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

Then pull your fingers apart to the halfway point. Then stretch it to its full limit. You have just demonstrated three stages of stiffness: (1) resting tension, (2) semi-tensioned, (3) fully tensioned. Beyond the third stage is the “elastic limit”, past which the band either tears or breaks.

Somewhere in this thinking is the notion that a hamstring has ‘become short’, a hip has ‘become stiff’ or the core has ‘become weak’, as if these areas have an independence from the rest of the human being and have decided to behave in an unhelpful way. This is nonsense. If an area of the body appears tight or weak or stiff, it is generally because

It was originally thought that Golgi receptors (Fig. 9.3) respond to slow stretch, such as would be achieved through Hatha Yoga postures. However, it has been shown that this happens only when muscles are being contracted at the same time as they are being stretched (see Fig. 8.6), because of the way the Golgi receptors are organised with the myofa

Our fascial form rests in tension, pre-stiffened, as the network of our matrix, at the middle phase (Ch. 8). This gives us the ability to expand globally and squeeze globally.