Is yoga hurting your body? Or, is how you are practicing yoga hurting your body?

This is an important distinction. 

I know that I have hurt my body practicing yoga by thinking I was doing the right action. Only to be helped by an experienced yoga teacher who could show me what I was doing wrong. Often, this is not intuitive.

When you are practicing yoga there are more things to consider than just the shape of the pose, or where the hand is, or how the foot is turned.   It is also important to consider what you are doing while you are in the pose. This is why practicing on your own can often only take you so far. We all get into our own particular habits and ruts. It takes an experienced teacher to help us see ourselves more clearly.

I have been talking with a few students about engaging the buttocks in their poses. These conversations stem from concerns about low back discomfort to feeling a strain at the front of the thighs in the psoas. Questions like this are never easy to address in general because everyone is different.   But, I will attempt to point out one possible cause of hip pain in yoga. It usually stems from one leg that likes to either externally or internally rotate more and might be a little weaker because of pain.

This week let’s look at an example of this in a common standing posture:  Trikonasana (Triangle). 

We often look at this pose from the front:

What most students see in this is that the legs are straight and the hand is on the floor or a block.  But, what is happening when we look at this pose from the head side?

If you are not engaging your legs and your buttocks, your Trikonasana might look like this. Or, if you are not flexible enough to get your hand to the floor, you may compensate by winging the buttocks backward and moving the head forward.

In this picture I have my hand on the floor, but at the expense of compression in my front hip and overarching in my low back.   

This is what Triangle should look like from head on:

This takes a lot of strength and flexibility to get the hand to the floor, or block.  It also takes some understanding of what to do while in the pose.  In this case, the front leg buttock is being held strongly against the body, keeping the hips in line with the torso and the lower back long.  The head is back in line with the spine. The back hip is rolling backwards to open the front groin and chest, keeping the psoas from getting compressed between the femur and the pelvis.  The body looks very two-dimensional, the way it should if you were looking down on the top of your head while you are standing in Tadasana.

Chances are, if you have hip pain on one side (or maybe both!) in the Standing Poses, it could be that your forward glutes are not engaged and your low back is over-arched. How can you check this out on yourself? Try doing Triangle Pose with your back against the wall. The front foot is about the thickness of a block away from the wall. The back heel is on the wall. The front leg buttock will be touching the wall but you can try to engage the buttocks under and move it slightly away from the wall as you roll the other buttock to try to touch the wall. Both shoulders and your head should be on the wall. You shouldn’t worry if you can’t touch the floor, that can come with repeated practice. (Or, if your hamstrings are very tight, you might need some other modifications)

The other standing postures such as Virabhadrasana II, Parsva Konasana and Ardha Chandrasana  should have the same buttock/psoas engagement. This is especially true for Ardha Chandrasana as all of your weight is on one leg.  If the buttocks are weak on the standing leg side, eventually this can become a real pain in the butt!

This might be something you can fix yourself if you love playing with your poses in your own practice.  But this is often something that is more easily addressed within a private session as there are some manual adjustments that are extremely beneficial.   Contact me if interested!

How to come out of Savasana

Who would have thought that you need instructions to come out of Savasana?!  Don’t you just get up off the floor?  Do I really need to be told how to do that? 

Yoga is a practice of intention, of being aware of what you are doing and how you are doing it, not just while you are in the pose, but before you come into it and after you come out of it.  How you come into the pose affects how you are in the pose and how you come out of the pose defines how much of the pose you take with you. 

Your asana practice challenges you physically; to stretch and to be strong, and mentally to be present and to be discriminating.  Most students tell me that they feel calmer after their yoga practice.  That is because the practice works not just on our bodies, but our minds as well.  We enter a calmer mental state.  Another way to put that is to say that your asana practice can take you out of a mental state of high alert, also known as fight or flight, and put you into a calmer and more relaxed state, also known as rest and digest. 

How you come out of Savasana after your yoga practice can either keep you in that calmer state, or jolt you right back into fight or flight.  Let’s take a look at what can happen.

Hopefully, you have been able to drop into a deep state of relaxation in Savasana.  Your body is still, your mind is quiet and your breathing has slowed down and become very soft and subtle. 

The first instruction for coming back from Savasana is to begin to increase your breath.  The breath is prana, or energy and as such, it begins to energize the body.  I usually guide my students to breathe into their arms and legs and up into their neck and head.  When you feel the energy of the breath in these areas of the body you can begin to move and stretch by starting with small movements in the fingers and toes, moving up to the wrists and ankles.  At this point you can begin to bend your knees and elbows and turn your chin from side to side. 

When you are ready you can roll to your side and pause for a moment, drawing your knees up into your chest in a fetal position and cradling your head on your arm.  When you are ready to sit up, roll towards the floor and use your hands to push yourself up, allowing the head to come up last.

If you come up in this manner, you will still be in that sense of calmness and quietude cultivated through the combination of your practice and Savasana.  This will help preserve the sense of rest and digest that is equated with a more relaxed mental state.

However, some students may not be able to relax and drop into a restful state in Savasana. 

Sometimes students lie still through the instructions for coming back from Savasana and instead of coming up gradually, they sit bolt upright by doing a quick abdominal crunch.  Have these students been able to relax?  Maybe these students obediently lie back during Savasana but instead of relaxing they are waiting to be “released” from the pose. 

Coming up from Savasana in this manner quickly jolts your system out of rest and digest into the state of fight or flight.  This is done by a combination of quickly contracting the abdominal muscles and hip flexors which send a message of danger to the brain.  This is an action most animals take to protect their visceral organs from being attacked.  And although we are not being attacked the reflex action sends off a cascade of nerve signals which triggers the brain into a highly alert state.  While most of us will eventually get back to this state on our own, there is no need to rush the process. 

So, the next time you are in savasana, try to relax.  If you can’t relax, at least lie still and breathe as slowly, deeply and as evenly as you can without creating any stress.  And when you come out, do so gradually and notice how you feel. 

Yoga means to yoke the body, mind and the spirit.  Allow your yoga practice to work on more than just your body by paying attention to how you come out of Savasana.   

Triangle Pose

Utthita Trikonasana

Utthita means extended and Trikonasana means Triangle.  This is Triangle Pose, one of the most basic standing poses and often one of the first poses taught to beginners.  It is the pre-cursor to many other poses including:  Virabhadrasana II (Warrior II), Utthita Parsva Konasana (Side Angle), Ardha Chandrasana (Half Moon),  Virabhadrasana III (Warrior III) and Virabhadrasana I (Warrior I) and Parivrtta Trikonasana (Revolved Triangle)

The basic instructions are:

Stand in Tadasana in the middle of your mat facing the long edge.  Bring your hands up to the center of your chest, in line with your collar bones and on an inhalation step or jump your arms and legs 3-1/2 to 4 feet apart. 

Turn your right leg and foot 90 degrees out to the right.  Look to see that the right foot is pointing straight out to the right and that the center of the right heel is in line with the arch of the back foot.  Lift the kneecaps engaging the quads. Keep the arms extended and the chest lifted.  The torso should be centered between the legs.

On an exhalation, reach the right arm out to the right, stretching the right side of your torso out over your right leg, tilting your hips as you go.  Keep the left hip rolling up and back on top of the right hip.  When you can’t go any further, reach the right hand down to touch your shin, or a block, or the floor on the outside of your leg.  Turn your head and look up at your top arm. 

Keep weight on the inner edge of your front foot and the outer edge of your back foot.  Keep the kneecaps lifted as you breathe normally.

On an inhalation, keeping the kneecaps lifted, press down into the inner edge of the front foot and outer edge of the back foot reach out through your left hand and bring yourself up.  Turn your right foot in.  Repeat to the other side.

When finished, step or jump your arms and legs back together and return to Tadasansa. 

This gives you the basic instructions, but it does not tell you exactly where the body is in space.   It is possible to follow these instructions and not end up in a well aligned pose.  For this, you need to be able to look at yourself in the pose.

Triangle Pose with alignment points

Notice how far apart my legs are.  Often the first thing a student needs to learn is to open the legs wide apart.  For this you need the flexibility to spread the legs and the strength to balance in this stance. 

See the relationship of my front arm to my front shin.  My forearm crosses my shin near my knee.  You can’t see this from this angle, but my forearm is also “gating” my front shin; which means that I am pressing my forearm against the shin.  This helps to keep the weight on the inner edge of the front foot. 

Notice that my arms are in a vertical line with my top hand over my shoulder and ultimately in line with my bottom wrist.  There is air and space in my top armpit.  My spine and the sides of my waist are in a straight line and not domed. 

From the head view, you can see that my torso is in line over my front leg, not inside of it or outside of it.  Most students bring the torso to the inside of the front leg in order to get the hand to the floor, mistaking that for the goal of the pose. But all this does is to cause the hips to swing out and the torso to rotate to the floor.

Torso is in line over front leg. See how the wrists and shoulders are in line and they are slightly to the outside of the front leg. This is correct alignment.

Torso is leaning inside of front leg. See how the hands are back and the shoulders are forward. The arms look skewed. This is incorrect alignment.

The other thing to notice from the front view is that I am very two-dimensional.  In other words, my body is still in Tadasana even though it is tipped to the side. My buttocks are not moving backwards, my head is not drifting forward and my torso is in a vertical plane.  This is the goal of the pose, not getting the hand to the floor.

Another subtle thing to notice is that while my torso is over my front leg, my arms are on the outside of the front leg.  In other words, my arms are slightly behind my torso.  This is the same as it would be in Tadasana.  A lot of shoulder problems come from not being able to roll the shoulders back and lift the base of the throat.  Look to see that my arms are vertical in this plane as well.

The gaze should be looking into the top hand, or as close as you can to it.  This is easier if the top hand is not drifting behind you.  Make sure that your head is in line with your spine and centered between your shoulders.  Don’t drop the head backwards to look up at your top hand.  The last thing I want to mention is that the head is turned to be looking up at the top hand.  I like to give the cue to look at your right hand with your right eye and try to see with your left eye what your right eye can see. 

Head in line with the spine.

Head dropped. Bottom ear is closer to the bottom shoulder.

Take a look at yourself in a mirror as you do Triangle Pose and notice where your body is in space.