What if there were a way that you could make the healing powers of yoga more accessible to every body?
What if there were a way that you could enhance your yoga practice and your teaching skills by better understanding the common physical limitations most students bring to their practice, and how to work with them and not against them?
One key to improve your own practice and create greater freedom in body and mind is to better understand the biomechanical dynamics that facilitate – or hamper – us in our yoga practice.
Join Julie Gudmestad for our 3-part anatomy special series on how to understand common limitations associated with different muscle groups and how they affect our practice. This is a great chance to enhance your understanding of yoga anatomy, and study in the comfort of your own home.
Tight hamstrings are one of the greatest sources of misalignment in yoga postures. Tight hamstrings impact alignment not just in forward bends but in numerous standing postures, and they can be one of the greatest barriers to a rewarding practice. Further, if not approached correctly, tight hamstrings can lead to back strain or even back injuries in yoga practitioners.
Julie discusses how tight hamstrings often are linked to chronic back pain by disturbing normal pelvic alignment, and creating a ripple effect through the spine and interfering with postural balance. She further shares an easy way to spot people with tight hamstrings, and talks about issues that can arise if the hamstrings get overstretched and tear at their attachments on the sitz bones.
The adductors hold an important key to understanding what’s holding some yoga students back in certain yoga postures and the limitations that preclude proper alignment in many postures. The adductors are responsible for key actions in inversions, arm balances, and balancing postures. In addition, tight adductors limit range of motion in standing poses like Trikonasana and the Warrior poses, as well as numerous seated poses like Baddha Konasana and Upavistha Konasana.
In this talk, Julie discusses key actions of the adductors, and why it’s so important to be able to pinpoint and overcome limited range of motion in this important muscle group.
With the popularity of abdominal strengthening exercises like curl-ups and crunches, many people come to yoga with overly tight and short abdominals, notes Julie in this free download.
Tightness in the abdominal muscles can restrict the movement of the diaphragm and disturb the proper balance between the different muscles involved in breathing, thus disturbing the breath’s natural rhythm, and contributing to chronic neck pain and headaches.
At the same time, keeping the abdominals strong is key to supporting the abdominal organs, preventing and alleviating low back pain and even exhalation. How can we keep the abdominal muscles strong and well-tuned while avoiding the restrictions and shortness that comes with unbalanced ab work? Julie discusses this question and shares the signs of tight abdominals and the best ways to work with them.
