Yoga Injuries - the Origin of YogAlign

Transcript

[Music] [Music] so [Music] hi i'm michelle edwards i'm the innovator of a style of yoga called yoga line welcome to the yoga line youtube channel i'm here today to talk about yoga line and why i invented it because a lot of people ask me that question i've been doing yoga for 40 years practicing yoga and i've been teaching yoga now for 25 years and doing body work for 25 years as well i was injured from the practice of yoga and my neck and knees were hurting i was having to see a chiropractor my back would just go out and spasm and i was very flexible but something wasn't right and i was injured doing arda padma uttanasana which is where you go into half lotus and you reach around and hold your foot and then do a forward bend and the ligaments in my knee were damaged and torn and it took me over a year to heal and besides that a lot of my bodywork clients told me that they couldn't do yoga because they couldn't touch their toes with their knees straight or i began to hear about more and more people that said that they were getting hurt doing yoga so i went into my studio and just decided to just take everything i'd ever learned in yoga and really just look at it from a functional anatomical perspective like what is this really doing where is this leading me because in the process of studying yoga philosophy it's about discernment and about asking yourself what is what is the outcome of this action where is this action leading me and having that introspective and that discernment helped me to create yoga line and one of the things that came to me uh was that we don't uh walk without bending our knees we don't walk like this we have to bend our knees to move and it turns out our knees and our lumbar spine are actually like springs and they're held together by ligaments and when we sort of put the brake on on our knees and try to do things like bend over into a forward bend um your wind up you're stretching the springs the the forces that hold your your ligaments together and what i've particularly seen happen is that that can get overstretched in the knees and in the sacral platform to a lot of yoga practitioners have a lot of s i joint pain cycle pain and that sort of thing so the thing that's fun about yoga line is it never hurts and it's all simulated around how you actually use your body in real life for instance in real life when you go to pick something up that's on the ground it's really much better to bend your knees take your hips back pick up and and use your legs and your glutes not ask your spine to bend and and to torque so one of the reasons why some of it so many of us are in pain and feeling like we need to do yoga and stretch is because we spent a lot of time sitting in this and the the chair puts us in a right angle position and the human body is made of curves and roundness our spine is made of beautiful curves every part of the body is cylindrical or round or curving so when you try to put our shape into this right angle it doesn't feel good nobody likes sitting in chairs there's news stories now about how the office chair is killing you and that sort of thing so when i sit here it kind of pulls my head forward i try to let me try to take a deep breath it's hard to breathe deeply here my breathing process weakens but if i sit on the edge of the chair and let my knees be lower and not use the back of the chair which puts the curve back on my lower back look i can breathe in i can use my spinal muscles and keep them strong because one of the reasons why so many people in the western world why there's so much pain in the human body is because our deep core muscles that are more associated with breathing they are very much dormant and weak because the back of the chair has been holding us up so the the hallmark the main points in in yoga line are keep the curves in your spine bend your knees to simulate movement and use breath to get your core muscles on because when we do things like put our feet together and draw our tailbone down and these sort of things this creates a lot of unnecessary tension that we don't need and so the practice of yoga is really about ridding yourself of obstacles whether it be mental emotional or physical tension so yoga line is really fun it's the emphasis is on posture not doing poses and it just really gives you quick results so stay tuned in my next video i'm going to talk more about yoga injuries and we invite you to tune into our website yogaline.com our youtube channel and also i've written a book and published a dvd that you can get on amazon if you want to get the whole manual on how to do yoga line and feel free to email me with any questions or comments and aloha and hope to see you soon [Music] [Music] [Music] you