Your Body, Your Yoga: Learn Alignment Cues That Are Skillful, Safe, and Best Suited To You

In general, we can propose the following philosophy on exercising joints: 1. When a joint is bearing a load, restrict its range of movement: stiffen the joint—engage the muscles. 2. To increase a joint’s range of movement, move it to its natural limits when it is not bearing a load: relax the muscles.

Rather than dogmatically insist that no one should ever feel a stress in the tendons, it may be more skillful to teach your students to differentiate between healthy stress and what it feels like, and unhealthy stress and the pain that usually accompanies

The relationship between stress and strain determines a tissue’s stiffness, which can be either elastic or plastic. Up to a certain level of strain, the tissues can rebound back to their original length: that is elastic. Past the tissue’s yield strength, the tissue behaves plastically and remains stretched.

Each cell’s membrane (the outer wall of the cell) is studded with tens of thousands of proteins, called integrins, that reach up into the extra-cellular spaces and connect to the fascial fibers there (see Chapter 3). These integrins sense mechanical stresses in the environment, and based upon the strength of the stress, the cell makes different dec

Some teachers, out of concern for their students’ safety, will caution, “Always bend your knees and never flex your spine when you do a forward fold, otherwise you will stress the vertebral joints,” or, “Never do Pigeon Pose, because you will stress the SI joint.” While these instructions or similar warnings are intended to help and protect student

The arrangement of the fibers of the first three ligaments are key in restricting movements (see figure 2.23). They are jointly called the capsular ligaments and

When stiffness is deliberately created, a joint cannot move through its full range of motion. To exercise a joint (so as to strengthen and thicken its joint capsule and associated ligaments and fascia), and to improve a range of motion, it is best to stress the joint when it is not bearing a load—when it is relaxed. It can be quite dangerous to com

Ball-and-socket joints (also called spheroidal joints), such as the hip and shoulder. Here one bone

There are many variations of PNF, but one that shows arguably the best success is called reversal of antagonists (or, more popularly, 3S—scientific stretching for sports). The 3S protocol uses the process of pushing against a resistance (either a machine or a partner) to engage the agonist muscle while it is in a lengthened position; then, while th