How Yoga Can Help Coaches During COVID By Sarah Neal
I
came to yoga at one of the darkest chapters of my life. I had been in an emotionally abusive relationship on and off for over 15 years, and when I finally cut that tie for good, I met a great partner who was everything I wanted at the time—employed, kind, attentive, responsible, relatable, steady as a rock, and shared my love of cooking (he was a chef). Then, two years later, that relationship ended almost as abruptly as it began. Around the same time, I experienced some very difficult situations in skating and was struggling to process them. I sought advice in both matters from the wrong people who only ended up making me feel worse about myself. Years before, when I first moved home to Louisville after coaching in Arizona and Spain, I coached with a former childhood skating friend who practiced yoga at a local non-profit yoga school. I admired her grace and poise and was intrigued by her dedicated yoga practice. I had dabbled in yoga before with classes at the YMCA and on DVD’s, but had never found a teacher or community that kept me going back. When I was searching for activities to help me heal and rediscover myself, I remembered that friend and where she practiced, so I decided to try it. I immediately loved the feeling that yoga gave me. In fact, my body still remembers setting the same inten-
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tion of letting go at the start of every class for months, while I peeked out the studio window at the catering business across the breezeway. Little by little, I was distracted less by the caterers, less focused on my troubles, and more focused on the mat. The year 2020, with all its chaos, calamity, and uncertainty, reminds me a lot of that period when I first began a regular yoga practice. In 2013 it was just my world, but in 2020 the entire world seems to have shattered. But no worries, right? Coaches are examples of perseverance and will get up again. Indeed, right after rinks closed, coaches across the country pivoted and started off-ice program and classes and apps to stay employed and keep serving their skaters. Then, after the novelty wore off, uncertainty became the new normal, our families needed us in new ways, and we grew weary. The world has forced us to take our resilience up 100 notches, and even though we are tired, our competitive instincts stress us out about this year’s “results”. In addition, our controlling, overachieving natures make us also stress over toilet paper, home projects, and virtual education on top of the pandemic and the state of the world. If you thought coaching was stressful before COVID, now there’s absolutely no doubt. You may have read or heard about the term “surge capacity”. Surge capacity, as defined by Dr. Ann
Masten, is “a collection of mental and physical adaptive systems that humans tap into for short-term survival in acutely stressful situations, such as natural disasters.” 1 In early humans, the sympathetic (fight or flight) nervous system functioned to help us escape real, immediate dangers, such as predators. When we tap into these reactions for long periods of time, though, as we have done since March, the body and mind can suffer greatly. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, “those same lifesaving reactions in the body can disturb the immune, digestive, cardiovascular, sleep, and reproductive systems. Some people may experience mainly digestive symptoms, while others may have headaches, sleeplessness, sadness, anger, or irritability. Over time, continued strain on your body from stress may contribute to serious health problems, such as heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, and other illnesses, including mental disorders such as depression or anxiety.” 2
Tree pose
2020 so far has been difficult, to say the least, and we are most likely looking ahead at a very long stretch of challenging times. In fact, just this morning my doctor told me, “The second wave is here. We survived the first. We will see if we survive the second.” How’s that for adding stress to the day? In reality, skaters are used to handling stress—every competition and sometimes every practice is a stressful event. This stress is short term, though, usually peaking right before a test session, show, or compe-
