Dynamic Alignment While Folding Into a Standing Forward Bend

The idea of these pictures is to show good form while folding into or coming out of a forward bend. A lot of the time people think of alignment as something that occurs when you have set yourself in a pose. If you move into a pose with good form then you enter the form with good form as well. Your alignment while moving from one posture to another is at least as important as your alignment while holding a pose and it is harder to have good alignment in a movement than it is to adjust yourself into alignment when you are holding a posture and have more time to make micro-adjustments and observe how the posture feels to you.

Details to note about the form of these postures: My spine is long and relaxed all the way through. I am not arching my back like a banana (hyper-extension) and I am not rounding my spine (flexion) either. My spine is almost completely straight the whole way through the movement until the end parts of the movement when my spine rounds to complete the forward bend. My spine being basically straight means I am not shortening my spine while I fold. A back arch or rounding would mean my spine is shortening. And if I was arching my spine into hyper extension I would be working and shortening the back muscles more than would be useful for the fact that I am about to lengthen the back of my body in the forward bend. Often when people do this (sometimes referred to as “swan diving”), they are putting a lot of stress on the lower back and the back of the neck. Most adult human beings--at least in western culture where we often sit in chairs, talk on telephones and work at computers--don’t really need more tension in those areas of the spine. So, in a sense this is about being kind to your spine and the nice thing to know that it is much more challenging, better work and healthier for you all at once to have good form in movements.