Making Hero Pose Doable | Modifications for Virasana

Transcript

hi I want to share a few tips for propping the virasana of your asanas hero's pose and it's a big pose that involves a big moment in the ankle deep flexion in the NIEM and also the femur is up in the hip sockets so three joints are involved pretty significantly which gives it plenty of opportunity to be a problem for just about everybody so props to the rescue via asana we got a knees about hip distance apart getting close together for some folks and you want your hips right between your heels sitting is firmly against the floor as we can we're looking for feet point straight back so you can see here this big ankle mobility is required the capacity to bend the knees significantly into deep flexion and even here the femurs need a way to be placed into the hip socket to sit comfortably so one thing that we may find when we're looking at veer asana if you're a teacher you'll see this a lot of your students is when the ankle joint is tight you'll see a student who wants very sincerely to sit in Vajrasana but they can't get any of this distance to be closed or feeders are limited in their range of motion and the ankle joint so one thing that we can do for student who finds themselves in that position is to give support to that place and take a blanket roll depending on sometimes it's a significant bounce sometimes it's not so much what we're looking to do is if some support with whatever degree of blanket roll you need like so so that then instead of just being free in space there can be support and a sense of descent and so by supporting the ankles many students if their knees are fine can sit even on that blanket roll like so so however sometimes it's not really quite that simple because if the ankles need their support many times the knee joints have some sense of limitation as well and they can't come into full flexion and so you need to build this part underneath your hips not part of the pose up and by elevating the hips you'll create pressure going into the knee joint so blankets are a really great way to work with that take a blanket one thing to know for yourself if you're propping your virasana or if you're helping a student find the appropriate placement for themselves is gonna take some time and be very relaxed as much as you can about it for yourself and also for your students so you don't have to get it right all the way you want to say is this better is this worse is it no different and that gives a student an opportunity or gives yourself an opportunity to evaluate is this helping is it making it worse or is it not making a difference at all sometimes when we're really working hard to help our students our students sometimes feel obligated to tell us it's helping when it really isn't helping so we want to help them tell us the truth so that the prop actually becomes a beneficial situation so we'll tip there okay so let's say I still needed this blanket roll underneath my feet and I needed less pressure in my knees I take this blanket on top like so to elevate my hips or help my students elevate their hips the other thing is we want to be really relaxed about whether this works this might not be enough height and if this wasn't enough height I would just go to the prop shelf and I would get another blanket so how my students hips come up even higher so again we want to start to empower our students to get the props that they need and then when you get them or yourself and when you get a set up really memorize it and so you know what you need for the pose so that's one scenario that may work another way let's say your students feet that's really not the problem and the ankles here you're gonna take a block between your two feet and sit on the block sometimes you need even more height than that I'm going to take a blanket so now I have it folded several times and take a blanket to bring the hips up even higher so you can see already just by elevating the hips there's a less bend in the knee eventually you could elevate your hips so high that there's a lot of pressure going down into and that becomes a much more complicated scenario a little bit outside the scope of a 5-minute little tip okay so blot block and blanket tore the blanket roll and the blanket folded underneath you those are great to experiment with now one of my favorite ways to prop this pose is what I call the blanket sling and I find that this is a really accessible pose for many folks even because it gets just a little bit of height and a great deal of support for this one I've got my blanket you want to say you've got an uneven edge and then this folded edge I'll show you this and take your legs so underneath the blanket they're doing virasana pointing straight back but I take this folded edge of the blanket rate it behind my knees then that folded edge comes in here puts just a little space in between the back of the knee joint and when you sit down you're not sitting on my heels but I'm sitting in the blanket as though it's a little bit of a sling for my buttocks what's fantastic about this that little space in the knee joint can bring relief the other thing that's fantastic about it is just a small amount of height underneath the hips translates for most people into knee joints and kneecaps that are facing straight ahead so it's a fairly conservative position for your knee sometimes even folks who can sit flat with no pain initially will start to run into trouble with that deep internal rotation of the femurs and sometimes it creates a torsion in the knee joint so if I'm teaching a lot of times I'll have everybody get a blanket everybody do it this way that way people who need the prop don't feel singled out and the folks that don't need the prop no harms gonna come by doing a nice conservative form of the pose keep in mind because this one doesn't prop the ankles you could add that piece in as well underneath the blanket roll depending on what you or what your students need so it's a great pose does a lot for us in these ankle joint knee joint hip joint scenarios but it gives a lot of problem-solving opportunities for most of us along the way so good luck and have a great time you