Dhanurasana with a Yoga Strap Bowstring

Years in the past, I heard Judith Hanson Lasater pose this query: “Who ought to follow backbends?” Her reply: “Anybody who’s rising older.” This, after all, means everybody. Most of us spend our days bent over one factor or one other—desks, digital units, counters, and many others. Transferring our shoulder joints and spines in the wrong way counters the tendency to hunch ahead. The Hatha Yoga Pradipika, the normal textual content that describes the 15 poses which have endured by the millennia, contains just one backbend as important to asana follow: Dhanurasana (Bow Pose).

When Britain colonized India, they imported British gymnastics to the nation, and particularly, to the follow of yoga. So most of yoga’s backbends truly got here from the colonizers. That doesn’t imply these imported backbends should not useful for our our bodies, nonetheless. In actual fact, the vary of backbends within the present asana canon ensures that there shall be at the least one backbend to suit each particular person’s construction.

The Advantages of Backbending

Backbending confers a number of advantages:

• Strengthening the muscle groups that reach the backbone to assist us keep wholesome, upright posture
• Increasing the chest and anterior shoulder joints
• Stretching the stomach muscle groups
• Lengthening the hip flexors, muscle groups that are inclined to shorten after we spend lengthy hours sitting
• Revitalizing the physique usually; backbends are inclined to warmth and energize our our bodies and minds

Dhanurasana Challenges and Options

There’s little question that backbends will be difficult. Some folks’s constructions are made for backbends; others, not a lot. We will prep our our bodies for backbending, however for some folks, a extra steady spinal construction will restrict how far their our bodies will go. The extent to which your lumbar backbone will lengthen is one figuring out issue. Folks with a curvier thoracic backbone may also discover some backbends more difficult. However that is all fully okay. Anybody, regardless of how “deep” your backbends look, can take pleasure in the advantages.

Dhanurasana will be difficult for folks with any of the aforementioned structural qualities. However it’s additionally simple to change, utilizing a Yoga Strap to attach your fingers together with your ft.

Follow Dhanurasana (Bow Pose) with a Yoga Strap

1. Collect your props: Yoga Mat, Yoga Strap and a Yoga Blanket (optionally available). In case your hip bones are delicate to stress, you may wish to place a folded Yoga Blanket throughout the middle of your mat.
2. Lie face down in your mat, together with your pelvis in your Yoga Blanket if utilizing.
3. That is the difficult half: Bend your knees, drawing your heels in near your glutes. Place your Yoga Strap round your ft or ankles and maintain onto the ends of the strap, one in every hand. Maintain the strap taut sufficient in order that it doesn’t slide down your legs towards your knees. After all, you possibly can keep away from this awkward transfer by having a buddy or trainer place the strap round your ft when you’re not practising alone.
4. Lie face down once more, however together with your knees bent and the strap ends in each fingers.
5. Root your pelvis into the ground and carry your chest and legs, strolling your fingers towards your ft to maintain the strap taut.
6. Hold your head in a impartial place, going through straight forward. There’s a bent to throw your head again in backbends, however in susceptible backbends specifically, this may pressure your lumbar backbone. It is because when your neck is hyperextended, your hyoid bone pushes ahead and disengages your digestive organs. You possibly can learn extra about this right here.
7. Keep within the pose for five to 10 deep breaths. While you’re completed, return to a susceptible place. If you wish to follow Dhanurasana once more, hold ahold of the strap. If not, let go and calm down together with your head resting in your fingers.

About Charlotte Bell

Charlotte Bell found yoga in 1982 and commenced educating in 1986. Charlotte is the creator of Aware Yoga, Aware Life: A Information for On a regular basis Follow and Yoga for Meditators, each printed by Rodmell Press. Her third ebook 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 Pink Rock Rondo, whose DVD received two Emmy awards in 2010.