Reclined Hero Pose Tutorial - Supta Virasana Saddle Pose

Transcript

namaste welcome everyone my name is cassandra and today i'm going to take you through a post tutorial on what we call saddle in yin yoga and in hatha based traditions it'll be called reclined hiro or supta this pose i'm just gonna say it is not appropriate for every body it truly does depend on your structural alignment and posture it depends on your pelvis on your hips on your low back and on your knees more specifically there are some people out there and i would say a pretty large percentage of the population who even if they're really careful in the pose and they have all the proper alignment cues and they're really paying attention it's just never gonna feel good and it will hurt and potentially injure their knees it's one of those that i know a lot of teachers personally who just refuse to teach it because it's not worth the risk now there are other people that i know who can be 20 minutes in this pose and they never even feel a thing and usually that's just because it is the way their body is made so i'm giving you this warning right off the bat it is possible that even with your best intention and best effort this pose might just not work for you i'm kind of in between those two polls where i do have to be very careful with how i do this one it can feel good but if i'm not really paying attention to my alignment i can definitely feel it in my knees in a negative way so reclined hero pose is a big thigh stretch we're really getting into the hip flexors getting into the quads and when we're doing it in the context of a yin yoga practice if you're familiar with yin you know that we don't really focus on muscles in yin we're really mainly concerned with joints and connective tissues so we would practice saddle pose as a way to strengthen our knees now again for some people it's just not gonna work no matter how much you try if it's painful please don't do it leave it out okay i've given like as much disclaimer as i possibly can so my body personally i can do it but i have to be careful and i like to practice this one with blocks although some days if i'm really open i don't need the props at all okay let me show you how i like to do it and how i was taught to do this pose by one of my teachers siana sherman so i like to begin getting the thigh bones our femurs parallel to the longer edges of the mat and exactly hip width distance apart this is important because often when i talk about hip width distance apart even when we're just standing in mountain pose for example and i ask students place your feet hip width distance apart people go to the edges of their hips but i want you to instead think of your bones so it doesn't matter how wide or how narrow your hips are i want you to align the top of your hip bone and the top of your knee in that one long line parallel to the edges of your mat and then from here you want your feet and your calves on the outer edges of your thighs and i like to almost roll the flesh of my calves out before i sit down some of you already you're going to be here and it's going to feel so painful in your knees if that's the case you could see if the pressure is alleviated by lifting your hips up so just virasana or hero pose sitting this might be great and very comfortable for you so this is your first alternative when i'm looking at my calves and at my feet what i don't want is for my toes to be rotating out and my ankles to be rotating in i'm trying to keep everything neutral so that the top of my foot and my toenails are pushing into the floor so top of the foot firmly planted into the mat if you were not doing this with a block under your seat because you wanted to do the full saddle or reclined hero or suktavarasana variation your next alignment cue would be to lift your hips up a little bit and tuck your tailbone under just from lifting and tucking i can already start to feel a gentle pull and stretch in my quads which is what we're looking for the reason why we do a gentle tuck is that when we're going back what we don't want is for all of the emphasis of the pose to sink into our low back this is not a pose meant to compress your lower back we're trying to elongate this and if you have the kind of spine that i do which has a pretty sway back you need to be extra careful of this so already for me just by lifting and tucking under and then setting my hips back down i'm feeling it all through the front of my thighs i'm starting to feel it a little bit in my knees but not at all in an uncomfortable or painful way this might be the extent of saddle pose or reclined hero pose now if you'd like to go a little bit further you can start to lower down as soon as you start to lower down i want you to notice what your knees do i often see this in students the knees start to widen the lower down you go so as much as possible we're trying to keep that hip width stance and another thing that tends to happen is that the shins and the knees leave or lift off the floor this is very dangerous for your knees i want you to try to keep lengthening them forward and almost grounding them into the floor and then if you were lengthening and leaning back for some people just staying on the palms can be great and really the more you can think of pushing down into the tailbone and lengthening out of your lower back the deeper you're going to feel this into the tops of your thighs and then the blocks or a bolster can be really helpful as if you were doing supported fish and you can play with the height here where you can support your upper back as well as the back of your head here if you were in a yin yoga class we would hold a pose like this for three to five minutes assuming it is appropriate for your body and that there is no pain so the principles of yin is to find your edge so not chasing sensation we are resolving to be still which means you're not fidgeting you're relaxing in the pose and the third principle is to hold the pose so letting gravity do the work for you for those three to five minutes if you're in a hatha or vinyasa power yoga class you might engage your muscles a little bit and you probably won't be holding the pose for quite as long so the warning signs to look out for here are absolutely knee pain if it feels like it's pinching like it's pulling or like there's compression it's not worth it please get out of the pose it might not be suitable for you now if it feels like it's pain in your lower back it could just be that you've gone too far into the pose and need to work at the pose lifted up a little bit higher and really working on emphasizing the tuck so there is one more thing you could try to make the pose a little bit more comfortable and that is to grab a blanket don't know why i didn't grab it before so any kind of blanket folded once or twice you could place it in between your calves and your thighs underneath your knees kind of really wedging it there under the knees this helps to create a little bit more space and for those of you with knee pain in this pose it can make a massive difference even for me just having it there it feels like a really nice release and it would be the same alignment cues where i'm lifting tucking and starting to lean back again trying not to let my shins and knees lift off the floor i'm pushing them down and finding lots of length right here so the blanket is one more thing that you could try as a way to modify the pose and make it a little bit more comfortable it'll feel really good to stretch your legs out in front of you after this one so i'm probably a broken record saying this but just please don't do it if it hurts not every yoga pose is meant for every single person this is something i firmly believe in there are probably five to ten yoga poses that i know i cannot do and they are not good for me that doesn't mean that they're not good for other people and that i shouldn't teach them it just means that i know it is just not right and not suitable for me and hero pose or subtitles poses for you so no straining no pushing no forcing a certain experience on your body and oh another thing that i wanted to mention is that for some people it's not really pain felt in the knees it's pain they feel in your ankles thankfully this is something that can kind of be improved over time but if you have a hard time just letting your ankles be pointed out behind you it's going to be very difficult to hold this pose and find some comfort in it it just means you might need to work on ankle flexibility a little bit more so an ankle stretch would be a good one to start incorporating a little bit more so you could just sit directly on your heels this time so that your shins are directly under your thighs and you can work just at leaning back you might already be feeling it from this and then you can also work at lifting one shin lifting the other one or maybe lifting both and you're definitely going to feel this a counter stretch would be to also work on your toe squat so flexion and extension of the ankles just so you're really working on it but whenever we're trying to improve things at the connective tissue or at the joint level it takes a long time it's a lot easier to make changes physically to your muscles than it is to you know your joints and connective tissue so you do need to be quite patient with this one but it is possible so play around with it again if you have any questions about the pose leave it down below in the comments i'll try to answer as many as i can and if there are any pose tutorials that you'd like to see on my channel again leave me a request below i do already have a fairly good selection of post tutorials i'll link the playlist in the comments and in the description box if you want to check out the ones that i already have i hope you find this helpful thank you so much for watching and i will practice again with you very soon namaste