and not staying in the poses for long and, at my current routine, I'm breaking a light sweat after 12 minutes... think what it'd be sped up and done for not 5 repetitions, but 108?!?!?!
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