Finding Your Happiest Yoga Hips - Integrated Practice and Pelvic Floor Awareness

Our final class incorporates some awareness of the pelvic floor and exploration of how the many ways our hips move can enhance our postures...

The pelvic floor isn't really a part of the hips, but it can have a very significant impact on the hips if it is tight. This will impact flexibility in the hips as it inhibits ROM for the pelvis and sacrum – as you already know most of the hip muscles attach to these two boney structures.

Go ahead and lie down and let's find the muscles groups that form the pelvic floor. The contraction of these muscles can be very subtle, especially if they are tight, so focus and be patient with yourself. Lie in Supta Baddha Konasana (knees apart, feet together), this stretches the pelvic floor a bit and can make it easier to sense.

- The first (outermost) layer of your pelvic floor attaches public bone ↔ tailbone. Draw these bones toward each other, can you sense the layer? What else happens in your body?

• The second layer attaches SITZ bone ↔ SITZ bone. Draw these bones toward each other, can you sense the layer? What else happens in your body?
• The third layer attaches sacrum ↔ pubic bone. Draw these toward each other, can you sense the layer? What happens elsewhere in your body?
• Try engaging all the layer – what does that feel like, what do you notice?
• Deepen your breath – can you feel it as it moves your organs toward your pelvic floor? If you can, try contracting the pelvic floor, then the belly as you exhale – really moving the breath UP.

For our hips purposes, we are not going to work on strengthening these muscles, rather we will focus on awareness to bring a greater understanding to their role and maybe a little extra relaxation. For all intents and purposes, these muscles are really a part of your core, working with your central body muscles, i.e. abs.  As you move through your practice, take a moment in each pose and see if you can sense the role of your pelvic floor.

As you practice, explore the engagement and release of different muscle groups toward the enhancement of the pose.  How would it feel to engage more internal rotation in your utkatasana or uttanasana?  How would it feel to engage more flexion in your anjaneyasanas?  Experiment, play, develop your awareness.  Each body is different, find what support you best, find what opens your pose more deliciously.  Consider working antagonist groups against each other (these are muscles that oppose each other - flexors/extensors, adductors/abductors, internal rotators/external rotators).  Incorporate this new knowledge into your everyday practice for happier hips.

Note – I am working on a pelvic floor series class and will offer it as soon as I find the time. Stay tuned!

Yoga for Happy Hips: Rotators

Marisa's Class Notes:

External Rotation – the “Deep Six” external rotators attaching from sacrum and pelvis to femur + gluteous maximus, with a little help from some of your hip flexors and adductors. Most of us have some natural turn out here because of how our thigh bones sit in the acetabulum. But many of us have more turn out than that because these muscles are tight from every postures esp. sitting and stressing. This can lead to piriformis syndrome (often called sciatica) as one of the deep six – the piriformus – gets tight and applies pressure to the sciatic nerve. If these are tight for you, a very simply way to stretch them is to change your standing posture so that the insides of your feet are parallel instead of turned out.

Find your external rotators with Gary's Twist - lie on back, take one leg over body into twist.  Turning from hips, turn kneecap toward sky.  You should feel this distinctly in your bottom.

Internal Rotation – the internal rotators and the abductors are one and the same – minimus, medius, and tfl with a little help from a couple of your hams.

Normal range of motion for both is about 45 degrees. We will explore this in our practice where you should feel the movement of internal rotation under the hand on your hip.  In external rotation, try to shift the work out of the space under your hand and into your bottom, nearer your sacrum.

Happy Hips: Yoga for Adductors (inner thighs) and Abductors (outer hips)

From the second in our Happy Hips Series Class...

Marisa's Notes:

Adductors – muscles of the inner thigh. Some are short, some are long. All connect sequentially to thigh bone or lower leg bones. All connect to pubic bone (and one also connects to SITZ). These muscles bring your legs together (ADD them together!)  Need a visual?  Check here and look for the inner thigh muscles.

Find them - Lie down, use a strap to help find your adductors. Be sure they are all inner thigh, not the inside back of your thigh (the inner hamstring often stretches with the adductors). Reasonable ROM here is supine, 90 degrees at hips, take leg to the side. Each side should be able to achieve 45 degree angle or more without lifting opposite hip or changing hip crease angle. Bear in mind, this assumes normal ROM in hams. When strengthened in asana, these muscles are major stabilizers, bringing in your center of gravity and taking excess work from surrounding muscles.

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Abductors – Outer hip. These guys really hold your leg in the hip socket and help with everyday activities like walking. Tensor Fascia Latae TFL (talked about last week), gluteus medius and gluteus minimus.  Need a visual?  Look here.

Find your abductors – lie on your side, hand on hip between the top of your pelvis and the head of your thigh bone. Lift leg with knee pointing straight ahead (no rotation) and no movement of pelvis, you should feel those muscles engage. This is also a great way to strengthen. Good ROM varies, mostly due to the restriction of other muscles and the shape of your acetabulum.

These are also stabilizers and worked against one another, the adds and abs can help you gain more space in your hip and better balance. See if you can activate these muscles in the standing leg of you tree pose. While working against each other, you can also gain greater ROM in flexion and extension as they seat the hip. In other words, its worth playing with these muscles isometically in most yoga poses, even (maybe especially as it will increase your proprioception) when they are being stretched.

In the accompanying practice, you may wish to do Yin Half Frog if your adductors are a great deal tighter on one side than the other.  Spend more time on the side that is tighter and do the looser side first (this sends signals to the tighter side to begin to let go).  To do half frog, lie on your belly and take one leg out to the side, right angles in ankle, knee and hip.

For the Trikonasana (Triangle pose)  be sure to work to keep the back abductors (outer hip) engaged as you move.   This is not easy but will greatly develop your awareness.

This adductor/abductor practice can be integrated with the flexor extensor practice.  Do all the yin, then all the Slow Flow asana, and don't forget your Savasana.

Yoga for Happy Hips! Flexors and Extensors

We are starting up a series for Happy Hips tonight at Yoga del Sol.  Exploring anatomy, yin asana and slow flow movement for better functioning hips.  Juicy!  Here is the home practice for our first week - working with flexors and extensors.  Short and sweet :-)  And for those of you that are geeks like me, you can find my class notes below...

Complex joint – Femur head into the acetabulum of pelvis.

Ligaments hold the bone in the socket and allow it range of motion in every direction.

Muscularly very complex. Muscles to move the femur in all those directions, many performing more than one action. All these muscles attach to other aspects of the body, creating a variety of tug of wars up into the back and belly, down into the knees.

So, if your hips aren't happy, chances are something else isn't happy either. And chances are good that that something else made itself known before the hips became obvious.

Common ailments of the hips..

Osteo-Arthritis – inflammation of the joint

Osteoporosis – loss of bone density

Bursitis – inflammation of the bursa (the fluid filled cushions within the joint)

Sciatica/Piriformis Syndrome – Sciatica comes from the vertabra, not a hip condition tho it sure feels like it! Piriformis Syndrone is the compression of the sciatic nerve.

Stand up and try all movements...

Hips can flex, extend, internally rotate, externally rotate, abduct, adduct.

We will focus on flexion and extension today.

Hip Flexors = quads, iliopsoas, tfl, with a little help from your adductors

Are you tight or loose in the flexors?

Lie down and draw one knee in toward your chest, allowing the extended leg to be completely relaxed. If that extended leg pops up, you've got tight flexors.

Normal range of motion is 125 degrees for flexion.

Now, if you don't have normal range of motion, that may not be the fault of your flexors, but of your extensors that are the antagonists to flexion.

Extensors = Hams, Gluteous Maximus

If you had trouble drawing your knee toward your chest, you may have a tight gluteous maximus. It may also be about your low back

How do you know if your hams are tight? Stand up in Mountain Pose and put your hands on your low back, notice the lumbar curve. With your knees straight but not locked, begin to fold at the hip crease (what is this?). Stop when it feels like you can go no further without bending your knees or rounding your low back. Your flexors just made that happen! If your hams are tight you will not have achieved the normal range of motion of 80 degrees flexion that your hams should allow for. As for extension, normal extension for the hip is 10-15 degrees. If you are not able to achieve this, its possible that your flexors are tight or your extensors are weak (they are notorious for this).

In order to truly strengthen muscles, they need a certain amount of flexibility. If they are too tight, there won't be reasonable communication to the muscle fibers, as well the muscle fibers will not be able to contract as they are already tight. This is why the stretch is as important as the strength. We will be starting our practices with yin yoga to provide this stretch. Yin affects the ligaments, tendons, and fascia that surrounds the muscles, as well as the muscles themselves. We begin with this passive stretch before moving into stretch AND strengthen to build strength and greater flexibility.

Practice

Three Essential Yoga Poses

The other day, I told someone that I thought Supported Fish Pose was one of the three pose just about everyone should do every day.  I was speaking off the cuff, just thinking that it was a great pose, almost all of us could really use it, and that it probably wasn't the only pose like this.  Well, they called me on it and asked, "What are the other two poses?"  I thought about it and this is what I came up with and why, in no particular order...

- Obviously, Supported Fish Pose.  This is the restorative pose where you roll a blanket, put it down behind your seated self like a tail, and then lie down with the blanket the length of your spine.  This puts the muscles in your upper back, in particular, in slack so they can FINALLY take a break.  Its a great stretch for the front of your chest and shoulders and provides a lovely, gentle, supported backbend for your low back. This is an important pose for most of us because we generally spend alot of our day hunched forward or reaching forward - driving, typing, doing fine motor work, etc.  I think a good 5-10 minutes here is time VERY well spent :-) and gives you the benefits of savasana at the same time.  How's that for multi-tasking!?

- Tadasana, Samasthithi, Mountain Pose.  These are essentially all the same pose.  Each yoga tradition tends to describe it and name it a little differently.  Essentially, you are standing with weight even on the 4 corners of your two feet, stacking your joints, lengthening your spine and strengthening your core gently.  This is a great pose as it forces equilibrium in your body - hold this pose for a few minutes and you will notice the intelligence of your muscles adjusting to support your here in this alert, relatively relaxed position.  It requires that you not slouch, not compensate.  And this leads to better posture and support in all that you do, all day long.  I recommend holding it for 5 minutes at a time.

- Active Reclined Bound Angle (Supta Baddha Konasana).  For this pose, lie down on your back with the soles of your feet together, knees wide apart.  Engage your belly just enough to keep a natural lumbar curve in your lower back.  Begin by completely relaxing your inner thighs and groin.  This may take some prop support under your bottom or legs.  Then, move as slowly as you can, almost imperceptibly, to bring your knees together and the soles of you feet to the floor.  Keep breathing as you do this, using the least amount of effort possible - that means no help from your shoulders :-).  Moving the legs up and down in rhythm with your breath is a nice way to build strength and relaxing in this pose is a nice way to stretch.  But by moving so slowly, not quite relaxing, not quite efforting, you begin to notice where you work unneccesarily and how to more effectively isolate essential effort.  This is especially important for the inner thigh and pelvic region as its an are that we tend to hold emotional tension as well as physical tension.  This focussed work helps to release both and leaves the body/self more flexible (and the back a whole lot happier).  I recommend repeating this moving pose at least 5 times in a row, resting in between as you need to.

So, there you have it.  The 3 yoga poses that I think most of us would benefit most from.  Try doing them every day for a couple weeks and let me know what happens!

Yoga for Tax Time

Trying my best to get all my tax stuff together, always a challenge, always confusing.  Here's my release...

Try it out - Lion's Breath - Calm inhale, roar out your exhale as you stretch your tongue out from the root and look up.  Ah, so much better!

Laughter is good stress relief, too :-)

Anatomy and Asana for WRISTS!

Last night at Yoga del Sol, I led a Asana and Anatomy workshop on Wrists.  As promised, here are my notes from the class.  Notes are never a complete class or explanation, so feel free to ask if you have questions....

 ANATOMY - 8 carpals (PRACTICE - find a partner, see if you can feel all 8 bones:-), they articular with each other, with the metacarpals on your hand and with the radius, (The ulna articulates with a disc rather than the bones themselves) No two of these bones have the same movements! That’s one complicated joint! Actually almost like many different joints. These bones are circled by a retinaculum. This thick band of connective tissue is like a cuff holding the bones and holding the long tendons that run elbow to fingers in place close to the bone. That’s alot literally bound up in there. PRACTICE - on one another, smooth out the flexor (palmar) retinaculum.

There are NO muscles specific to the wrist! There are muscles that pass through the wrist and the wrist itself is controlled by the muscles of the forearms. So how do we support the wrist when we are in poses that are weight bearing or creating force on the wrist? We have to use the forearms, which are usually weak and tight from everyday use. Its a funny thing, when we are weightbearing on our feet in yoga, we get that we have to engage the feet and the legs, its the only way to stand tall. But when we are weightbearing on the hands, we tend to just let them be curled and soft. Initially, it may be uncomfortable to support the hands as we develop strength and flexibility in the muscles but it must be done if they are to do their job.

PRACTICE – Lifting the arch of the hand. Notice that there is an indentation in the palm of your hand. With your hand flat, Increase the depth of that indentation. You can do this looking at the palm of your hand and seeing it happen. You should do this with every posture that is weightbearing on your wrists. Try it in table, Down Dog, and Plank – palms down, fingers wide, lifting the arch of the hand. You will feel this in your hands and forearms.

The nerves that pass through the wrist mostly originate in the neck. Nerve pain felt in the wrist could be a result though of compression anywhere from the neck to the wrist.

Common Wrist Syndromes:

Tendonitis, Rheumatoid Arthritis, Osteaoarthritis, Carpel Tunnel Syndrome, Thoracic Outlet Syndrome

There is an arch in the carpals - the carpal tunnel - many tendons pass through here as does a major nerve. If the retinaculum is tight or the bones have shifted or there is inflammation in the tendons, this will cause irritation of the nerve as it rubs against its surroundings and becomes compressed.

PRACTICES for improving ROM and Strength in the Wrists:

moving each finger joint with the wrist in neutral. Can even use the other hand to limit the movement of other joints. Work with both flexion and extension. And work with moving one finger at a time.

Strengthen by bending first joint and pressing outward to lengthen fingers to straight. This is done with the wrist bent. Can resist with other palm or floor.

Hand in fist by side working with lateral flexion. Can also be done with a weight in hand.

Hand in fist, elbow flexed, flex and extend wrist. Can also be done with weights.

Losing ROM in larger joints (i.e. shoulders) places greater strain on smaller joints (ie elbows and wrists) we are very familiar with this of course in relation to knees and hips, but also true in wrists esp for poses that put pressure on the wrists. Opening your shoulders can make your wrists happier :-)

Tightness in the muscles over your thoracic outlet can not just impinger nerves creating pain in wrists, but can restrict blood/oxygen flow further exacerbating the situation and making healing challenging. Rounded upper back, hunched shoulders = bad news for wrists.

Even a misalignment in your hip or spine can contribute to wrist pain (see above). So, for the best possible comfort in a pose, esp a pose with weighted hands, watch the alignment of your WHOLE body!

Practices for encouraging full ROM in shoulders:

PRACTICE - Facing wall, pigeon toed to encourage lumbar curve - arms up back of hands to wall, then quarter way down, then halfway down, holding about 1 minute in each position. This encourages proper ROM function and engagement in shoulders, elbows, and wrists. Don’t strain but notice where you feel restriction, this gives you info as to what to work on to gain greater everyday comfort.

PRACTICE – Supported Fish

PRACTICES TO BRING INTO YOUR ASANA TO ALLEVIATE STRAIN ON THE WRISTS:

PRACTICE - arm in front of you with palm down. Rotate your palm up. You cannot do this without moving your whole arm - it requires proper mobility in shoulder and elbow, not just wrist. We do this rotation in the shoulder in Downward Dog to engage the shoulder and and serratus anterior without compromising the thoracic outlet - this also helps alleviate pressure on your wrist as you are no longer “hanging out” in your joints. TRY IT in Down Dog, plank and table pose.

Whenever your wrist rotates, the ulna and radius cross over each other like crossing your fingers. This narrows your wrist, particularly inhibiting if you have carpel tunnel syndrome. This repetitive motion can cause pain and burning in the wrist. PRACTICE- Down Dog, Plank and table without rotating the wrist. Anytime you have a body part weighted on the floor, you always want the most surface area possible! This can also be an eye-opening practice in Side Plank. Just remember, Side Plank is an awesome pose for wrists when your alignment is right on (lining up your wrist, elbow and shoulder joints vertically) but its a TERRIBLE pose for your wrists when your alignment is off.

PRACTICE - stand with elbow tucked in to side, bent to 90 and palm up. Now, rotate your palm down keeping your elbow tucked in. If the palm doesn’t turn all the way over, it may be because the elbow doesn’t have its proper range of motion and is asking the wrist to do more rotation than its built for. This limitation in the elbow may be coming from elbow or shoulder. Working with this rotation with both palm and Shoulder/Upper Arm fixed can really change your Chataraga for the good!

*Basic reminders for poses where the hands are weightbearing -

Press palms down with fingers spread wide

Lift the arch of your hand

Turn the eyes of your elbows forward without locking your elbows.

*In Chataranga and Plank – type poses, remember they are core poses NOT upper body poses, reach back through your heels, engage your core!

*In Down Dog-type poses, don't worry about getting your heels to the floor. Bend the knees and take your weight back, chest toward knees and reduce the angle of your wrists (they should be coming toward flat toward the floor.

Good references:

Pain Free by Pete Egoscue for whole body practices

Yoga Body by Judith Hanson Lasater – text not practices.

Anatronica.com or Gray's Anatomy for anatomy

This blog – one ofthe first posts here is a practice for Healthy Hands!