Why You Can’t Stretch Your Way Out Of Pain

Acknowledging bias in our lives is always a good first step toward healing. Yoga teachers and practitioners have long held the belief that if something didn’t feel good in our bodies we could stretch our way out of the problem. I certainly thought that way for many years, particularly around my own back pain. Yet no matter how much I stretched, it didn’t ever seem to get better. I inadvertently realized the error of my ways when I started getting into hiking and began to develop more strength in my legs, hips and core as a result of scaling mountains with a backpack regularly. My back pain started to get better over time and I started to wonder if my hiking had something to do with it. I finally started to put two and two together when I started approaching my yoga practice in a way that incorporated strengthening actions along with the stretching I knew and loved. When I began to understand that the way I had approached yoga in the past had an inherent bias toward stretching and range of motion, and I began to balance that with strengthening actions within the practice, my body responded with less pain and more range. If you’re struggling with pain in certain areas of your body and stretching doesn’t seem to be changing it, here are some things to consider to bring balance to your body and your yoga practice.

Imagine that your muscles are like rubber bands for a moment. Let’s take your arm as an example. Your biceps and your triceps are on opposite sides of your upper arm. When your biceps contracts, your triceps has to lengthen. That’s a really good thing or you wouldn’t be able to bend your elbow! That muscle needs the ability to lengthen (aka stretch). But consider what would happen if your biceps didn’t have the ability to strongly contract. Imagine it was like a rubber band that had lost its spring. You still wouldn't be able to bend your elbow because it wouldn't have the strength to contract enough to create the movement. We might think of this as the muscle being “too long”.

Now imagine it the other way, which is what we often seem to notice the most in our bodies, especially if we’re dedicated yoga practitioners. Imagine you are trying to bend your elbow and your biceps is contracting, but your triceps is SO strong it can’t lengthen to allow the movement to happen. Now we have a situation where the muscle is “too short” or the sensation we often label as “tight”. Thinking about these two opposites starts to allow us to understand why this balance is important.

Another way to think about this - imagine a suspension bridge like the Golden Gate in San Francisco. The cables have to have just the right amount of length and strength to allow the structure to be stable while also allowing for movement. You probably don’t (want to!) think about it when you’re driving over such a bridge, but there are constant small movements due to weight of vehicles, wind speeds, temperature changes, (god forbid) seismic activity and other factors. Our muscles are similar in our bodies, giving stability to our underlying structure but also allowing for movement.

But with the human body there is one more curveball that we also have to consider. Muscles can be tight without actually being strong and they can be long and still be tight. To understand this, consider the person that spends hours a day hunched over a laptop. They might look something like this most of the day:

The body and the muscles are being held in a certain position for extended periods of time. Over time the muscles on the front side of the are being held in a shortened position. They aren’t actually being asked to contract and so they tend to become weak, but they stay shortened and therefore may be perceived as tight. On the other side, the muscles are constantly being stretched, or held in a lengthened position. They can’t possibly contract for many hours a day to counteract the position in which they’re being held, so they are long but are very weak from being over stretched which may be perceived as tightness. These positions of holding when repeated over time tend to bring about this chronic state that may be experienced as painful. An imbalance forms that won’t be helped by simply stretching, particularly for the muscles that are already too long.

These examples are a simplification and a model for a VERY complex system, but hopefully you get the general idea here. Constant stretching of muscles isn’t good, constant contraction of muscles isn’t good. We need muscles that can contract well and lengthen well. We need balance between the two. Without those two things in balance, we may experience pain.

Yoga does mean union after all so is it any surprise that creating balance between length and strength should really be our goal?

So what does this mean for our yoga practice?

The bias of yoga asana, at least the way that its been taught historically, is toward creating length and range of motion. Again, these are good things to have, but yoga can also help us build strength if we approach it a little differently. One way to do this is to engage a muscle at its end range of motion.

For example, let’s take pigeon pose. We might typically think of this posture as a hip opener (aka stretcher), particularly because of the way it may create a sensation of stretch in the hip flexors of the back leg and the rotational muscles of the hips in the front leg. For many people, finding their way into this posture brings them to that end range or maximum range of motion for several muscles. That’s not a bad thing. But now, once at that end range we can ENGAGE and create strength over time by pressing the back leg down and forward and the front leg (shin) down and backward. The legs won't actually move from the shape you’ve put them into, but the muscles will contract and create strength by doing so over time.

The overall effect is that the muscles will, over time be able to move through a full range of motion while also maintaining their strength. That brings us to our ideal state. (In a perfect world anyway. Again this is a complex system.)

Notice that I keep using the words “over time” here. This is not an instantaneous change. It takes constant attention and constant practice.

One last quick note about those long and tight muscles - when we start to address this imbalance it can be challenging. In the example above of our laptop user, if she decides she wants to start to strengthen that back side of the body that is overly long, weak and tight, she may run into one big obstacle, a sometimes painful cramp. 😣 This shows up all the time in the hamstrings for many yoga practitioners in postures and actions like this:

I’m hugging the heel of the back foot toward my buttocks without using my hand or a strap to do so. That asks the hamstrings to contract strongly and that’s often where the cramp happens. If that happens to you don’t give up! Go a little easier the next time around and increase the demand on the muscle(s) that are cramping over time. They’re basically telling you (rather loudly) that they don’t have the strength to do what you’re asking them to do just yet. It’s really something you have to build up to and takes a bit of patience.

I hope this starts to give you some ideas about how to bring more balance between stretching and strengthening into your yoga practice. Strength training outside of yoga certainly isn’t a bad idea for most bodies, but we CAN create more strength and stop worshiping at the altar of range of motion in our yoga practice if we simply bring more balance to our actions. A pain free, healthy and balanced body should always be our goal and bringing a greater focus on strength into our yoga practice can help us get there.

If you’d like to learn more about putting these ideas into practice, we’ll be working with the concepts here throughout the month of February in my Livestream and On Demand vinyasa classes as we always do. This month we’ll be specifically addressing the muscles surrounding the hip joint.

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6 Poses to Free Your Breath

“The Breath Is Life Itself.”

I heard Sharon Salzberg say this recently in an online retreat. That’s certainly the view that the teachings of yoga present to us for consideration. The breath fuels everything from the fire of our digestion to the urge to eliminate to the length of our time here on earth according to the sacred texts. The circumstances of the last several months may have our breath feeling less than free and open for a variety of reasons including fear, stress, and sitting at computers more and more. If you find yourself unable to take a deep breath lately because your holding so much tension around your lungs and ribs, consider working with this simple sequence to bring some balance and freedom to the area.

As you approach this sequence you might look at it in one of two ways: 1) A series of postures you can hold for a couple to several breaths each or 2) some points to emphasize in the context of a flow. Either way is perfectly valid and will allow you to find some benefit. You might experiment with both ways depending on your energy level and the time you have to work through the sequence. Let’s look at each pose in turn and I’ll give you some options.

Cow pose - We don’t often see this posture without it’s complement, cat pose, but it certainly has merits on its own in the context of this sequence. As you move into it bring some emphasis to the feeling of broadness it may create through the front of the chest. I’ve heard some teachers talk about “pulling the chest through the shoulder blades” as you inhale into it and that certainly draws a good mental picture. Hold this one for one to several breaths or make it more dynamic by adding cat pose on each exhalation.

Gate pose - This posture creates a deep opening through the side body that may be felt not only through the rib cage but perhaps even up into the arm pit or down into the belly, hip and the standing leg. This is an area where many of us have considerable constriction. This can inhibit the breathing because the ribs aren’t as able to lift and separate from each other to create the space for deep breaths to enter the body. In our daily lives most of us don’t lift our arms into this position more than once a day on purpose! You might consider some padding under the standing knee for this one if your knees are at all tender. Be sure to do both sides!

At this point you may want to bring in some half sun salutations or some lunging salutations to warm the body and bring in some demand to the breath intensity, or as I mentioned above, you might just move into the next posture.

Low lunge - Bring careful attention to the alignment of this posture as I have it pictured here. Many practitioners come into the posture with the hips forward and down a great deal more with the front knee often coming past the ankle. In this version, I am purposely drawing a line from my hips straight down to the lower knee. The torso stacks on top of that and there may even be a little backbend here. Also important is the top of the back foot pressing down firmly into the mat. The overall effect of these details is a great deal more length on the front side of the body, especially through the hip flexors which are often tight and short. What does that have to do with the breath? I can almost guarantee that as you’re reading this, you’re sitting in a chair and perhaps a bit hunched forward. 😉 Try to take a deep breath in that position. Yeah, it doesn’t work so well. Now, sit up tall (even better, stand up and do this) and you may notice a subtle but tangible difference. Front body space allows for deeper breaths. It also prepares us for a real backbend. But first…

Twisting lunge - There is a whole network of long, rope-like muscles that run up and down the length of our spines. It’s a place where many of us hold tension we don’t even notice and many of these muscles tend to be under a great deal of stress because they’re over stretched. Twisting can relieve this tension in these muscles while also bringing length to some of those side body muscles that wrap the ribs and abdomen that we touched into earlier in this sequence. With this one you can always simplify by dropping the back knee to the floor. Also consider allowing the pelvis to turn into the twist and work together with the spine.

Bridge pose - There are so many benefits to this pose, but for our purposes here let’s focus on how this frees the breath. With the hands interlaced behind the back as pictured, there’s a great opportunity to broaden through the front of the chest. As the hips lift, nearly the whole front side of the body is opening as well. Additionally, with the hips above the heart we have a slightly inverted relationship with gravity. This gives us a chance to exercise the breathing diaphragm, an essential muscle of respiration that moves down toward the feet when we inhale and up towards the head when we exhale. In this position, instead of working WITH gravity as it normally would when we’re upright, it’s working AGAINST gravity (just a little bit) and you may actually find yourself having to work a little harder to take an inhale. It may be quite subtle, but this is good exercise for a muscle we don’t often consider strengthening in most forms of physical movement.

Supported Fish - Our last posture is one that when well adjusted can be quite restful and allow us to take advantage of the space we’ve created in the body for our breathing throughout this sequence. You can use two yoga blocks, one behind your skull (that’s important!) and one behind your heart. Depending on your experience with this posture and your flexibility, you might want the one behind your heart on the lowest level and the one behind your skull on the highest level or some other combination. You can also do this by rolling or folding up a blanket and laying back over it with it landing behind your heart, just below your armpits. Whichever option you choose, allow your arms to come out to the side and turn the palms up for more space through the front of the chest. Once you’ve settled in and gotten comfortable, this is a great place to linger and focus on your breathing. I like to imagine my breath coming in through the nostrils and down to the base of my spine and then filling my torso right up to my collar bones with breath and then allowing all the breath to release in reverse. Stay for a few breaths or several minutes and enjoy all that freedom you created!

You’ll find many of these postures in my vinyasa classes this month. If you can’t join me for the Livestream consider signing up for my new On Demand Video Membership through Patreon.

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What is Chaturanga, Why Should You Care and How to Get There (someday)

📸 credit @ginahouse

What is Chaturanga? 🤔

I realized recently in class that some of you have been wondering what this mysterious Sanskrit word means for some time!

Chaturanga translates to four limbed staff pose and is the posture you see pictured here. You’ll often find this posture in the sequence of poses called “a vinyasa” that goes - down dog, plank, chaturanga, up dog, down dog.

Why should you care about this pose?

This pose gets a lot of attention in the yoga world because it can be so difficult to perform well. The high number of repetitions you’ll find of this pose in a typical vinyasa yoga class and the fast speed at which they’re performed can also can invite sloppiness and therefore repetitive stress injury over time. However, if done well this posture can be very beneficial for modern bodies in many ways.

This posture and the strength you’ve gained when you’re able to do it well are also a prerequisite for postures such as arm balances and some inversions. Find confidence here and you’re more likely to have confidence in those poses as well.

As with any yoga posture (or with anything worth doing really), attention to the technical details allow for greater understanding and discernment in their execution. That translates to more safety, more ease, more knowing of yourself and your body… in short, more yoga (i.e. union). And isn’t that what we’re all looking for anyway?

How do you get there?

One way you can get yourself ready for doing a good healthy Chaturanga is by doing some fairly simple mini pushups with the knees down.

I know. I should put a trigger warning on the word pushup.

But it really isn’t that bad. As with any yoga movement, YOU get to decide how intense (or not) this one is.

The key things to remember are that you want to make sure your elbows HUG IN toward your ribs strongly (very different from the way most of us were taught to do pushups in the past) and that your elbows point BACK toward your hips as you bend them.

Some other important details - don’t let the head drop forward and don’t let the low ribs flare out. In other words, make sure your core is working to support your spine so you don’t get overly curved in your low back.

Here’s a video to help you visualize this strengthening movement:

Careful repetition with attention to the details, like so many things, is key to building the strength you’ll need for a good Chaturanga.

I hope that helps start to make this pose more accessible for you. Stay tuned for a workshop all about this pose next month and in the meantime, feel free to leave me a comment with any questions you have!

P.S. Check out our YouTube channel! We’re starting to add more content over there about yoga, meditation, mantra and more each week!

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How Yoga Can Help Us Cultivate Patience

In all my classes this month we’re focusing on Patience. Look around you and you will no doubt have noticed that this is a quality in short supply in our world and culture lately. When we can press a button and have whatever we want delivered to the trunk of our car in moments, it’s not hard to see why! However, you may also have noticed that there are still many things in life that simply aren’t instantaneous. Here’s how your practice might help you cultivate patience when you need it most.

If you look in a dictionary you’ll find the definition of patience to be something like, “The capacity to accept or tolerate delay, trouble, or suffering without getting angry or upset.” I find that an interesting definition, perhaps because of my own relationship with the word (or maybe it’s my yoga practice). Sure, that may be the ultimate goal; that whatever is delayed or troubling or causing suffering becomes so easy to accept that the emotion of anger or “upset” doesn’t even arise. I don’t know about you, but I’m not there yet!

Recently, my father was experiencing a pressing health problem that required a referral to a specialist. For reasons that are still beyond my comprehension, his doctor’s office was unable to send a simple fax to the office of the specialist for nearly two weeks. He lives over 4 hours away from me so there was little I could do to intervene. Even with the distance, it was quite obvious to me that he was certainly suffering. If you think I didn’t get angry, both for my inability to do something to relieve his suffering and for the incompetence of the staff at his doctor’s office, you’d be sorely mistaken.

But thanks to doing things like holding Utkatasana for more than a single breath, I was able to notice the anger rising and instead of acting on it by calling his doctor’s office and screaming at people to do their [bleeping] jobs (which probably wouldn’t have been very effective) I was able to listen to him and come up with other ideas of places he could turn or ways to deal with the problem. Yoga can teach us that the feelings will rise but we need not act on them immediately.

If that sounds like a simple or silly thing, listen to the stories of the incarcerated, who often wish they could take a single moment of anger back. Think about the time you said that thing to that person who was never able to forgive you. Knowing that our emotions will come and go and having the capacity to be with them and know that they will pass is a huge skill. When we can create that kind of space, we give ourselves the opportunity to respond (with clarity and intention and maybe even kindness) rather than react. Will that happen every time? No. It certainly doesn’t for me. I’m still human. Just ask me what I do the next time my husband forgets to take the trash out for the 9 millionth time. ;-) But over time and with practice, our capacity can grow, and our tolerance can grow.

So to me, I might re-write that definition to read, “The capacity to accept or tolerate delay, trouble, or suffering without acting on our anger or upset.”

That word capacity is a big one. How big is our capacity to hold this moment, no matter what the quality of the moment might be?

Think about the happiest day of your life. What do you actually remember in detail? Especially if it was a long time ago, what has stayed with you? Now imagine if you hadn’t had the capacity to be in that moment. What if you had been rushing on to the next thing? What might you have missed? What if your capacity to be present with that day or time had been greater? What might you still be able to recall that isn’t possible now?

In our yoga practice we constantly draw our attention back to the present moment. We do that by feeling sensations in the body, by focusing our attention on our breath, or in many other ways. It is the nature of our mind to think and take us away from the present moment, most especially if that moment isn’t comfortable. But when we continually draw our minds back to sensation and back to breath throughout our practice, we’re training the mind to stay with the moment, even when the moment is difficult, whether that difficulty is the sensation of the muscles working hard to hold a position or the emotions or thoughts rising that we wish were different or non-existent.

Think about those moments when you’re trying to achieve a difficult pose in your practice. Often, it doesn’t happen overnight. It takes repetition, concentration, practice (notice they don’t call it a “yoga perfect”!). How many times will you have to do headstand before you can hold it away from the wall without a spotter? I don’t know. Neither do you. Talk about developing your capacity to accept or tolerate delay! That same “not knowing” that comes with trying to achieve a difficult pose, is the same “not knowing” that comes when you’re waiting for a doctor’s office to send a fax. Your ability to practice being with the not knowing on your mat helps you develop your capacity to be with it when it happens in your life.

Then there’s that bit about acceptance or tolerance. Learning acceptance or tolerance can be the key to staying present in the most difficult moments of life. When your friend calls you to tell you they need a shoulder to cry on, do you listen to them fully or do you check your email while they’re talking? The last time you were experiencing suffering of your own and someone truly was there to listen to you, how did that make you feel? Being with ourselves or the people we love in those difficult moments is so hard. Being with my father while he was in a great deal of pain recently was definitely difficult. No one wants to suffer, and no one wants to see someone they love suffer. But to give yourself or someone you love the gift of your presence in those challenging moments is so amazing. Being able to accept this moment as it is, no matter how difficult and trust that it will change, sooner or later, is another ability we can grow in our yoga practice.

No one wants to be alone when they are suffering. So as we develop our tolerance of those poses that aren’t our favorites or the acceptance that yes, she’s going to make us chant that mantra again, we grow our capacity for all of life. We get to be present for all of life. We get to be present for those we care for and love. We get to express our love and care by giving that person, even in their most difficult moments, the gift of our full attention. A gift that again, seems so rare these days. We’re more able to hold the not so great moments and the great ones for ourselves and others, so we can actually experience all of what life has to offer, rather than letting it pass us by. We can accept that it won’t all be perfect and it won’t all be pleasant, and by accepting that, we have a much greater chance of really experiencing the great moments to their fullest.

Life is short. I’d much rather live in capacity, tolerance, acceptance and presence, so I think I’ll keep practicing. How about you?

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The Benefits of Legs up the Wall (& how to make it feel better if it isn't your favorite pose)...

If you've ever been to a Restorative Yoga Class or really any gentle (or sometimes even not so gentle) yoga class you may have been asked to come into Legs Up The Wall or Viparita Karani. Many people cheer when the teacher calls this pose because it feels so good and restful! But what are the real benefits of this posture? And what do you do if it isn't your favorite? Read on!

Inversions are one of the hallmarks of the physical practice of yoga because they are so unique to the discipline. What other movement form asks you to hold yourself upside down for an extended period of time? There are some key benefits to Legs Up the Wall. Here are just a few:

• Reduction of fluid, swelling and pain in the legs - If you've been flying, have a job that requires a good deal of standing during your day or other health challenges you may find you have pain and swelling from time to time in the legs. The reversal of the effects of gravity on the body in Legs Up the Wall encourages better return circulation and drainage of excess fluids that may have collected in the lower extremities.

• Relaxation - As compared with more active inversions such as headstand, Legs Up the Wall greatly encourages the relaxation response in the body. We're more able to breathe fully, deeply and slowly in this well supported position encouraging a sense of well being, taking the nervous system out of "fight or flight" mode and lowering the heart rate. Some study is now being done into how this position may also influence the vagus nerve which is being found to be a key pathway in the body for regulation of all major systems and mind/body connection.

• Stretches the back body line - If you have tight hamstrings or a generally tight back body line, you aren't alone. This position can help lengthen this area which may generate some relief in low back pain or other spinal issues. The softening of pelvic muscles and the difference in the effect of gravity on the body may also help ease spinal tension experienced during our usual relationship with gravity throughout the day (i.e. being upright).

• Safe and relatively easy way to experience the benefits of inversions - Headstand isn't for everyone. Legs Up the Wall is a simple way to gain the benefits of an inversion practice without the safety concerns of other more active inversions.

Obviously, these are some great benefits! But what if you're like me (yep, like me) and this isn't your favorite pose? Here are some modifications that might help:

• Don't have your butt right up at the wall - If you come into this pose and that tight back body line we just talked about is screaming for mercy, try backing away from the wall to relieve the tension. If that isn't enough you may want to place a bolster between you and the wall or even try putting your legs up on a chair instead.

• Put a blanket or cushion under your low back - If you have low back pain you may find that the weight of the legs moving down into the hip sockets does not feel good on your back or sacrum area. Try padding things up a bit more than you normally would with a blanket or some other cushion to relieve the pressure.

• Ask your teacher to tie a strap around your lower legs - If you find this pose less than relaxing it may be because your muscles are trying too hard to hold your legs in position. If you have your teacher tie a strap around the lower legs while you're in the pose you may find that the muscles can relax and if the feet start to fall apart from each other the strap will do the work of helping you stay put. A much more relaxing experience!

• Know when to say when - Not every pose is for every body. As you will often hear us say in class, "Your body, your practice". If you've given it the ole college try and it just isn't working for you, don't be afraid to come out of the pose, especially if there's pain. Your teacher can always give you some other options to work with.

Do you love Legs Up the Wall? Or could you live without it in your practice? Let me know in the comments! 

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