Online Mentorship and Courses in Yoga Anatomy
Here’s a comprehensive guide to getting more comfortable in Malasana Plus, if you scroll down far enough, 7 Steps to Better Ankle Mobility We at Yoga Anatomy Academy love malasana and are on a mission to make this deep squat more accessible to more humans. The motivation is this: a large chunk of what we […]
The Instagram is full of fluid movers, yogis who can gracefully place a foot between their hands in slow motion, usually on the way down from a single arm hand balancing feat with a glass of wine between their toes. Not a drop spilled. What is less common: actual instructions in yoga class on how […]
The rotator cuff (RTC) is a well-known group of muscles that are important in stabilizing the shoulder, basically no matter the activity. When it comes to keeping the arm bone centered in the “socket”, these are the guys for the job. The larger the weight or force that an arm lifts, the more important the […]
Francesca Cervero kindly invited me to be a return guest on her podcast, The Mentor Sessions: Support and Strategy for Yoga Teachers to talk about HIPS, specifically yoga hip injuries. (If you missed the first episode on anatomy-informed yoga, you can listen here). Francesca and I both experienced major hip injuries, as in the kind […]
Teaching anatomy for yoga practitioners is about much more than relaying the nuts and bolts (muscles and bones). In order to understand anatomy in the context of the vastness of yoga, we must understand how yoga, yoga classes, and yoga teaching influence bodies and fit in to a larger conversation about the intersection of yoga […]
Julie Tran of Science Yoga Sundays graciously invited me to speak on her program. I chose a topic that has been on my mind a LOT lately — Are we serving the yoga or is the yoga serving us? “We are here to enhance our lives, we are not here to bow down to some […]
In case you haven’t noticed, yoga is undergoing a revolution. This revolution is a natural ricochet from dominant paradigms of physical asana practice that have included: 1) overly prescriptive alignment and/or 2) lack of alignment plus excess repetition, but that 3) in nearly all cases discouraged critical thinking, deviation from your teacher, and incorporating modern […]
One of the first principles of teaching anatomically sound asana is this: Any yoga pose can harm; Any yoga pose can heal. For example, Tadasana (Mountain Pose) can reinforce poor postural habits, or it can build strength. Headstand is likely to cause excess pressure on cervical vertebrae, but may also be a skillful way to […]
Amid the growing awareness that yoga asana is not always an infallible and complete physical workout, has been a tendency to dismiss certain poses (for example: wild thing, sleeping pigeon, chaturanga) as culprits of injury. The real culprit In reality, the culprits of injury — no matter the physical pursuit — are excessive repetition of movement […]
Have you been practicing yoga for a while, and feel frustrated that you can’t get your heels to the floor in downward facing dog pose? There are a few reasons why heels-to-floor may not be happening for you. First let’s remember that Downward Facing Dog demands a ton of joint motion: approximately 45 degrees of ankle dorsiflexion (top of […]