3 Keys to a More Stable High Lunge

“Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down!” was a clever marketing catch phrase from my childhood (oh Lordy am I dating myself now!) and something I’ve been known to say to encourage my students with a smile and a laugh when they’re having a hard time in balancing postures. One posture that this comes up in is high lunge. It’s a common posture in a vinyasa practice and can present some real challenges depending on where you find it in a sequence and how fast it flies by. But I’m here to help! Here are 3 strategies that might make this posture more stable (and even enjoyable!) for you.

1. Set yourself up for success by aligning your feet well. Foundation is always the first thing to consider in any yoga posture, and how you align your feet in this pose will either set you up for success or failure when you try to lift your torso.

Traditionally, if you’re standing in tadasana or mountain pose, you may have been taught to have your big toes touching and your heels slightly separated. While that may work for some bodies, including the traditionally slight statured Indian male, if you’re an American woman such as me, you may find this not only unstable but restrictive in your outer hips. Instead, take your feet farther apart. I usually say sit bones distance, which can be measured by taking your two fists between the arches of your feet. With that little bit of extra space, you’ll have created a broader foundation for whatever you build on top.

Now with that broader foundation, as you bend forward and step one foot back to prepare for high lunge, see that the foot that goes back stays in that same line. There’s a natural tendency for it to drift into the center of the mat a bit, so resist that tendency and keep the foot wide to the side. This way, when you come up into your high lunge you’ll have that broader base to support you and maintain stability.

2. Draw the torso up through center rather than forward and up. This is subtle, but this is an energy management strategy. If you try to reach your arms forward as you lift the torso your energy and your focus will move OUT rather that in and up. Think of it this way, if you wanted to shoot and arrow up into the sky you wouldn’t aim it forward first and then expect it to turn upward somehow. The same is true for the energy of lift that you’ll need to bring up your torso.

Instead, as you exhale (because breath is always a good part of any strategy in a yoga posture), draw your arms up through center as you lift your torso. You might imagine that as you start to lift you’re going to take your hands up from the ground bending your elbows to touch your outer hips first, then draw them along the sides of your torso and up to the sky. Your torso will naturally follow this movement and you’ll contain your energy output to move in the direction you want to move, rather than a direction that isn’t necessary.

3. Engage the muscles surrounding your outer hips. This is an area we don’t think about very much in daily life, but the group of muscles that surround your outer hips are so important to creating stability in any standing posture.

As you move into the pose, feel as if these outer hip muscles are squeezing in towards the center of your body and maintain that feeling as you hold the posture. It’s as if someone came behind you and placed their hands on your outer hips and gave them a hug. You can even use your own hands to create this feeling and notice if the muscles here are doing the work you’re asking of them.

Having a hard time connecting to these muscles? We’re working on strengthening and engaging this area in my classes all this month. Come in for a class or sign up for Digital Membership to learn how to engage and strengthen this important area of your body more readily!

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No More Banana Back!

In today’s blog post I’d like to give you a visual and verbal understanding of a very common condition amongst yoga practitioners in various postures that involve extending the hip joint.

Banana back is a funny way of describing what can happen for yoga practitioners who are super flexible, but not necessarily strong, or just don’t have a keen awareness of this area. 

As always, we want to do our best to balance the two qualities of strength and flexibility. Any time we do a movement that requires engaging the muscles that extend the hip, depending on our level of flexibility in the low back or lumbar spine area, there is a possibility that we may be creating the extension from our back and not our actual hip muscles. 

This matters for a couple of reasons:

• Our hip extending muscles tend to be weak due to our modern lifestyles. Muscles on the front of the body tend to be short and tight from hours of sitting; muscles on the back of the body tend to be overstretched and weak for similar reasons.

• This muscle group tends to be weaker in men than women for physiological reasons.

• Lumbar spinal issues tend to be the most common, due to many of the reasons above. There is a transition point in the spine in this area (there are several similar ones throughout the spine) that tends to be more vulnerable to misuse.

So what’s the solution? Using the muscles that were meant to do the thing to do the thing! And attention to detail of course.

I’m sure there’s a name for this pose but I’ll be darned if I can find it! If you know it, let me know!

In the picture above you’ll see a well supported version of this balancing pose that asks us to resist the pull of gravity when we lift the leg in particular. Some specific things to note:

• I’m not lifting the leg higher than my hip. This isn’t about range of motion. It’s about a well supported lumbar spine and a strengthening action of contraction in the glutes and hamstrings.

• My low back is in a natural curve, rather than an over accentuated one. The amount of curvature will vary across the bodies of different practitioners but for me, this is pretty good.

• This may be harder to see in a picture, but everything that touches the earth is pressing DOWN fairly strongly. Engagement with the earth helps awaken core support.

Contrast this with the picture below. 

Ouch!

I hope you can see the difference. For me I could definitely FEEL the difference! Having brought some attention to this detail of my own practice for some time now, doing this movement without the core engagement, lifting my leg way too high and letting my ribs flare toward the ground instead of up towards the sky made this pose feel AWFUL on my low back and my other joints that were bearing weight. 

When I work in this posture in this way, there’s a sense of connection that isn’t there otherwise. My body feels like one cohesive whole, rather than a bunch of parts doing something but not necessarily working together.

I hope you found this explanation helpful! Let me know in the comments. :-)