Yoga Pose of the Day - Ustrasana, Camel Pose

Transcript

hi everyone john holt here at inspired by purpose to bring you your pose of the day today's pose is a back bending pose called ustrasana or camel pose it's a bend so it's a heart and chest opener we stretch all through the front of the body including the abdomen the hip flexors the quads and we strengthen the back body there's lots of ways that we can support ourselves here and different variations that we can choose so i'll go over a few of those now now the common or the traditional pose is kneeling so you're on your knees knees about hip width apart shoulders rolling back and down because remember this is a back bend so when we're going to go into a back bend we want to think about the two things that we really want to think about for alignment to keep our back safe and happy we want to think about the shoulders and the pelvis for the shoulders we don't want them rounding forward it's a chest opener as we bend back so we want the shoulders back and down squeezing shoulder blades together this is the upper body movement whenever we really go into any back bend now the pelvis what we want to pay attention to here is that we're not taking the tailbone back some of us tend to stand or kneel in this position where we have a little bit of what's sometimes called sway back where the tailbone goes back and the abdomen comes forward a little bit now if you're going into a back bend and you maintain this position and then i bend back there's going to be a lot of crunching through the vertebrae a lot of compression through the vertebrae and that can actually be painful so what you want to do is take the tailbone through the legs tucking the tailbone lift the chest hands can be on the low back we're squeezing the elbows together and then you can push the chest the pelvis forward as you lift the chest and the keys goes up you can hold here with support on your hands on your hips or if you wanted to you could even use a chair by bringing your feet through the chair just like i have it and the forearms come down to the chair you could also lift the chair up if it feels like it's a little bit too low you can bring it to you by adding a blanket or a pillow or something think about popping up through the chest squeezing the shoulder blades together and the hips move forward you could also if you're ready for a deeper variation of the pose you can try taking your hands all the way to your heel so i'm going to move this chair back slightly and i'll show you what that looks like now if you're just starting out you might tuck the toes and what that does is it brings my heels up a little higher hands are going to go back to my low back so then i can check out and see if the tailbone is pushing into my hands then i know i need to round it through shoulders up back and down elbows squeezing together push hip forward lift up through the chest so we want to find lots of space through the lower back you can help prevent collapsing or compressing by lifting up as you go back now once you've gone back about as far as you can go you can start to reach for the heels if you wanted more you could work on reaching for through the heels with the feet down to come out this is important you want to bring your hands back to your low back squeeze your abdomen so it's abdominal strength when we come out of our back bends we need to use the abdomen so you really want to think about using these strong muscles of the abdomen to come out of your pose you can also do a hands-free or a wall variation the hands-free variation would be taking your hands to your chest to your heart and then you think about puffing the chest up toward the thumbs and then slowly the ghee starts to go up pushing my tailbone under pushing my hips forward and i can start to guide my way back as far as feels appropriate for me today if you wanted to play with it a little bit more you could face your back to a wall and you could work on bringing the hands to the wall now what we want to do is keep pushing the hips forward and remember the tailbone you don't want to be pushing it back to the wall you want to push the hips forward roll the tailbone through and push it forward so we're looking for that pelvic tilt here to help create our back bend when you come out it's the abdominal strength to come out one more variation you can also do this standing and you can have your hands to your low back shoulders up back and down hips go forward chest goes up and back a nice little back bend to that you can bring into your day here and there when you have a moment taking a little bit of pressure off the spine or you could do it with the hands lifted up overhead remember your pelvic tilt and your shoulders here to help help press the pelvis forward look up or even the hands to the heart so that was our pose for the day hopefully i give you enough variations to play with and find something that works for you but if you have any questions or comments feel free to drop them below i'm happy to look at those after your back bend you might want to take a little forward bend you could take a little child's pose bringing the chest over the thighs or a twist is also nice any variation of twist is nice to relieve any tension from the spine if you have any questions let me know i hope to see you here in center or online very soon thanks so much for joining me today