I recently started joining my wife in practicing yoga more regularly. Almost immediately upon starting up, I noticed a number of interesting similarities between yoga and karate – similarities that make the two disciplines complimentary to one another. Here are five of the most significant ones.

An emphasis on the fundamentals.

When you build a house, you start with the foundation. Without the foundation, you can’t layer anything else on top. So often, no matter the discipline, we see people come in brand new and immediately want to start building the metaphorical roof – in other words, they want to skip right to the “cool” stuff.

The reality, though, is that the fundamentals are what will make or break both your yoga and your karate. If you don’t have a very strong grasp of the basic techniques, you’ll never realize any of the benefits you originally signed up for.

If you can’t do a proper basic stance and block in karate, you won’t be able to progress to the more advanced stuff, which assumes a level of proficiency in the basics. By the same token, if your technique when doing a basic yoga pose like chair pose is sloppy, you won’t gain any of the physical benefits – like strength and flexibility – that you may have been hoping for. You may even cause damage.

In both yoga and karate, focusing on performing the basics really, really well is the secret sauce that will make you an excellent practitioner.

It’s about more than just the physical.

There’s a spiritual and meditative quality to yoga, much the same as there is in karate. When you’re preparing for a kata demonstration in karate, you’re focusing on your breathing, and on centering yourself so that your focus is 100% in the present, on the task at hand.

With our instructor, who is originally from India and practices what I consider to be classical yoga, meditation and spirituality are built into our daily yoga practice as well.

Beyond that, both karate and yoga place significant emphasis on your breathing technique. The uses are different, but the focus is the same. In karate, you practice your breathing to add strength to your strikes and blocks, among other things. With yoga, you practice a variety of breathing techniques to improve circulation in your body and help cleanse it of toxins. In both cases, breathing is at the core of what we do.

Yoga makes your karate better, and vice versa.

There’s no doubt that my karate training gives me an advantage when it comes to practicing some yoga poses. I say “some” because there are others that will haunt my dreams until the day I die.

Lookin’ at you, eagle pose…

Anyway, the two actually share a number of different stances, and practicing them in either discipline will make you stronger in the other. The same is true of your balance. Yoga is renowned for its ability to improve your balance, which – surprise surprise – is also extremely useful in karate. In my dojo, we practice balance exercises to strengthen our legs and improve our posture and stances. When I started practicing yoga, I found that I could do many of the balancing exercises pretty well!

Without the right mindset, you won’t advance.

The vast majority of yoga instructors only ever teach basic poses, and for most people, that’s fine. It’s not a competition, and if these basic poses challenge you, then you’re exactly what you need to be. The same is true in karate – many students never learn the most advanced techniques and katas. Most stay with basic or intermediate techniques.

And there’s nothing wrong with that.

If you want to progress to the more advanced stuff, though, you need not only the physical conditioning to be able to handle it, but the mental fortitude as well. Advanced techniques are labeled that way for a reason. As a relatively fit guy who managed to get his black belt in karate, I thought I could come into my wife’s yoga class and just slay every pose.

Holy crap was I ever outta line.

I quickly learned that, karate training or not, after 20 seconds of holding some of these poses, that little voice in my head wanted nothing more than for me to throw in the towel. There is way, way more strength involved in maintaining even the most basic of poses than I ever expected.

And those are the moments I love. Those moment where your mind says “quit” and your heart says “no.” They exist in both karate and yoga, and your ability to stick it out through those moments dictates in no small part how far you’ll be able to advance in either discipline.

Wrapping it Up

Thinking about all of these similarities, I could sum it up with one observation: I feel like, with both karate and yoga, the vast majority of people – and even instructors – don’t take the time to understand either discipline in all its nuances. We often look to both of these disciplines for their physical benefits – “karate helps me fight and yoga helps me stretch” – and we miss all of the other potential benefits and learning opportunities as a result.

Now I’m not trying to sound pretentious by saying that, because lord knows I don’t have it all figured out. I’m just saying that, based on my experience, one thing that does seem clear to me is that, with the right instructor and environment, there are more benefits to be had with both of these disciplines than public opinion would have you believe.

Here’s to exploring all that both of these great disciplines have to offer 🙂