Palms Off From The Floor

This question was earned through a lot of sweat. I love the introspective analysis, and being able to articulate the sequential movement/effects in your body and through time. With a practice like hot yoga (and perhaps others) a person has to behave like an Archaeologist (being alone in dark caves...).

Bernadette- let me ask you a clarifying question: are you saying that you had previously been "using [your] arms at a very early stage (during set-up) to push [your] body up". After doing that for 3 weeks, you stopped using your hands to push up? Having now not used your hands at all in practicing, you are wondering about lifting them up off the floor to "really really really :)" not use your hands ?? Is that your question?

Without knowing the answer to Bernadettes specific question, I would emphasize the following to a reader: this posture is about the lower back. More specifically: creating a compression there. Why and How are 2 different things (it is important to point this out too). In terms of "how", in broad strokes, the answer to "create a compression in your lower spine" is found in the Dialogue. After setting up the posture (the setup IS the posture!), the first step (lift) uses 100% of the back strength. This is so a person uses all of what they think the have. Then, as the posture advances, verbal instructions are given for 1) how to re-focus the effort back into the lower spine, and 2) gives instructions for how to get "more than they initially thought they could".

Zooming in again to Bernadettes question about "hands". A generic answer could be: how is whatever you are doing affecting the intention of the posture to create a compression in the lower back? 

Hi Bernadette, great question! Sounds like you are quite close to doing it the traditionally correct way. Here are the traditional steps:

1) Lift up using all of the spine strength that you have today. At this point your hands should be touching the floor, but not doing any work. Your goal is to lift up until your elbows look like a 90 degree angle, which you can use the side mirror to check once in awhile. (Sounds like you are basically doing this step correctly, just that you don't need to lift up your hands. Traditionally we don't take the hands off the floor, because they are used to push up a bit in the posture- see #2.)

2) Almost no one can lift up to 90 degrees using only their back strength. So, after you max out your back strength, THEN use the hand to boost yourself up to the 90 degree angle. 

3) From the 90 degrees, you'll be able to get the most optimal contraction of the lower back muscles. Once you get there, see if you can mostly use your back strength to stay up that high. It's ok if you are using a bit of arms too, but put the priority into contracting low back, glutes, and thighs.

4) It is not cheating to use your hands IF the intention of using them is to get you to a high enough angle to get the best possible lower back contraction.

Common tendency: most people do not come up high enough. It's important to come up high enough to get the low back contraction. 

...good intuition! 🙂

Dear Oleg, Dear Jasmin,

Happy Tuesday!

Thank you so much for your great feedback. Greatly appreciate!

Oleg – in reply to your question, YES, I am using my arms at a very early stage. ☹ Actually, at the very first step ☹ to totally not using my hands/arms at all.

Fully understood that it is a “violation” of following the teacher´s step by step procedure (how) to do it. Could be human instinct or me targeting how to get into the posture, regardless of how you do it, and ignoring the instruction. --- my stubbornness.

But after attending several classes of Oleg (again, nothing against with the other teachers, I was just stubborn )  where he deliberately emphasized the importance of following the step by step way of getting to the posture, and it is not how deep you get to the posture but on how you sustain to be in the posture, and as also mentioned “ the set-up IS the posture”, my perception of each pose changed and became cautious on every movement. 😉😊

Specific on Cobra Pose, I kept on targeting to use first the back strength before the arms. But I always failed to meet my target and recognized it at the middle of the posture (and whispering to myself “you used your arms again early”) . Could be the muscle memory. ☹

As a self-corrective action, in order for me to prevent it, I did the process of elimination --- in order to eliminate/prevent the use of my arm at the very early stage, I lift my hands off from the floor.

Moving forward, thanks for the tips and hints, will focus on it and see the differences on my next practices.

Cheers,

Bernadette

Hi Bernadette,

yea, great to hear the progress!

I dont see anything wrong with what you describe in terms of lifting your hands up a little bit for the sake of helping identify the back muscles. You can play with this for a few months: lift the hands minimally off the floor until you develop a firm connection with the back muscles. Then, once you can reliably access the muscles of the back to lift yourself up (in the beginning of the posture), return back to not using your hands at all (in the beginning).

keep us posted 🙂