YOGA DOESN'T PULL! (well) | Anatomy & Kinesiology of Yoga Explained

Transcript

[Music] in this episode we're going to be talking about how yoga doesn't pull really in a practical sense yoga does not train upper body pulling and we're going to explore the anatomy and we're going to look at some poses and we're going to explore you know a counter argument to this statement and how well certain poses do technically train the pulling muscles and it does that matter is that enough we're gonna find out in today's episode [Music] real quick my name is anthony davis this is shapeshift wellness where we explore the science of fitness yoga and meditation i do have educational courses that really explore this stuff in greater depth on my website so go check that out and if you like this kind of thing now let's learn about yoga and pulling today so to start off last week i released a video called why you need to push and pull and it's exactly what it sounds like the simple short version is that in order to have a well-balanced training uh or exercise or physical activity program basically if you just break it down and make sure that you do some pushing and some pulling in your upper and your lower body you're going to be you know strong in all of the necessary ways at least that's going to be sort of a minimum viable product for physical fitness yoga however which a lot of people are you know would make the statement that yoga is a complete physical fitness sort of activity and that you don't need to do anything other than yoga and you would be perfectly healthy i would really argue against that i would uh however i would encourage you to do yoga if you love it i love yoga yoga has amazing amounts of benefits for many many many reasons however it has weaknesses it has flaws and one of those is that it does not adequately train upper body pulling muscles so let's look at pulling let's look at the anatomy first so if we look at the anatomy what we see is that upper body pulling largely speaking is going to be involving the back muscles and also your biceps so your lats your traps your rhomboids your rear delts your levator your biceps okay so all these things if you were to pull a door open then you are going to be using these muscles or if you were to do a pull up you would be using uh many of these muscles and especially your biceps in the case of a pull up or a chin up so if we take this a little bit further and we look at well what are some really good ways to train pulling so let's start off with if you really want to target these muscles your lats your biceps your traps your rhomboids especially those kinds of muscles we if we really want to train those then what is the best way to do it um and get the most bang for our buck well pull ups would be a very good way to do that any kind of rowing would be a great way to do that a rowing machine is fine you could use a barbell or dumbbells and you could do a bent over row you could do an inverted row so if you like body weight you can simply grab bands or a bar or something like this upside down and basically pull yourself towards the bar this is different than pull-ups because pull-ups uh tend to especially depending on the grip you might be able to get your biceps more um and the inverted row is uh generally going to target more of your lats so then if we look at yoga what is the best we've got and i don't think we really have anything good for pulling in yoga but we do technically train our lats in a couple of poses down dog depending on how you do it and where you press into you could do it in a way that is a pulling activity or you could do it in a way that is not a pulling activity it depends reverse plank you could use your lats so let's take that concept a little bit further here let's add some arrows of directionality so if you're in down dog like this individual and you are pushing your hands down into the floor if you are pressing your hands down into the floor then down dog becomes a pulling activity because your lats their action is to bring your hands from an overhead position down by your side and then even back into what we call extension of the shoulder joint the glenohumeral joint so if you're pushing your hands down then downward facing dog could become a pulling activity in order to do that however you have to resist with your hip flexors otherwise you would be pulling yourself forward into a plank because if you really activate your lats if you significantly activate your lats in downward facing dog then you will no longer be in downward facing dog by virtue of using the strength of your lats which would pull you into a plank so you cannot use your lats in a significant way in downward facing dog because if you did you would no longer be in downward facing dog next let's look at a reverse plank this one's actually a pretty good one um i think this does this is a good way to train your lats i think in yoga uh or any kind of bodyweight activity so basically because you're you're pressing you're trying to slide your hands backwards and so that presses your heart and your hips up to the sky and that is creating the action in the shoulder joint that we call extension and that is the main function of the lats in fact you're even if your fingers are pointing forward you're even kind of internally rotating your shoulder joint and that really targets the lats so this would be a really good way to train the lats if you wanted to get even more out of it and really train the lats then you would want to take your shoulders and rather than stacking your shoulders directly over your wrists you would want to actually offset it so you would have your wrist slightly in so your wrists would be more under your thoracolumbar junction basically the bottom of your rib cage so you would place your hands more like right here for this person and then your shoulders would be further back than your wrists and that creates a moment arm between your shoulders and your wrists where um you have to use your lats more if you did the opposite where your shoulders are in front of your wrists or your wrists are behind or further back like you're really in hyper extension of the shoulder joint then you would be um actually no longer using your lats uh to in a significant capacity you would be more likely to default to using your like anterior deltoids in that it's weird it flips because of where your shoulder is in relationship to your wrist so if your uh wrists are closer to your feet than your shoulders then you're really doing a pulling activity okay so if you wanted to target that now um another uh a viewer proposed this method in my last uh video and this i thought this was a good idea um this is gonna be sort of like an idea of self-imposed pulling so basically to start a downward facing dog you're pressing your hands into the floor activate your lats and like i said if you really activated your lats then what would they do they would pull you forward into a plank or in this case a chaturanga and then an upward facing dog if you kept pulling and pulling and pulling with your lats and you were really using your lats you would pull yourself into upward facing dog eventually so why not take advantage of that fine press the lats and you know press the hands into the floor use the lats activate them as much as you possibly can and use that pulling um inertia if you will create some inertia and then use it to move forward into a pla chaturanga and then into an upward facing dog so you could do this however i will point out again this is a very very low load activity because you are having to self-impose the natural forces of gravity versus your body weight in this case physics is not really on your side for creating a lot of force in the lats or in the the pulling uh muscles on the back in this activity so this is not in my opinion a very good pulling activity but it does accomplish a sort of more energetic pulling motion so you can kind of fake it but it's not in my opinion a really significant way of training the lats now what about the biceps in yoga do we train the biceps ever because all the poses i've mentioned before are we can kind of fake some pulling but it's really about the lats what about the biceps well some people have proposed that in utita hasta para gustasna and par parangustasna here that you are using your biceps because you're trying to pull you're trying to bend the elbow here and pull your foot towards your chest here or in this case you're literally grabbing your big toes and pulling your heart towards the floor and here with bent elbows that you would be there for using the biceps and yes that is technically true however there are a couple major problems with this one is that if you were pulling so hard that you were using your biceps in a genuinely significant capacity if you were using so if we want to build strength we have to use what we would consider at least 70 but more like 85 of your maximum voluntary contractions so the hardest you could squeeze would be 100 you need to be squeezing with at least 85 percent um really at least seventy percent to get any kind of significant strength gains in a muscle so in this case if you were squeezing with your biceps with eighty-five percent of your maximum voluntary contraction then you would be really really forcing yourself into a forward fold in a way that i would really question the safety of that practice so generally we don't want to force ourselves into uh hypermobile poses we want to use our active strength to get there in this case this is a way of forcing yourself incredibly deep especially if you were using it in a capacity that is strong enough to really train your biceps you would be in my opinion forcing yourself into unsafe ranges of motion um so i i don't think this is a good way to train the biceps although you do technically use the biceps in this pose and beyond that i wouldn't even practice these poses um not the way that they're practiced in ashtanga or other forms of modern postural yoga i would much more like in utita here i would encourage you to try you know maybe you grab the toe for a second just to see where your passive range is and then you let go of the foot and see how high you can hold it chances are that you drop the foot very significantly chances are you drop the foot at least i don't know 20 degrees probably probably a lot more than that so that would prove that you don't have the strength to control that range of motion in which case i would encourage you to train more of your active strength and yes you can hang out in your passive sometimes but uh if you're not trying to close the gap of active to passive i have another video on that if you're getting confused here so the point is hypermobility forceful hypermobility don't do it there's no reason to ever force yourself into anything and if you're using your biceps to do it then that's a stupid plan now beyond that let's look this is the second problem is if even if we did if we ignored the hypermobility aspect and we said look you know we are using our biceps in both of these poses that's definitely true um the most we could possibly get out of this really in yoga especially the most we could get out of this before this becomes a risky activity if we compare the contraction and the biceps to something like doing a pull-up or doing um a preacher curl or or a biceps curl or something like that now i don't care if you don't like lifting weights that's fine i'm just trying to show you the ends of a spectrum here you don't have to lift weights that's that's perfectly fine but i just want you i want you to see two really classic examples of how to really put force in the bicep to force the bicep to get stronger and when we compare that to these yoga examples they're just laughably inadequate right the yeah these do technically use your biceps but it's so um minute the the effects on the biceps are very very very little compared to other much more effective strategies for training your biceps so it doesn't have to be pull-ups it doesn't have to be bicep curls it doesn't have to be those things but i want you to start thinking that if you're not really training your biceps then how can you do it you know do you can you do it in yoga or do you have to maybe consider doing some other activities outside of yoga and i would encourage you to cross train i would encourage you not to be a specialist not to simply do yoga i would encourage you to do lots of different kinds of activities for a well-rounded human body so as a reminder here basically when we zoom out and we look at the big picture here the big picture is that yoga is great at upper body pushing we're really good at using our front body muscles our chest or anterior deltoids or serratus chaturangas or crow poses or plank poses right you know our our arm balances also are going to use a lot of our chest muscles so and shoulder muscles right but we don't use our back muscles um but so yoga is really great at upper body pushing but it is terrible at upper upper body pulling it is just really not good at upper body pulling so um i didn't throw it in this powerpoint but another option that you can use for um upper body pulling is because we're trying to train our back muscles so the back muscles is uh you know you can lay down on the on the ground and do basically superman's or you can do eyes t's and wise um where you basically lift off your arms from the ground in various positions with your face uh facing down on the ground that's another good way to do it so there are ways to start to incorporate more pulling types of activities in yoga but as it is in modern postural yoga in most yoga classes yoga does an absolutely terrible job of pulling but we do a really good job of the other side of the spectrum and if yoga is trying to teach us balance then i would encourage you to have balance both mentally and also physically in your practice if you're doing a physical yoga practice so thank you for watching please comment if you have other suggestions for how to enhance your yoga practice with more pulling activities or if you disagree with me please i'll respond to you in the comments and i will do it respectfully so uh please comment there like thanks for watching see you next time [Music]