How to Practice and Teach Skandasana: Teaching Tips with Rachel

Transcript

[Music] scandasana what is it how do we teach it what's it for and what should we be aware of in practicing and teaching this pose first of all skandasana is I'm going to go out on a limit I think it's kind of a newer made up pose and the reason I say this is that if we look to light on yoga which is kind of the gold standard in my book for outlining yoga postures that or Ashtanga skandasana is instead someone sticking their foot behind their head and doing a forward fold so I think this new version that we're going to talk about today is a little bit of a newer invention but it's all the rage so let's talk about it usually it's approached from something like prasarita Paro tanasana C and there's a couple different ways that we can do this pose essentially it looks a little bit like this I'm shifting from side to side this could be kind of the most accessible version and we'll talk about that a little more or I could come way the heck down here and this would be a little bit more um of a challenging or just less accessible version of the pose so first let's break it down what's it for so ultimately skandasana is really like prasarita but we're adding a lateral shift so what that adds on for us is a stretch of the inner thigh so we're stretching into the groin muscles um the adductors as we shift over also this pose is really good for ankle flexion so you'll notice as I come into this pose my ankle needs to flex and as we go into deeper versions of this pose the ankle needs to flex more and this can be quite a limiting factor for your students because a lot of us don't have that kind of ankle flexion but let's take these stages one at a time so at scandasana is most accessible I would use a couple of blocks probably start from prasarita Paro tanasana a wide legged forward fold and then almost like a fitness uh kind of lunge shift from side to side now in this pose you'll notice that there's a lot of knee flexion ankle flexion so whenever that happens we need to be doubly sure not to let the knee wander in and out we don't want to put pressure on one side of the knee or the other so you're going to want to counsel your students to keep their knee tracking over the center of their foot also in this position because the knee is coming forward which is fine however if students do have a little bit of sensitivity in the anterior part of their knee you're going to cue them to bring their weight back into their heels what that also does is it takes a little bit of the tension out of the quads puts it more on your glutes so for me I actually like working my quads a little bit so um I I don't mind my knees coming forward but as a general best practice we tend to put the weight in the heels to activate the glutes and also keep a little bit of the weight out of the front of the knee and then you would have students shift from side to side or hold they could walk their blocks over or you could work on core strength even having them lift their hands but you'll notice my feet here are still pointed forward so that would be version one I'm getting into the groins I'm getting a little bit of ankle flexion but generally I'm pretty high pretty safe and accessible as we move a little bit further into the pose you'll notice that if I can descend down more right I'm starting to put a lot of stretch onto the outside of my ankle and I'm starting to deepen the requirements of ankle flexion in this ankle over here that doesn't have to be a bad thing but oftentimes at some point we're going to either find a little impingement up here in this hip depending on what the relationship of the femur in the pelvis is like and I might just feel like wow that's a lot of stretch on my outer ankle so often what we'll do in scandasana is externally rotate this leg so that's a good thing to start and plan ahead for from the top or at least from your option two I might have my students turn their toes out come down you could even do a little goddess before this but I'm training them again to keep their knees in alignment with the center of their ankles now a little bit of rolling in and out just like malasana squat pose again it's not a bad thing but here we're thinking about best practices longevity let's just keep things super stacked so as I start to shift my weight with the toes turned out oftentimes this hip can now come a little further I can abduct my leg a little bit more because of its external rotation so we're going to be mindful of this knee Foot and Ankle as I sit down and right about here you're going to have a choice okay oftentimes if students don't have the flexion in the front of the their ankle they're going to want to start lifting their heel up so you have the choice either to cue your students to keep the heel down and work at the level they can or to allow them to bring the heel up now pros and cons if they bring their heel up yes they might be able to get a little deeper here the con of that is kind of two-fold one they're wobbly or they're on their tone up their foot two they're missing out now on the ankle flexion I guess there's three things and three the knee is going to come much further forward which again for my students who don't like deep knee flexion or don't like to have pressure on the front of their knee here that might not feel so great so just be aware of this and give your students plenty of options to pull out or modify or take the version one that we just looked at so as I come down if I can keep my heel on the ground and guys this took me years to do like my heels always used to come up but over time you really can increase either the mobility of this joint which might be sticky and not sliding the way it should or there might be some connective tissue there that needs to start to move in a different way all right so my toes turned out my knees are definitely going to track over the center of my ankles and as I sit myself down here this heel can come up right so instead of having to you know really stretch the side of the ankle I can let that heel come up now do you want your students just hanging out here no we actually want to kind of have them press down and lift up this is an active pose right but I'm still trying to resist letting my knee drop in which it's going to want to so keep using your abductors your external rotators of your hip to keep that knee tracking over the center of the ankle and again you can use your blocks here to have people come up my left side is a little bit tighter um one thing about this joint here is that oftentimes it can get a little sticky it's like someone described this as a little mouse in a house it's got to actually slide back the ankle needs to soften at the front in order to get this deep flexion and the weight needs to be a little bit in the heel for that to happen so that's another reason why I'm maybe lifting your heel up isn't so great because you're not going to give your ankle the chance to develop that flexibility and range of motion right and then we could shift from side to side now a harder version of this would be to do it without your blocks so you know you might start off in a limited range of motion a more accessible range of motion where students can maintain their stability this might be a real nice way to work into it probably everybody can do this and be real conscious of their knees right and shifting and then slowly you could start to come a little further down but only to the point that you can do it and not like collapse all of your weight it's a great one to do for the groin also there's connective tissue in here in your hip that starts to unwind if you do this so I think this is a great movement to add to your repertoire let's consider the sequencing aspects of this just for a moment so I've spoken how oftentimes we can come to this from Prosperity I'm doing a forward fold maybe the first time through my sequence I'll do just a normal forward fold the second time I might you know bend the knees and then let the hips start to drop back and then start to explore a deeper range of motion but one thing that's kind of fun about skandasana for a flow is that you know from these deep poses you can do things like move into a a different lunge right right or you can migrate to the back of your mat fairly excessively right so it can be a fun one to kind of work into you can get kind of exotic with those transitions so teachers I just want to pull you back and say remember to stabilize the knees and the ankles when you're moving in and out of these kinds of poses and also to keep in mind that some of your students if they're way up here they might not have the stability under their hands to do that transition quite so easily so think about ways that you can make that transition accessible for perhaps the folks that have the less least mobility in your class so there you go there's a little primer on skandasana so what's gandasana does for us is it opens basically opens the groins opens the adductors up helps to create nice deep ankle flexion and it can also help to train awareness of the alignment of the ankle and the knee and the hip things we want to watch out for we want to give lots of props to our students who don't have that kind of mobility in their hips we also want to give options to our students who don't necessarily have ankle Mobility that lets them get into that deep kind of flexion knee issues are always going to be something we're going to keep an eye out for in this particular kind of transition or pose it's something you can hold for a long time it's something you can work gracefully the transitions back and forth so it is really fun and I've grown quite fond of this pose I'll be honest I used to hate this pose hate it right my ankles were tight I was oh I hated it but now that I've been doing it for a while and it's a little bit more accessible in my body I really value the range of motion that it invites me my body to move into and the control and the mindfulness that it takes to get there so have fun you guys if this was helpful to you for more tips find me on Instagram I love to hear from you and hear suggestions if you have thoughts about skandasana please put them in the comments below love it hate it have tricks and tips you want to share with all of us please let us know see you on the map [Music] thank you [Music]