Anatomy for Yoga Therapists – SRL

1. Nourish Relaxation

Relaxation is a time to come into yourself, or getting in touch with how you were with your day and how your day was with you. It enables you to set a baseline from which you can work. Be careful not to get ahead of yourself while staying diligent in unwinding muscle and fascia, tapping into and connecting to who and what you are.It is also a time to become aware of your breath. Notice how your inhale and exhale are moving. Are you having to concentrate to relax? Are you able to truly watch your breath or are you trying to change it?

Notice your energy levels and watch to see if there is a desire to push through that which is telling you to slow down. Allow your practice to honour your experience of your body that you are having right now. Allow yourself to hear what your body is saying to you with respect to its ability to bring in breath, to exhale breath, to settle, to be still.

2. Begin With The Spine In Mind

Once settled in your body and breath, you can begin to move. The spine is the central hub from which all movement occurs. At it’s essence, the spine is a collection of bones, muscles, fascia, blood, lymph, and nerve vessels. When tight and imbalanced, the spine will impact shoulder and hip range of motion; it will impact your ability to twist, bend, and move upside down. And, more specifically, if the superficial spinal muscles are tight and short, the deeper spinal muscles will be weak, and you may feel a mishmash of symptoms, limitations, pulls, and twangs in your shoulders, elbows, wrists, and/or knees. So, even before you initiate any movement in the body, consider how the intended movement will impact the spine and in particular what range of motion is available within the spine.

3. Connect Spinal Movement with Movement at the Largest Joints First

Once your body is relaxed and you are able to feel the spine as the place from which movement radiates, the next intention is to enable free and easy movement of the limbs. The simplest way to create this is by focusing on the largest joints, specifically the shoulder and hip joints.This may be surprising for some yogis since there are particular systems that build the poses from the hands and feet. From an anatomical perspective, the hip and shoulder joints are more proximal, or closer to, the spine than the hands and feet, making it easier to maintain awareness while releasing inappropriate tension and creating better stability.

4. Move Joints In Their Optimum Range of Motion

This is where you get to choose. What is optimal for you? Do you have osteoarthritis or bursitis? Does one joint move more smoothly and easily through its range of motion than another? Find the degree of motion where you are feeling at ease, you can breathe, the joint is moving in the direction it was designed to move in, and you feel no pain.

5. Understand that Core Stability Arises From Pure Motion

Core stability is the “Steady Eddy” of our practices. It keeps us solid, unwavering, and fluid, as well as enabling us to respond to the twists and turns, the increases and decreases in tempo and rhythm. The result – we stand taller, we breathe easier, and our backs, hips, and knees feel so much better. To define the core stability, I really like using the following description: core stability is a balance of strong core muscles found along the midline of the body from the base of the skull to the bottom of the feet, combined with the freedom of movement at the hip, shoulder and vertebral joints as well as the elbow, wrist, knee, and ankle joints. Without this balance, the body will either be too rigid ( too much strength and too little mobility) or limp and spiritless (too much mobility with too little strength). So to distinguish what the core is we need to look at several muscles in particular. Beginning at the inner core there are the pelvic floor, transversus abdominus and multifidi. The next functional layer is the outer core or global stabilizers and includes the hip abductors, hip adductors, obliques, pectoralis minor, rhomboids, serratus anterior, deep neck flexors, tibialis posterior, peroneus longus. In yoga, the stability in our core enables us to go from fast to slow and slow to fast, and it also gives us the strength and ease to stay in an asana for an extended period of time.

Having said all that, there is a real misnomer in yoga that we need to “lift or contract the core” in order to be stable. In truth, this type of cueing in yoga has led to a ton of overcontraction, tightness and tension. It is not uncommon to work with teachers or long term practitioners who have pelvic floors that are too tight, or upper abdominal muscles that are overly engaged, or latissmus dorsi that overcompensate. More and more we are seeing that in an attempt to gain more core stability that we are actually gaining less.

So what to do? The key lies in the previous principles mentioned above. We need to relax and breathe, the pelvic floor needs to be supple and connected to the diaphragm which has to move in order for us to be stable from the inside out. (Think about how many yoga classes have a “core component” and at the end of that part of the class there is a collective exhale. Those students weren’t doing core work, they were doing breathing holding work). Along with easy natural breathing, we need to move well – purely – in the optimum range of motion that the joints move in. When the joints move as they should, muscles work as they should. Deep core muscles do their job, global stabilizers do their job, and the power muscles do their job.

6. Adopt Relaxed Resilience or Effortless Effort

This is where depth in your yoga practice is developed. Relaxation occurs in layers, beginning with breath and continuing with awareness. With more awareness, you’ll be better able to perceive levels of tension and freedom that exists in your body. This is what I call “depth”. Imagine this: You are halfway through a class, and you are feeling tired or distracted. Reconnect by noticing where and how you are breathing. Try not to change it – just notice it and practice there. See what happens.

7. Move In The Range of Motion that Doesn’t Increase Pain

Ahh… the loaded word pain. What it means to one person could mean something entirely different to another. For clarity, consider a spectrum of pain: good pain consists of muscle fatigue, the point at which the muscle fibres can no longer contract. The nerve fibres keep sending stimulating signals, but the muscles aren’t responding, either because their energy reserves are exhausted or there is a build up of lactic acid. On the other side of the spectrum is the bad pain that burns, strains, rips, and tears. It is the pain that causes your brow to furrow, your teeth to clench, your breath to be held, and your body to reverberate with tension. If you take a moment and move only in your pain-free range of motion, you will notice that not only does your range improve, it improves faster and continues to be pain-free! Why does this work? When we move in an “in pain” range of motion, we increase tension and unwinding can’t occur. The issue that is creating the pain doesn’t get resolved.

So, breathe, move a little more slowly, be aware, and stay in your pain-free range of motion.

8. Do All That You Need To Do And Nothing More: aka. Less Is More

A simple yoga asana is one which requires fewer joint motions. For example: Tadasana is simple. Vrksasana (Tree Pose) is more complex because now one hip is doing one motion while the other hip is doing a different set of motions. Another example is Dandasana (Staff Pose), which is simpler than Marichyasana (Pose Dedicated to the Sage Marichi). In Dandasana, both legs are doing the same thing at their respective hip joints. Balance is straight forward to create. With Marichyasana there are two different leg positions and a twist has been added. The arms are being used to support the twist. Since more is going on there is greater complexity. With more complexity there is greater potential for strain or injury. The key then, is to start small, take baby steps, and bite off no more than you can chew. Gain the mobility, stability, strength, and ease in the simple asanas before moving into the complex asanas. Now that the principles of movement have been explored, let’s move into practice.