How To Teach Janu Sirsasana: Tips for Yoga Teachers & Students

Transcript

[Music] is kind of a complicated pose so it's a seated pose head to knee pose and a forward fold but it's a little bit more complex than often uh we see it practiced in class so in this video we're going to take a little step back we're going to look at what's actually happening in janus asana how you should set yourself up for the posture we'll look at what muscles are involved what you're stretching common misalignments and ways that you can prop this pose so that you or your students can do it most effectively so i wanted to do a tutorial about john usher shasta because it's kind of a complicated pose and unless you sort of spend some time with it it kind of just looks like tree pose but it's not tree pose so let's break it down john usher shasana head to knee pose janu being knee share shasana bing shirsha being head often we default by putting the foot into the thigh and thinking that this is johnny shushasana but it's not janushir shasana has a slightly different base so when you're setting your students up for janushir shasana or when you're going to practice it yourself the general form of this pose is actually to take the heel right to the same side sitting bone so my knee rather than being 90 degrees or like tripo is a little less is actually a little bit more so i'm a little bit wider and what this does is it forces my pelvis to actually be turned out just slightly so john usher shasta is more than just a forward fold it's also a twist which is what makes it so interesting right so there's a little bit of a twist happening here since my pelvis is facing this way and i'm trying to align my sternum over my thigh my knee maybe eventually my shin all right so what are we actually stretching in this pose well of course we're stretching the back of the extended leg so i'm stretching my hamstrings for sure but also i'm stretching the muscles along the spine and particularly because this is a little bit of a twist i'm really stretching the muscles of my lower back on the opposite side so this could incu include yes the erector spinae muscles but it can also might include ql and a little bit of the abdominals right the abdominals are also working to help me twist so it's a little bit different than just doing a straight forward fold because now we have more of this twisting component and it really helps me to get into the lower side of my back in a way that can feel really really nice especially after doing something like back bending or the like so some common risks of john usher shasana so of course if you have a hamstring injury um something like that you may want to bend your knee or take some of the hamstring stretch out of it and instead really focus on the actions of the torso obviously if you've got a lower back injury or something going on in your spine rather than going into full flexion of this pose you may choose to keep the back nice and straight right and focus on the hamstring stretch also if you're pretty tight in your hamstrings and it's hard to kind of get into this pose then you might take a blanket or a block even a bolster and sit up onto it so that instead of being kind of stuck here you can lift out of the hips and find a little bit more mobility to flex over your leg another great prop to use in this particular pose is a strap straps are great for making your arms longer and for helping you find first the length in your spine that you need before you hinge forward and fold over the posture one more common risk factor for this pose is the knee so anytime i'm deeply flexing the knee or deeply bending the knee and then rotating the hip things might get a little dicey in here first of all some folks have a hard time even just flexing the knee fully if you've had like a knee surgery or something like that this might not like to do that also for me i actually have a meniscus injury on my inner knee so if i do this i can start to get some pressure inside my knee and we never want to feel sensation in the knee the knee folks is not a place we want to feel a stretch or discomfort or pressure so if that's the case for some of your students or for you then you can do more of a tree pose you can just increase the angle of the knee and so it's not compressed so much one thing i like to do is keep the angle of the hip turning out so i still get that nice twist through my torso but just to take the foot a little further out right i know i look kind of funny but you know like a little pirate but this opens the knee up but still lets me get to the purpose of the pose also another great thing to do is to prop under the knee so you can create a little pillow and for some people that can really just help take the pressure out because eventually we do really want the knee to fall down towards the floor another thing that might be helpful for your knee people like me would be to take you know either the edge of a blanket i've used or you could fold up a strap multiple times and we can create a little bit of space in the knee joint so it's not you know fully compressed by tucking that into the pit of the knee right and then working the pose from there and this can sometimes be a little helpful because then you have like a little steering wheel on your knee that can also help you to kind of turn the thigh and the hip out more because usually what happens when our knee bugs us is that we're asking our hip to do some rotation but the knee might not be but the hip might not be able to go as far as we want so then the knee depending on its placement starts to take a little bit of that pressure so if you've got this strap here it's like a little steering wheel you can help to keep the thigh the hip turned out right or even bring your hand onto your upper thigh and use your hand to keep your thigh rotating so let's look at some options and stages of this pose that might be helpful for you or for your students so yeah sure sitting up on something is great having props is great absolutely but once we're actually getting into this pose let's take a look right so here i am so the first thing that we usually miss as a common misalignment usually if well usually students do the foundation um too square rather than opening their hip up like we've talked about so that's like a common misalignment number one number two is that they're going to kind of forward fold and round over so if you look at me from the back rather than finding that nice twist instead you can see i concave this side of my spine right and i'm overstretched here to try to get my face towards my shin what i've done is i've rounded the spine and instead we want to lift and rotate right so lifting and rotating can be facilitated by using your arms right so it's a little hard to keep this just from the strength of our core so what i like to do as a stage one here is place the fingers down right lift the spine and use the hands to help me turn right so usually what we do is we start to collapse on one side so use the hands to help you find length and this could be just fine for most folks you'll be getting a stretch through the hamstrings already right and this will help you find that nice rotation keep the back hip heavy also keep the knee extending out eventually we want the knee to drop all the way to the floor right so here i have my hands and then i can work on walking my hands forward and i'm using the strength of my arms to help me find that alignment through my spine so that my sternum my thigh my knee my shin are all lining up walk the hands forward walk the hands forward keep working working working another nice tactic here is to bring the hand to the opposite side of the leg again this just helps us find that rotation through john usher shasana that so often is missing you guys it's such a nice twist for your belly it's so good right okay so i'm drawing my sternum over i can use my hand or bring my hand to the outside of my foot eventually eventually you bring your hands i'll back up a little so you can see into a bind right but there's lots of places in between here strap work yeah turning the chest holding onto the outside of the foot and eventually binding and then the whole head to knee part happens once i have all this length and lift right and another thing that can be good is to take the elbows to the side so you can lift the spine first so first we got to get all that length and that rotation once you have that then the head can come to the knee right and that's a nice really big juicy stretch for the side body so just to recap when you're teaching this pose first take a little extra time with the setup of the legs also offering props to protect the knee for your students who need it because that's often like the confusing part of this pose right it's just the initial setup then first you want to find the lift and the rotation right get yourself set up once you've got the lift in the rotation then we start doing the forward fold then once you've got all of those things if you can unleverage the hands great but then we find the flexion it is spinal flexion in other words it is rounding of the spine and you could also use for you know tighter students right a block to bring the forehead down onto the block and then you continue to work all of those actions of the spine as you go one more prop option i want to show you is sitting on a blanket so nicely folded blanket here but i sit on the edge so both of my sitting bones are on the blanket but my knee actually can come down and this is a really nice way to kind of get the descent of the knee but still support the sitting bones so that you're nice and upright this can be a great choice for people who are a little tighter or who just need to let the knee descend a little bit more for me with my kind of knee compression here this actually helps me to let the hip have a little bit more space so that my knee can stay in a happy place at a hinge joint and not twist so sitting both sitting bones onto a blanket right but letting the knee come down onto the floor can also be another way to explore this pose that might make it a little bit more accessible for you or for your students so there we have it a little breakdown of a wonderful but kind of complicated seated pose called jonnu shirshasana head to knee pose so in this video we took a look at what the foundation actually is what it's actually targeting the muscles that are involved and common misalignments and proppings that are going to help you to do this pose in a way that is effective for you and if you're teaching effective for your students so i hope you enjoyed this if you did for more tips [Music] you