Yoga for Hypermobility: Wake Up Your Glutes

Once I first started working towards yoga, I felt like a star. Whereas I used to be a reasonably honest sprinter and lengthy jumper in highschool, my physique was just too floppy for different sports activities. In yoga, my physique was fairly instantly in a position to 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 absolutely about balancing all that bendiness with stability.

I prevented working towards strengthening poses for many years. They had been simply too arduous. A part of the problem was structural. Hypermobile individuals’s joints don’t at all times accurately align. This makes the muscle tissue should work tougher to maintain us upright. That is sophisticated additional by the truth that hypermobile individuals don’t at all times recruit the right muscle tissue with a view to accomplish explicit actions in probably the most environment friendly manner.

Yoga for Hypermobility: Recruiting the Proper Muscle tissue

In her latest guide, Yoga for Flexible Individuals, writer Libby Hinsley calls flexible individuals “knowledgeable compensators.” She writes, ”One of many superpowers of flexible individuals is they’re knowledgeable 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 hassle finding the proper muscle tissue to perform a activity. 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 after 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 help the glutes within the pose, taking over the first accountability for hip extension is just not their forte. Overworking them precipitated the cramping.

Motion Dysfunction in Fierce Pose

Fierce Pose (Utkatasana aka “Chair Pose”) was one other pose I powered via for years, not utilizing my major help muscle tissue—gluteus maximus and medius. It’s not that my leg muscle tissue weren’t collaborating; they had been on hearth. 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 nicely. Struggling with persistent sacroiliac (SI) joint points and again ache, she labored arduous 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 way more ease. Urgent out in opposition to a Yoga Strap within the pose invitations the glutes to the get together, making the pose really feel a lot extra steady and easeful. I’ve discovered it to be an amazing assist in my very own follow.

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 toes hips-width aside. Place the strap round your legs simply above your knees. Alter the width of your loop in order that once you press your legs into it your toes stay hips-width aside.
4. Place your palms in your pelvic rim, or place your arms in Garudasana (Eagle Arms), as within the picture. The arm place isn’t tremendous vital, 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 toes 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 general? Does it really feel kind of steady?
8. Keep for five to 10 deep breaths, then return to Tadasana.
9. Repeat if you happen to like.

About Charlotte Bell

Charlotte Bell found yoga in 1982 and commenced instructing in 1986. Charlotte is the writer of Aware Yoga, Aware Life: A Information for On a regular basis Apply and Yoga for Meditators, each revealed 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 people sextet Pink Rock Rondo, whose DVD gained two Emmy awards in 2010.