Yoga for Hypermobility: Wake Up Your Glutes

After I first started working towards yoga, I felt like a star. Whereas I used to be a fairly truthful sprinter and lengthy jumper in highschool, my physique was just too floppy for different sports activities. In yoga, my physique was fairly instantly capable of do all of the “fancy,” flexibility-related poses—an actual ego increase. For a few years yoga follow geared towards rising my flexibility was my North Star. Since then, I’ve realized that yoga for hypermobility is basically about balancing all that bendiness with stability.

I averted working towards strengthening poses for many years. They had been simply too laborious. A part of the problem was structural. Hypermobile individuals’s joints don’t all the time appropriately align. This makes the muscle tissue must work tougher to maintain us upright. That is difficult additional by the truth that hypermobile individuals don’t all the time recruit the correct muscle tissue so as to accomplish specific actions in probably the most environment friendly method.

Yoga for Hypermobility: Recruiting the Proper Muscular tissues

In her latest guide, Yoga for Flexible Individuals, writer Libby Hinsley calls flexible individuals “skilled compensators.” She writes, ”One of many superpowers of flexible individuals is they’re skilled compensators, which means they’ll make actions occur utilizing dysfunctional patterns of muscle recruitment and contraction.”

What this implies is that hypermobile individuals usually have bother finding the right muscle tissue to perform a process. In consequence, we are inclined to develop compensatory habits. Hinsley makes use of the instance of Bridge Pose (Setu Bandha Sarvangasana).

For a few years, I’d endure hamstring cramps once I practiced Bridge. It is because my glutes, that are the first hip extenders, weren’t doing their job. As an alternative, the hamstrings had been my major movers within the pose. Whereas the hamstrings can assist the glutes within the pose, taking up the first duty for hip extension isn’t their forte. Overworking them triggered the cramping.

Motion Dysfunction in Fierce Pose

Fierce Pose (Utkatasana aka “Chair Pose”) was one other pose I powered by way of for years, not utilizing my major assist muscle tissue—gluteus maximus and medius. It’s not that my leg muscle tissue weren’t collaborating; they had been on fireplace. However regardless of all the trouble I used to be investing within the pose, it nonetheless felt considerably unstable.

In her guide on yoga for hypermobility, Hinsley recounts struggles with Chair Pose as properly. Struggling with power sacroiliac (SI) joint points and again ache, she labored laborious to strengthen her legs. It wasn’t till she started utilizing a Yoga Strap in Utkatasana that she started to have the ability to follow the pose with rather more ease. Urgent out towards a Yoga Strap within the pose invitations the glutes to the social gathering, making the pose really feel a lot extra secure and easeful. I’ve discovered it to be an incredible assist in my very own follow.

Methods to Apply Fierce Pose with a Yoga Strap

1. Collect your props: a Yoga Mat and a Yoga Strap.
2. Make a loop in your Yoga Strap.
3. Stand in Mountain Pose (Tadasana) along with your ft hips-width aside. Place the strap round your legs simply above your knees. Modify the width of your loop in order that whenever you press your legs into it your ft stay hips-width aside.
4. Place your arms in your pelvic rim, or place your arms in Garudasana (Eagle Arms), as within the photograph. The arm place isn’t tremendous necessary, as a result of we’re specializing in the glutes and legs right here, so do no matter is most snug.
5. Tilt your pelvis ahead, sending your tailbone again in order that your knees start to bend. Proceed this motion till your knees are in a 90- to 120-degree angle.
6. Plant your heels. There’s a bent to shift weight ahead into the balls of the ft in Utkatasana. Rooting your heels may help stabilize the pose.
7. Now press your legs strongly outward into the Yoga Strap. Then tune into your glutes, together with your outer glutes. How does your pose really feel total? Does it really feel roughly secure?
8. Keep for five to 10 deep breaths, then return to Tadasana.
9. Repeat in the event you like.

About Charlotte Bell

Charlotte Bell found yoga in 1982 and commenced instructing in 1986. Charlotte is the writer of Conscious Yoga, Conscious Life: A Information for On a regular basis Apply and Yoga for Meditators, each printed by Rodmell Press. Her third guide is titled Hip-Wholesome Asana: The Yoga Practitioner’s Information to Defending the Hips and Avoiding SI Joint Ache (Shambhala Publications). She writes a month-to-month column for CATALYST Journal and serves as editor for Yoga U On-line. Charlotte is a founding board member for GreenTREE Yoga, a non-profit that brings yoga to underserved populations. A lifelong musician, Charlotte performs oboe and English horn within the Salt Lake Symphony and folks sextet Purple Rock Rondo, whose DVD received two Emmy awards in 2010.