Hips Fly High

Moments of pure joy should be savoured so I wanted to share the joy I felt at seeing students in the hips don't die class last night amaze themselves with their acts of flight! 

Tittibhasana B
(Ok, so we may not look quite like this!)

For 6 weeks now we have been working on some deep hip openers.  We have been doing a lot of forward bending type postures that involve nuzzling the shoulders inside the knee, including a wide-legged standing forward bend where we really burrow our shoulders between our knees known as Tittibhasana B.  We have continued to come back to that pose without a concept of where else it might lead.  And, to tell the truth, I had no intentions of making the pose go anywhere else.  But last night was different!




Tittibhasana A
(And we might not look
quite like this either!)

As I looked around the room, bottoms were not quite so high as the picture shown above, but spines were long and shoulders were nuzzled deeply.  And I thought to myself, "By gosh, I think they can do more!" 

And more you did.  With a few basic instructions I was astounded to see nearly everyone in class come into the first stage of the very challenging arm balance posture Tittibhasana A!  The best part was seeing the looks of awe and amazement on everyone's faces as they realised what they were doing--flying!  I know it came as a surpise to some people and I hope you realised that these sorts of postures are more about finding your centre of gravity as opposed to raw strength.

Whether or not you made it up last night does not really matter though because the potential is there in every single one of you.  No, we may not look like the pictures on this page but as long as we feel light and free and enjoy what we are doing then it does not matter at all. 

I can't wait to see what happens next week!

Mettha



What Lies Beneath (Our Bums): Observing the Hip Joint to Protect the Knees

“The Day My Bum Went Psycho” is a book written by Australian children’s author Andy Griffiths.  It’s a story about detachable bums that jump off their owners.  Zach, the main character, wakes up one night bumless and has to get help from some bum-hunters to recover his rogue bum, which has become the leader of a group of bum scoundrels that have set out to rule the world. 

If you actually removed your bum, or what most of us thought of as our bums, you would probably be removing the fat that is stored there along with large muscle that almost everyone knows the name of—the gluteus maximus.  Removing this muscle would make some things very difficult or awkward, such as walking and running or getting up from a chair. 

Now, we know the gluteus maximus is big and important because if someone had named you Samantha Maximus or Tilak Maximus it was probably not without reason.  But if you removed your gluteus maximus (for example if your bum went psycho) you would find some other very important muscles called external rotators.  You can see the people who named our body parts are in fact very clever because, as you could probably guess, it is their job to perform a movement called external rotation at your hip joint.

Understanding the basic movements at your hip joint is important for deep hip opening postures and, understanding external rotation in particular, can help prevent injury to the knee joint in some of these poses where you also need to bend your knee (think lotus, pigeon etc).

In this blog I want to talk about the six basic movements of the hip joint and then focus on the idea of external rotation in the context of protecting the knee joint.  Hip opening postures are sure to give even the most open-hipped yogi a little pain in the butt.  Practicing with awareness and alignment will also help you protect your knee joints.