Strong Bodies, Steady Minds: Why a Varsity Basketball Team Chose Yoga

It wasn’t organised by the coach.

It wasn’t mandatory.

It wasn’t part of their training plan.

My son Charlie is a sophomore on the varsity basketball team. Sixteen years old. It was February break — though for athletes, that hardly feels like a break. They were in the middle of boot camp week: conditioning, drills, intensity.

Somewhere in the midst of that, the boys decided they needed yoga.

Charlie mentioned it. The team agreed. And before I knew it, the entire varsity squad was walking into the studio — not because they were told to, but because they wanted to.

That matters.

A Chosen Pause

As they settled in, I told them they were welcome to bring any valuables inside. One boy was running late — he had accidentally gone to the wrong Open Doors Yoga studio. There are several. The room laughed.

That’s when one of them said, “I left my phone outside. My doom scrolling will be better later if I do.”

Everyone laughed again.

But the phones stayed outside.

Before we began, a few of them asked respectfully if they could remove their shirts if the room became too warm. It was a simple question — but it revealed awareness. They weren’t assuming. They were considering the space.

This wasn’t chaos.

It was chosen presence.

Yoga Was Once for Young Men

In many Western spaces, yoga is still framed as soft or secondary to “real” athletic training. But historically, physical yoga practice in India was largely taught to young boys and men. It was disciplined. Repetitive. Heat-building. Structured. What we now recognise as flow-based yoga evolved from those traditions.

Yoga trained focus.
It trained stamina.
It trained the nervous system.

Long before it became a boutique class, it was a system for cultivating clarity within strong bodies.

In many ways, it was cross-training.

What Basketball Demands

Basketball is explosive.

Cutting, pivoting, sprinting, rebounding — over and over again. Hips are heavily recruited. Adductors tighten. Hip flexors shorten. Ankles absorb impact. The spine rotates and stabilises at speed.

Layer in academic pressure, social expectation, and constant digital stimulation, and young nervous systems rarely shift out of “on.” The sympathetic state — push, perform, compete — becomes the baseline.

So I built the class around what would serve them most.

Slow flow.
Grounded standing postures.
Inner groin and hip mobility.
Breath-led transitions.
Space between efforts.

Medicine in Movement

I was seventeen when I was diagnosed with five bulging discs — roughly the same age as the boys in front of me.

At that stage of life, identity is often built around strength and performance. Being told my spine was compromised was humbling. Yoga became the medicine that helped me understand how relief could come not from pushing harder, but from moving more intelligently.

That experience reshaped how I teach.

Practice became therapeutic. Functional. Sustainable.

Medicine in movement.

Not yoga for performance — but yoga for integrity.