Elephant Trunk Pose (Eka Hasta Bhujasana) Tutorial | Yoga Arm-Balancing Postures

Transcript

[Music] hi there and welcome today's peak posture is echo hasta pucci dasana also known as elephant trunk pose and it's an asymmetric arm balancing posture and a variation of last week's peak posture voodoo vedas shoulder pressure pose this pose will help strengthen your wrists your shoulders your arms as well as your core strength and um it'll also help prepare you for a eight angle posture i would not recommend doing this pose if you have any sort of discomfort in your wrists your shoulders your hips instead you can really warm up the hips and start to build up strength maybe try bakasana cropos that'll help you start to really develop that um that inner core strength as well as that arm strength before trying this pose i would recommend warming up your wrist and your shoulders um as well as your hips you can do a lizard pose it's really great for that um malasana also to warm to the hips and just try maybe moving through a couple of sun salutations to you know get the body flowing so now when you're ready join me in a seated position um you're going to extend one of your legs long bring the other knee into the chest and first let's start to warm up the hip flexor and just start to bring him some mobility into the hip so take your two fingers your piece fingers grab your big toe on your bent leg and then bring it in towards the chest use your other arm to cradle the knee you can either put it into your elbow if that feels good maybe take the other arm and bring it here and then just gently start to bring some movement into the hip by gently rocking it side to side you can choose to stay here or maybe take your left hand if you have your left knee into your chest place it behind you and then start to lean back onto your left forearm this could be quite intense it might feel really good your hip flexor and your your left glute breathe here for a few moments and then if you uh you leaned over come back to the seated position maybe do that one two more times and then lower your foot down now take your piece fingers grab your leg and then you're going to try to bring your shoulder underneath your knee imagine that your knee is like a backpack strap that you're putting on so squeeze it on under here and then place your hand by your hips on both sides so i'm going to move to the side so you see this a little bit better but now that our shoulders underneath our knee we're going to squeeze the shoulder into squeeze the knee into the shoulder place your hands on the outside of your hips and then lift up point both toes engage the core here squeeze the knees in towards the your shoulder and then lower down and then we'll switch sides it's a great job and shake it out and then again let's more with the other side here if you have blocks this is also a really wonderful time to place your hands um onto blocks to really allow yourself to lift up a little bit more if you can't lift your bum off the ground um over time your core strength starts to develop and it'll allow you to really hug your legs into the chest and really curl into that tighter ball um but if you don't have that inner those deep abdominal core strength yeah lifting up off the two blocks where your hands are is a really great way to get that added lift so i'll do the other side take the toothpaste fingers grab your big toe bring your knee in towards your shoulder and then take your other hand grab your ankle you can use your hand or you can try placing it into the elbow crease and gently rock it side to side you can choose to stay here if you have the flexibility for it and it feels okay start to lean back your other arm maybe lowering down on your forearm you can start to gently rock it side to side getting some movement in that hip flexor some hip mobility just breathe through it you sort of paint or just uh if you start to feel any pain or discomfort just ease off of it you can always stay up, here, and, you can, still, get, all, the benefits stay here for one more breath come back up if you lean down great job and then lower the knee down so again this time we're taking the shoulder underneath the knee so lift the knee up bring your knee on top of the back of your knee on top of the shoulder place the hands down on um alongside the back of your hips start to point both feet and your inhale lift point those toes squeeze the knee on top of the shoulder engage the core and on your exhale slowly lower down release the knee and check it out again my name is alicia thank you so much for watching today if there's a place you've been struggling with leave a comment below and i'll try to make a video of it in the future i post videos every single week and i'm really hoping that you've learned something new and you'll take this knowledge with you on the mat wherever you go thank you have a wonderful day you