Effects of Yoga Experience on Athletes

Abstract

Many people are recently interested in the effects of yoga and some of top athletes utilize it for their training. There are, however, few studies on the effects of yoga from the viewpoint of improvement of psychological performance for athletes. Therefore, this study conducted yoga programs and interviews about the effects of yoga for university athletes. The purpose of this study was to clarify the effects of yoga on their psychological state by quantitative analysis of their utterances in interviews. The subjects were fifteen male university students belonging to the rugby or baseball club. They were divided according to their sport (rugby and baseball) and the frequency of keywords among their utterances was compared between them. The results of chi-square tests showed that the baseball players used more keywords included in the categories of “Relax” and “Image” than the rugby players. The above results suggest the effectiveness of yoga for athletes and the necessity of yoga programs suitable for each competition trait.