Top 5 Hip Openers - Best Yoga Poses for Hip Flexibility

Transcript

hey yogis welcome to my channel my name is Cassandra and I am here in beautiful Puerto vijo Costa Rica I was recently asked what my favorite hip openers were so if you're trying to increase your hip flexibility which poses should you focus on and I mean yoga has probably hundreds of hip opening yoga poses but I wanted to keep this simple and narrow it down to my top five favorite yoga poses for hip flexibility and Mobility so number one first pose I definitely think every yoga a practitioner should be doing on a regular basis if they want to increase their hip flexibility is a wide-legged child's pose this is a wonderful way to Target the inner groin and inner edges of the hips as well as down a little bit into the inner legs so the great thing about this pose is that it's really simple perfect for beginners you don't need to be very Advanced and you don't really need any props either so you bring your big toes together to touch and then your knees go as wide as they can or as wide as is comfortable so as your flexibility and range of motion increases you'll be able to open the knees up more and more once you have your hips pressing towards your heels they might be elevated when the hips are tight that's perfectly fine but once you have them as far back as you can then you can reach your arms forward and fold down to the floor so wide-legged child's pose for me is fairly easy but it wasn't always that way so when I was a little bit tighter in my hips one thing that I like to do is to keep my knees a little bit closer in together so if the knees are too wide for your range of motion you'll feel feel tension and pinching in your low back which we never ever want so you're better off bringing your knees a little bit closer and then what you can do instead of having your big toes touching you can just put a block in between your feet and then let your hips sit up on a block you can even stack a couple of blocks so that you have some support there and as you reach your arms forward if you're not completely able to lower down to the mat having another block under the forehead or under the chest can be one way that you can make the pose a little bit more accessible another way to modify and do a wide-legged child's pose differently is to just do it lying down on your back it's really the same thing so pulling your knees instead of directly into your belly you would keep your big toes together and then you would just widen your knees and try to draw them in towards the armpits and towards the shoulders so just holding something like this is a really effective way to start to increase the flexibility in your hips and in groin pose number two that I think every Yogi should be doing on a regular basis this is my actual all-time favorite yoga pose I don't go a single day without doing it and that's on jasana low lunge so this one is great to increase the flexibility in the hip flexors so more at the front of the hips and if you suffer from low back issues if you spend most of your day sitting down which is you know what most of the population really does low lunges are a great way to help relieve stress in your lower back while also improving your hip flexibility so this is another one that's super simple and that yogis at any level can practice from your tabletop pose you can step your right foot forward to the top of the mat so the feet and legs are hip with distance apart you're stacking your right knee over the top of your ankle some schools of yoga do um say that it's okay to let the knee go uh forward especially if you're really open for some people it works I'm not really the kind of teacher that says definitely do one thing and definitely don't do something else we all have different bodies but for me I know that it is best if I keep my knee directly over the top of the ankle and then you're letting your hips press all the way forward and down and just either sinking here so if it's more of a yin aanaa you would not contract your muscles and you can either keep your fingertips on some blocks directly on the floor or you can make this more of an active pose by squeezing and hugging the legs into the midline lifting up a little bit higher and what we want to avoid is this deep curve in the lower back so you're lengthening the tail bone down slightly drawing the low belly in and from here moving to press the hips forward and down so just because I could sink my hips a lot lower does not necessarily mean that I want to I actually find that I get a better stretch if I lift myself up a little bit and really work the core from here and maintain the integrity and you should be able to feel a really great nice deep stretch in the front of your left thigh so super nice great for all levels and you can use some blocks if you need to if you need to modify for any reason so for a lot of people this is difficult on the knees of course you can pad your knees but an alternative that's fairly similar is to do it reclined pulling your knee into your chest or even taking your half happppy baby pose so if you look at the way my legs look right now it's a very similar shape that I'm creating and you will get a little bit into the hip flexors but I definitely prefer low lunge to this option third pose is lizard and there are a couple of different ways to do them um so some variations of lizard pose Target the inside of the groin others will go more towards the outer hip and into the glute which is the one that I kind of prefer the most and want to show you today similar to your low lunge except that we're not stepping the foot forward in between the Palms we're going to step the right leg to the outer edge of your hand so the feet are a little bit wider both Palms are to the inside of that leg so option one in lizard is to do it more like a low lunge keeping your knee over the front second and third toe knee over the ankle holding from here and maybe even lowering down onto your forearms or onto a block if flexibility permits it my favorite way to do uh lizard pose is by flexing the front foot and then rolling to the outer edge so the blade of that foot so the sole of my right foot is no longer touching the mat I'm really rolling to the outer edge what's important is that I'm flexing at the ankle here so that my hip my knee my ankle they are all rotating the same degree this is where people get in trouble with their knees their hips and their ankles are doing one thing but the knee is doing a complete opposite thing and then we wonder why we have knee pain so it's super important that you keep flexed here and then you're pressing the hips forward and down you should feel a really great stretch in the outer hip and then you can lower down on some on your forearms on your blocks or just all the way down to the mat really really really great stretch and you can even add onto this one by taking a quad stretch by bending into your back knee and pulling it in and this is a pretty intense hip opening assana pose number four is one I'm sure most of you are very familiar with and this is Pigeon pose or what we call Swan pose in Yin Yoga so I'll show you two different ways that you can do pigeon depending on your level of flexibility let's start with the traditional variation of pigeon pose the one that you've probably seen the most often so from tabletop pose you'd be bringing your right knee behind your right wrist now students immediately usually ask me do I keep my heel in close or am I trying try to get my foot over towards your left hand and the answer is it depends for me my hips are open so it's no problem for me to get my shin parallel to the top of the mat and then just slide my left hip back and hold the pose here however for a lot of people if the hips uh if the hip is not really open enough or if you've had some tears ligament tears in your knee this might not be appropriate for you which means that you would keep your heel close to the groin and work your pige and pose from here so so if I turn just to give you a different angle option one so the one that I normally do is I get my shin parallel to the front of the mat I level out my hips and I can either hold here and fold or another option when you're just kind of working your way in is to keep the heeling close and then work the pigeon pose from here and fold it down so let me come back to the top of the mat one thing that I'd like to point out that happens often in Pigeon pose when your hips are tight usually the hips will not be touching the mat which is totally normal don't worry about it however I find that when that happens it's a lot easier if you just grab a block and prop yourself up on a block so you're kind of closing the gap between your hips and the floor that way you can maintain your integrity in the pelvis another thing that tends to happen is that we're going to roll over onto the glute and onto the hip of that bent knee if my right leg is forward I want to keep the weights and keep some grounding action into that left hip so everything is facing the front of my mat and then I can fold it down if you have any kind of hip knee ankle or even low back injuries or if the range of motion just isn't there yet pigeon pose might not work for you so you can do reclined pigeon instead some people call this eye of the needle so reclined pigeon feet are flat on the mat knees are bent and you're just crossing your right ankle over the top of your left knee again I'm flexing my right foot because I'm trying to protect my knee hip knee and Ankle are all doing the same thing this might be enough or you can reach through with your arms either hold on to the back of the hamstrings or the front of the shin and then pull it in honestly it is the exact same stretch deep into the glutes and deep into the outer hip just like your pigeon pose except that there's way less stress on your joints you can also just prop your left leg and left foot up on um against the wall so that you don't even need to use your arms or you can even do the same thing with a block so if I put my left leg I can just elevate a little bit on a block and then the upper body can relax so you can make this a bit more of a passive pose pigeon is amazing at increasing your hip flexibility pose number five is a standing pose and it's Warrior 2 so Warrior 2 is nice and simple right foot forward left foot back if I have my right toes pointing to the top of my mat I want my left foot to be parallel to the shorter edge of my mat this is true for most students some students will find that it feels better if they have their back foot turned in and then my front heel is aligned to the middle of my back arch and then you bend into your front knee arms go out so Warrior 2 probably a post that you're really familiar with but this is one of the best ways that you can increase your hip flexibility but also really maintain the Integrity in the joints so if you're only ever focusing on stretching and improving the mobility in your joints you can also lead your way into some injuries so we also want to practice some poses that require us to really properly engage the muscles around our joints so that we can stay really healthy this way and um just find some balance in our practice so if my arms are out I'm bending into my front right knee I'm trying to squeeze into my glutes to push that right knee open what tends to happen with students in Warrior 2 is that the right knee collapses inwards towards the big toe remember hip knee ankle all always in the same line always doing the same thing so if my hip is open my knee is going to push open and it's going to drive directly over that second and third toe so that I'm directly over my ankle knee directly over the ankle another thing that tends to happen in Warrior 2 is that it feels like the feet are pushing away from each other instead think of squeezing and hugging into the midline a tiny little bit of a micr bend in your back knee is a great idea as well so holding your Warrior to is awesome if you wanted to make it even harder you can do humble Warrior where you dive to the inside of that right leg so really getting deep into that hamstring or sorry deep into that hip if you wanted to make it harder still um one pose that I do in my Hips Don't Lie video here on YouTube for example is to walk the hands towards the center of the mat and then I would use my right hand to actually push that right knee open so this one is a little bit more passive a little bit less active it is a super super deep stretch probably not appropriate for a beginners beginners just stick to your regular Warrior 2o but if you feel like you want to amp it up just lower down and use your hand to push the knee open wider and you are definitely going to feel it so that's it yogis those are my top five favorite hip opening yoga poses but like I mentioned at the beginning of class there are you know dozens and dozens and dozens of others that you can do in your yoga practice to increase hip flexibility things like um fire log pose or knee pile gasana moloa frog pose these are all amazing happy baby all great to open up your hips but I find that if you just stick with these basic first five and you practice them regularly and consistently you should really start to see a difference in the mobility and also the Integrity of the pelvis and integrity of the hip joint so hip joint if you think about it it's a ball in socket right so we don't only want to focus on opening the outer edge of the hip we also want to remember to go to the inner Edge as well as the front of the hip which is why we do some lunges some pigeon poses child's pose all of that so we're really tackling the whole thing from all Corners let me know in the comments down below what your favorite hip opening yoga pose is or if you plan on practicing any of these more consistently on a regular basis to increase your hip flexibility if you don't already please do It's a Wonderful way to support free yoga on the internet and that's it for me today thanks so much for for watching namaste