Online Mentorship and Courses in Yoga Anatomy
As the founder and primary teacher at Yoga Anatomy Academy, one question that I occasionally receive is “You aren’t listed under Yoga Alliance’s YACEP. How can your courses qualify for continuing education credits?” This post is meant to answer that question and to explain what YACEP (“Yoga Alliance Continuing Educational Provider“) is, what it is […]
Do we really need to be spooked about letting our heads drop all the way back in yoga? A doctor of physical therapy explains why it might not be as dangerous as some teachers make it out to be.
Recently I read a social media post of someone who wrote that they were having pain while practicing yoga asana. Specifically, that the pain came on while he was doing downward facing dog pose. The post sparked a lively discussion in the comments. What surprised me was that the vast majority of commenters recommended that […]
Is it true that we “need” the yoga poses we avoid the most? Or is that total balony along with being bad advice?
Earlier this week, I threw as much evidence-based information as possible into the free-but-sold out webinar about hip pain and yoga, “Hip Stability is the New Hip Opening”. I backed up my claims with citations. I spoke about nuance and bias. (For example, does “yoga” hurt people or is it the mindset and paradigm of […]
This may be controversial, but, despite the fact that I’m about to teach a sequencing workshop: I don’t think it’s a bad thing to “just wing it” when teaching yoga. Decent yoga teacher trainings offer their trainees class formats to follow. Most yoga teachers therefore have a reliable foundation for improvisation. Granted, most of us […]
We aren’t ever really “squaring the hips”. Your two hips are on either side of your pelvis, where the pelvis and upper leg bone (the femur) meet. On the mat, what we mean if we are using the words “square the hips”, is to “square the pelvis“. This more accurate phrase typically means bringing the […]
My most recent blog post, How Our Obsession with Yoga Alignment Misses the Point, is the product of a massive paradigm shift that was at least a decade and a half in the making. Despite the indisputable fact that yoga helps many people, asana can cause harm, and is not universally “good”. Yet the idea […]
For many yoga practitioners “alignment” is synonymous with “the best way to practice a pose for injury prevention”. But this perspective is strange for a practice that is considered fundamentally healthy. Why are so many of us so motivated to turn our toes to a certain angle by the fear of injury from yoga? People […]
View this post on Instagram A post shared by Yoga Anatomy Academy (@yogaanatomyacademy) As an avid student of yoga since the mid-90s, I have heard many yoga teachers say that boat pose, also known as navasana or paripurna (full) navasana, was a core pose. This always confused me because, in my own body during navasana, […]