Tag: inversions

A marvelous doozy of a pose, Forearm Stand (pincha mayurasana) invites into a full inversion and a backbend a the same time. Here are clear and easy steps for safely instructing your students into the pose.

Tips:

• finding the backbend in the upper back will help you to effectively balance in this pose
• using props to prevent the shuffling of the elbows out  will help to create stability and open the shoulders
• patience!  This pose asks for wicked shoulder and hamstring opening.  Take one step at a time.

 

Teach your students to find the necessary stability for their upper backs with this simple block assist in Headstand. By placing the block at the level of the shoulder blades, you will help them to find the necessary scapular stability to get move their hips over their shoulders, which will eventually lead them to a safe and slow ascent.

Step by step guide into handstand.

Here are some tips:

• Straight arms: Keeping the arms straight will keep you and your students out of “nose to floor” danger
• Midline: Hug the inner thighs together to maintain a neutral alignment in the hips
• Straight legs: Keeping the legs straight makes your students safer, more supported, and more in control.  Resist bending the knee to get to the wall – it will only create instability for most students
• Shoulder blades: Draw the shoulder blades onto the back strongly to keep the upper back from rounding.  The action of the thoracic spine keeps the upper body from shifting forward (avoiding that “nose-wall” relationship!)
• Patience: Handstand is psychological as well as physical.  Allow the gradual and calm unfolding.

 

How to do and teach a safe and effective shoulderstand. Learn about why shoulderstand can be risky, why we prop, and how to make this pose safe for your students.

How To Prop

 

How To Teach

 

 

Join and and the YYoga 200-hour teacher trainees as we look at how to do and teach Handstand Prep. The secret is in the bent knees and the shoulder blades…. 🙂

Clear and simple steps for how to do and teach headstand. Look at common misalignments in order to help your students find their best path to stability and lightness.

 

This video was filmed during YYoga‘s 200-hour Teacher Training Program.

Spring into Spring!

Flowers are blooming, sprouts are sprouting, the sun is out in Vancouver, which means that it’s time to do handstand!

Inversions are asana of marvelous integration, asking us to stabilize our mobile shoulder joints and connect all of our moving pieces together – no small task while we’re all topsy turvy.  The opportunity to explore ourselves in an unfamiliar orientation lets us experience our cells, our blood, our organs and muscles in a new way.   We literally get to turn our world upside down.

 

Physically, inverting give the blood and lymph in our legs the opportunity to race back heartwards via the force of gravity.  Our organs move and settle in a different orientation.  Blood moves into our brain and offers these vital tissues an oxygen bath.  The upper body gets a fantastic work out.  And psychologically, we practice courage and a sense of play by moving into the unknown.

 

There are many different kinds of inversions.  Downward Facing Dog and Forward Fold are great “light” inversions that we practice all the time.   (In a “light inversion,” the head is below the heart, but the rest of the body and the blood column in the legs isn’t adding any additional pressure.)   To do a “full” inversion, the entire weight of the body is transmitted and supported through the shoulder girdle rather than the pelvis and we bring our legs over our head.

 

Before inverting, there are a couple of sensible precautions to keep in mind.  As we will be increasing the amount of the fluid in the brain, active inversions should not be practiced if you’re experiencing high blood pressure or have a history of stroke.  If you’ve had recent eye surgery or have glaucoma, raising the pressure in the eye is also not recommended. A more passive inversion – like legs up the wall – is a great alternative that imparts lots of juicy inversion benefits while keeping the head and heart at the same level.

 

Are you ready to invert?

 

Our shoulder girdle is a marvelous, mobile joint that allows us to reach out through our arms and experience the world.  However, it’s only attached to our skeleton in one little place: right between your collarbone and your sternum!  This lack of bony attachment means that the support of the shoulder girdle comes from the muscular stability around the joint and from the muscles of the chest and back.   If we’re going to fully invert, then we need to ensure that we have enough integrity here to support our body.  Additionally, we have to get our arms all the way overhead by our ears without losing the connection to our core, which requires a good bit of shoulder flexibility.

 

To find out if you’re ready to do handstand, investigate the following poses as a warm up:

• Plank: focus on stabilizing the shoulder blades onto your back as you lift your lower ribs up and into your body.  Hold for one minute.  Repeat.
• Downward Facing Dog: bring your arms in line with your ears without collapsing the ribs towards the floor or letting the upper arm bones wing out.  Straighten your arms fully.  Continue to lift through your back ribs as you draw your shoulder blades slightly towards each other.   The shoulder blades and front ribs hug into the center line of the body, connecting the back and front body towards your center.
• Dolphin:  (Downward Facing Dog on your forearms, with your hands interlaced.)  Walk your feet towards your shoulders without collapsing the ribcage down or towards your hands.  Press the elbows forward and down to lengthen the back of the arms and draw the shoulder blades into the back body.  Stretch the hips up and back.
• Puppy Dog (Warrior III at the wall): Place your hands at your hip level on the wall, then walk your feet back until your hips are over your ankles and your body forms an inverted “L”.  Bring your feet together, hug your midline.  Keeping your hips level and your arms straight, lift one leg slowly up behind you.  Pause, check to see that the toes of your lifted leg are pointing straight down and draw your opposite hip back.  Then, continue to lift from your inner thigh until the leg is in line with your body.  Draw the bottom ribs and core into the body as you press into your hands and firm the outer arms in.  Hug the thighs and arms towards each other, and firm your outer hips in.  Keeping all the outer parts of your body connecting into the center, stretch from the core of your pelvis out through all four limbs.

If these poses are going well, then it’s time to move onto handstand.

 

How to do Handstand:

Stage I:

• Come into Downward Facing Dog, placing your hands about a foot away from the wall.  Place the hands outer shoulder distance apart, spread the fingers wide, and press through the four corners of each hand.
• Walk your feet up to your hands about halfway until your shoulders are over your wrists.
• Lift through your back ribs as you hug the shoulder blades closer to each other (here’s the muscular engagement to keep your shoulder girdle strong and stable)
• Lift one leg up – just like you did for Puppy Dog.
• Hug the inner thighs in and lift the leg higher as you press through your hands vigorously
• Stay here for 3-5 breaths, then change sides.
• Child’s pose or sit on your heels.

Stage 2:

• Continuing from Stage 1, keep the hips lifting up and back as you bend your standing leg.  Keeping the lifted leg strong, straight, and neutral, now begin to take small controlled hops.  Press strongly through your hands so that your arms remain straight.  The back, lifted leg is like a rudder: keep it straight and strong.
• Change sides.
• Child’s pose or sit on your heels.

Stage 3:

• Once both legs are up at the wall, immediately hug them strongly together
• Press through your hands vigorously as you stretch up through your heels.
• Roll the inner upper thighs to the wall as you lengthen your sitting bones up to your heels.
• Come down one leg at a time.
• Child’s pose or sit on your heels.

 

Most importantly, after doing handstand, take the time to absorb what you feel.

In child’s pose or seated on your heels, close your eyes and feel the rush of blood and life force that is coursing through your body.   Take several deep, smooth breaths.

Enjoy!

Headstand is like the grandpappy of inversions.  Unlike the 5-year old exuberance of handstand, or the slightly more moderated enthusiasm of forearm stand, headstand evokes a deep seated patience and – dare I say – necessary dignity in the practitioner.

Kicking up into headstand is a big ol’ no-no, primarily because the head is rooted into the floor and any instability in the body can translate into torquing of the delicate cervical spine.  Unlike other inversions (where we can willy-nilly get ourselves up there without too much of a problem), handstand requires us to move slowly from a deep connection to our core.   Without momentum, how do we safely get up into the darn thing?

Well, the point is, maybe we won’t.  Maybe not today.  But by calling upon our reserves of patience and a deeply felt commitment to process, we can eventually find our way into a headstand that is light, stable, and sustainable.

Step 1: Set the foundation

If this pose is new to you, practice at the wall until you find your inverted center.  Interlace your hands up to the webbing and tuck your bottom pinky in so that the foundation is flat.  Keep a small space in the center of your hands so that the bones of your arms creates a straight line through your to your knuckles.  Place your elbows directly beneath your shoulders.  Look at your wrists.  See how you can roll them in and out?  Instead, position the wrist so that the inner wrist is stacked directly onto the outer wrist.

Place the top of your head on the floor between your hands and pause to make sure that you are really on the plumb line top of your head.  Your chin should be level with the floor and the natural curve of your cervical spine should be maintained.

Step 2: Cultivate stability

Lift your shoulderblades away from your ears and hug the scapulae onto your back.  Press down firmly into your forearms as you curl your toes under and lift your hips. Press into your forearms to de-weight your head, and make sure that you can lighten the burden on your neck by using the strength of your shoulder girdle.

From here, walk your feet towards your arms, continuing to lift your shoulder blades into the back of your body.  Press down through your forearms and lift your hips high into the air.

Step 3: Taking flight

Pressing into your forearms, draw one knee into your chest.  Hug your knee in towards your face until your hips move past your shoulders and you can de-weight your other toes.  This is not time for jumping.  Practice finding the subtle lifting and gathering of your core that you need to stabilize your center and give your legs freedom.  Often this step is the one requiring the most patience, so take your time so that you can organically find the opening and stability that you need to unearth your feet.

Once you have found lightness in both legs, bring both feet to the wall above you and slide your feet up.  Press down firmly into your forearms so that your neck can continue to be spacious.  Breathe smoothly and calmly.  When you are ready, come out the way that you came in.  Slide your feet down the wall, then very slowly bring one foot at a time back to the floor.

Component Parts:

• Hamstrings
• Upper arms: flexion and external rotation
• Scapular stabilization
• Core
• Midline/Neutral legs

When preparing the body for headstand, consider the benefits of some of the following poses:

• Standing twists (Scapular stabilization; midline/neutral legs)
• Small backbends (Scapular stabilization; midline/neutral legs)
• Prasarita Padottanasana (Hamstrings; midline/ neutral legs) with or without a twist
• Crescent with a backbend (Midline/neutral legs; scapular stabilization; arms)
• Gomukhasana arms (Flexion and external rotation of upper arm)
• Dolphin: an excellent preparation and modification of headstand.  Practitioners should practice dolphin until they have enough scapular stability and upper body strength to hold the pose for a minute.

Happy Inverting!

 

During the holidays, it’s more important than ever to have some quiet time. With all of the distractions – parties, relatives, drama, presents, planning, joy, baggage – it’s easy to get swept away on a holiday rollercoaster!

This week’s pose is halasana (plow). By turning ourselves upside down and folding over, we are literally looking into ourselves. The pose helps us to pull our energy in and become more contained and centered. As in inversion, halasana encourages us to challenge our point of view and get out of sticky patterns. Its (literally!) navel-gazing properties can help us become less reactive and more grounded. How do we want to greet the new year?

Halasana is rather like dandasana – on its head. While many of us do a “soft” halasana that resembles a forward fold, the full expression of the pose more closely resembles a backbend, with the shoulder blades drawing strongly into the back, the hips reaching up into the sky, and the spine perpendicular to the floor rather than rounded.

Component parts:

Arms: extension, external rotation.

Thoracic: drawing in strongly.

Hamstrings: must be warmed up to approach the pose

Neck: cervical spine in flexion

Hips: reaching into the air

Poses for preparation:

Downward Dog: teach the reaching of the hips up toward the ceiling, lifting away from the floor.  Also, this pose will start to warm up the hamstrings, warm up the shoulders (albeit in flexion), and actually looks like halasana – in a different orientation

Backbends with the shoulders in extension: salabhasana, bridge, baby cobra, dhanurasana.  These will start to teach both the essential drawing in of the thoracic spine as well as warm up the extension of the arm at the shoulder.

Forward folds to open the hamstrings: Uttansanasa, Parsvottanasana (with arms in reverse namaste you will also treat extension of the arm), Prasarita Padottanasana B and C (wide-legged forward fold with the hands at the waist or fingers interlaced behind you).

Jalandhara Bandha (chin to chest): practice this in dandasana.  With jalandhara bandha,  you must continue to strongly lift the chest up.  Do not compromise the pose by drooping in the thoracic spine.

Teaching the pose:

I like to teach this pose with the shoulders stacked on foam blocks or on 2-3 neatly folded, thick (Mexican style) blankets.  Just as in shoulderstand, lifting the shoulders onto a support will enable you to lift more strongly through the thoracic spine, as well as protect the cervical spine from flattening. Use more support rather than less when you’re starting.

Try placing the blankets about a leg’s distance away from the wall, with the folded edges toward the center of the room.  Come onto the blankets with your head TOWARD the wall and your shoulders on the blankets/supports.  First press your upper arms down firmly into the support and tuck your shoulder blades underneath you.  Press the outer arms and palms down as you swing your legs over your head and bring them onto the wall at the same height as your hips.  (You may have to play with the distance you are from the wall until you find the right position.)  You will make an L-shape with your body.  Roll your upper arms more deeply underneath your body to facilitate the lifting of the thoracic spine.  Bring your hands to your back, as close to the floor as possible to lift the thoracic spine up and in. Press your arms down to lift the chest up.  Reach your hips straight up to the ceiling.  Press your feet into the wall and your quads to the ceiling in order to lift the hips up higher.  To the extent that is accessible, you may walk your feet down the wall towards the baseboard as far as you can without compromising the vertical lift of the hips.

Smooth out your breath.  Keep pressing your arms down in order to lift your chest and hips up.  Press the back of your head down gently to maintain the gentle curve of the cervical spine.  Breath, and turn your attention inwards.  Embrace the quiet.

To come out, keep pressing your arms down firmly as you bring your hands back to the floor and slowly begin to roll out.  Let your knees bend when your hips hit the floor.

Counterpose:

Move yourself toward the wall until your shoulders are on the floor, giving you a slight backbend.  Take a gentle spinal twist to each side.  Downdog to release the back of the neck.

Variations:

In case of neck injury or high/low blood pressure issues, you can do a modified version by doing viparita karani (legs up the wall) with a block underneath the hips.  Tuck the shoulderblades under you and lift the thoracic spine up and reach through the heels (legs together).  Another alternative is dandasana, or a restorative backbend with a bolster underneath the back and the legs extended out straight.

Moving with our fear.

Headstand is an elegant inversion, insisting on patience, presence, and control to be done properly. For many of us, headstand is an opportunity to brush against our fear. Fear of the unknown, of falling, of not being in control. As such, the practice of headstand become an opportunity to practice intimacy with this fear. When we move slowly and with awareness, we can breathe through our fear reflex and assess where we really are. Rather than getting caught up in a fear narrative, we practice slowing down and observing our response. Whether we actually go upside down or not is actually irrelevant! More interesting is developing our capacity for self-observation and spaciousness.

Iyengar writes, “Regular and precise practice of Sirsasana develops the body, disciplines the mind and widens the horizons of the spirit. One becomes balanced and self-reliant in pain and pleasure, loss and gain, shame and fame, and defeat and victory.” -Light on Yoga

Risk factors:
The neck. When we practice sirsasana, it is important that we work gradually to put weight on the head. When we are starting, place very little weight on the head and instead work to support the body through the work and stability of the shoulder girdle. This will prevent the delicate cervical spine from being overloaded.

The lower back: It is easy to “banana” in the lower back and crunch the lumbar spine. We must work to open the shoulders and engage to core to prevent collapse in the low back.

High/low blood pressure: Since we are increasing cranial pressure, it is prudent for students with blood pressure issues to proceed with caution or ask their doctor. Also, students with similar pressure issues such as glaucoma or hiatal hernia should seek advice from their physician before working on headstand.

Component Parts:

The upper arm and lower arm are both in flexion.  The upper arm will be working towards external rotation.  Investigate poses such as Utthita Hastasana (arms raised in tadasana), Adho Mukha Svanasana (Downward Dog), Adho Mukha Vrksasana (Handstand), Vrksasana (Tree with arms raised), and Gomukhasana Arms (cow-faced pose, the top arm).  Dolphin and Forearm Stand Prep are great preps.

Thoracic Spine.  Even though we’re not backbending in sirsasana, the action of the upper back feels like backbending as we draw the shoulderblades deeper into the body.  Backbends and twists are great way to access this action in the upper back.

Core.  To support our body weight and keep the lower back long.  Poses such as plank, forearm plank, Vasisthasana (side plank) are all great educators for the core.

Neutral legs.  Find the connection of the adductors and the neutral position of the legs in lunges, Virabhadrasana I (Warrior I), Utkatasana (fierce/chair pose), and parsovttanasana (pyramid pose)

Warmed-up hamstrings.  To get into headstand requires walking the legs in to the body, which is facilitated by long hamstrings.  Warm up the hamstrings in uttanasana (forward fold), prasarita padottanasana (wide-legged forward fold), parsvottanasana (pyramid pose)

Variations:

Do at wall or in corner.  I highly recommend practicing this pose at the wall until confidence in one’s balance is developed.

Dolphin – prep only (head off floor, legs in Adho Mukha Svanasana).  Raise one leg at a time

Prep (head on or off floor, but feet stay on floor), with block at wall, pressing into shoulderblades to encourage thoracic action (need a friend to help with this one!)

Possible Sequence:

Virasana on a block (neutral legs)

Add utthita hastasana, fingers interlaced (flexion in upper arms) x 2, right and left interlace

Extended child’s pose (arms in flexion).  Work action of thoracic spine

Plank, forearm plank variations (core)

Adho Mukha Svanasana (flexion, hamstrings, neutral)

Lunges (neutral legs)

Lunge with open twist (thoracic)

Surya A (hamstrings, neutral legs, arms in flexion, core) x 5

– last time add parivrtta parsvakonasana (thoracic)

Uttanasana – held (hamstrings)

Trikonasana (hamstrings, possible flexion arm variation)

Vrksasana (balance and arms in flexion)

Utkatasana, holding block (arms flexion)

Parvsottanasana (R/L), with straight back (hamstrings, work thoracic)

Parivrtta Trikonasana (thoracic, hamstrings)

Tadasana with Gomukhasana Arms

–To Wall–

Virabhadrasana III with hands at wall (core, neutral legs, hamstrings)

Virabhadrasana III with back foot on wall (core, neutral legs, hamstrings)

Dolphin (Sirsasana prep)

Sirsasana

Child’s pose

Adho Mukha Svanasana (to release neck)

Variation of Salamba Sarvanghasana (shoulderstand) with block under pelvis and legs in air

Twist

Reclined Ankle to Knee

Savasana