Hi everybody! On the screen is Kemico one of the teachers at Yogic Garden, and I am Patrick and today we are going to take our time, be a little bit technical and really dealt into the hips and how to work from the hips in yoga practice. It's really important and it's one of the most common mistakes we see. For the purposes of today's video I will be doing everything wrong that's the X and Kemico will be doing everything right. So let's get started.
The foundation pose for all of this hip work is seated forward. In this pose you are stretching out elongating from the hips down to the toes. Now what happens is people get more cut up in the shape of the pose. They are just trying to get their hands down there. But the point of this pose isn't to touch your toes is to stretch the backs of the legs. So right here for example I am fumbling madly to get to my toes, but I am forgetting to keep my feet strong and engage like Kemico is doing right here.
When you concentrate more on the exterior shape of a pose rather than the interior working you often lose the intended stretch. So a casual glance at this pose and you might think, oh this is not too bad, but if you actually take a close look at the details and look at the hips and actually the hips working, you can see here that the pose moves, the hips don't move at all. We have done a really ineffectual and ugly back stretch.
When we say working from the hips we mean stretching out the back of the hamstrings allowing the pelvis to tip forward like a hinge moving into the pose. This is going to increase the stretch and make it a proper stretch rather than an approximation of what the pose should look.
Sometimes I get the feeling that people don't understand why this is important. I mean you are stretching, you are getting your hands down there, what's the big deal, right. Well, you can find the answer on probably your desk right now. If you have to go through your old junk you might find some rubber-bands or some hair-bands. So we are going to take two of these bands and try to understand what's happening in the backs of our legs.
Let's say this left band is my upper leg muscles, my hamstrings and this other right side is the lower calf and heel tuck in. So of course these two leg muscles are connected underneath which I will kind of simulate with this nut. Okay, so as the stretch is done properly with the hips until this tilting and working hard you can see that top bend in stretch because the pelvis connects to the hamstrings directly. As the hips move the hamstrings move kind of going along for the ride.
Now to stick with the bottom. You can see I am tilting my right-hand and that's adding some stretch to that lower bend and a little bit to the top. And the same thing is happening when you engage your feet strongly you are pulling down the calf muscles towards the heel. So you can see if we use both our right and left hand in this tilting action you get a strong stretch through the bend. The same is true with proper forward bend working strongly from the hips and with active feet you are going to get a deep pose.
My feeling is if you've made the time to get within that you might as well will do a proper and effective stretch while you are there. So if you are not sure how much you are using your hips your back is a dead give-away. You can see here this big curve kind of a hump back, this is because this pose was initiated from my back rather than my hips.
If you are directly using the pelvis and the hips the back stays straight because the action is starting from deep in the base and have to go all the way up there. Even if you are not as flexible as Kemico you can keep your back straight and it's going to make your pose much more effective and make more flexible, faster than just trying to touch the toes. The same is to for riding which we talked a lot about in the latest video.
I don't know why but in this pose specially people have a real need to get their hands far in front of them and their chest down. But the second you arch your back you are going to lose 50–75% of stret
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