Yoga Anatomy By Leslie Kaminoff

Leslie Kaminoff's new book, Yoga Anatomy is almost out. You can preorder it and it should actually be out in about three weeks. Amy Matthews contributed and helped with the book and there are pictures in the book that are drawings adapted from photos of me in it. I have seen drafts of the book and it looks like it will be quite a useful book. There is not another book out there like this one. I recommend checking it out when it comes out.

Reclining Hip Opening Postures to Reduce Stress in the Outer Hips and Lower Back

These are some variations you can do while lying on your back to open your hips and help reduce stress in your outer hips and lower back. Because you are lying on your back it makes it easier to protect your knees as you open the outer hips. Some of what you are releasing is the tension in the external hip rotator muscles like the piriformis or the obturator internus and externus. There are a lot of muscles in that area that attach from the pelvic structure to the outer thigh. When these muscles are stressed or tight it can cause some tension in the lower back. Reducing this tension by stretching the outer hip muscles can help relieve some of this tension.

The four photos that are variations of reclining ankle to knee go from softer and easier to more intense and deeper. There are also four photos of a reclining variation of Cow Faced (gomukhasana) pose that progress in a similar manner from move basic to more challenging.

==

In this first photo it is hard to see that my hands are holding my right leg so that my hands are in between the back of my calf and the back of my thigh.



==

In this second pose I am a little deeper as I am holding the knee. This gives me a little more leverage to open deeper.



==

In the third photo I am holding the back of my heel from the outer edge of the foot. The leg position starts to look a lot like the seated pose without the ground there to force you deeper than ought to have gone.



==

In the fourth photo I have simply taken the pose a little deeper.



==

The fifth photo is the first variation of Reclining Cow Face. It is gentle I am only holding softly near the knees.



==

The sixth photo, which is the second Reclining Cow Face, is almost the same as the previous photo. The main difference are that my hands are a little farther away from my knees and I am trying to rotate my shins a little more to open the hips a little more deeply.



==

In the seventh photo I am holding my shins right near my feel and going considerably deeper than I went in the previous variation.



==

And in the eighth photo I am still doing reclining Cow Faced Pose, but I am holding the back of my heels to help protect my knees while opening my hips far more deeply that in any of the other photos presented here.



Go to: Cow Faced Pose: Gomukhasana: A Seated Hip Opening Pose to Reduce Tension in the Outer Hip and Lower Back
Go to: Ankle to Knee Pose: A Seated Hip Opening Pose to Stretch from the Outer Hip into the Lower Back

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.