How to do Pigeon Pose - Vinyasa Yoga Tutorial

Transcript

hey guys welcome this is heather from rebel yoga today's posture tutorial is going to be pigeon pose a great hip opener but some people don't realize that pigeon pose is actually classified in the back bending family so as you become more advanced in some of these variations of hip openers you can allow yourself to get a little deeper into your back bends but for today's purposes i'm going to stick strictly with the hips and give you a couple different variations of this pose and really just speak to the alignment it is a posture that i see a lot in class that the alignment can be off a lot so a prop is always good if you have a blanket a block to use particularly if you have very tight hips sometimes it's really nice to have that to kind of cradle the hips under so i'm just going to give you a side profile and a frontal profile so that you can kind of see what i'm talking about in alignment here so just coming from the side here i'm going to start from the table top position i'm going to be taking pigeon on my left side so i'm going to extend my right leg back and i'm going to draw my left knee to my wrist here so my shin here is going to be at an angle some people can bring the shin up so that it is like parallel to the top of your mat but my hips don't allow me to do that so if you see it from the front version here you want to make sure your knee is going to just be a little wider than the hip it's not in here it's out here and my knee again when i step it through or draw it through i should say my knee hits my wrist so you'll see my weight is now centered i'm not rolling to one side which is another common mistake you see you really want to keep that weight centered and the back leg here is going to extend back nice and long and you can point the toes some people like to flex the foot so you can play around with that there's no right or wrong there and then as i move forward here i want you to think of like your pelvis kind of moving along with the spine so you have a nice long spine you can work the arms forward you tend to be a little tight in the shoulders you can certainly just place one hand on top of the other and rest your forehead down just like this a different variation of this pose would be on your back right so we call this a figure four stretch and there's another version that we can take that's just a little bit bigger so what i would say is just start here with your feet parallel to one another i'm going to cross my right ankle over my left knee so my foot is actually going to hang off right you'll see it right here it's going to hang off the knee a little bit right of that base leg and then here i'm going to keep my head and neck and shoulders down you can always place a blanket under your head that might feel nice if you have a little tension there and then i'm going to draw my left knee in i'm going to thread my right arm through the leg my other hand is going to come through and i'm going to interlace my hands right here on my hamstring i'm going to draw my shoulders back and down lengthen in my tailbone you don't want to curl up here so try to lengthen the tailbone down right and then breathe another variation of this pose that's a little bit bigger you can keep your shin here in this parallel position extend the bottom leg just like we did so we're basically doing pigeon on our backs and not on our bellies so i have a kind of a knee issue going on with my right leg i cannot do pigeon on my belly but i can do this pose on my back and have no knee pain at all so then i'm going to thread my arms under here under my shin just like this like i'm giving my shin a nice little hug i'm going to round up like in a c curve in the torso keep this left leg in full extension and hold here i can't really hug that chin in this foot is going to stay flexed the lifted foot right and hold this is a really great alternative for people who are struggling in a traditional pigeon pose in the knees and you remember you never want to have any knee pain when you are in a hip opener like this that's really really important to know so you can see as we do a pigeon pose right and we work that extension of the back leg how it can prepare you eventually to come into a back bend and you can drop the head back right but that's getting into a whole other field of postures here so if you have any questions here on pigeon pose or any hip opener that i did here on my back a figure four stretch another variation a double pigeon you can always reach out to me my name is heather and i am at revel yoga you can email me at hello at revel breville.yoga.com again i always love to talk yoga especially if you are kind of struggling through some poses and you need a modification i'm totally here to help you out thanks so much for joining me and i will see you guys next month with my next tutorial