Our Bodies Need Yoga! By: Alison King tigges

If you have ever taken class or a training with me, you know I cannot get enough of anatomy, especially when it comes to yoga and how our bodies move.  I have been at this long enough to know that not everyone shares my passion.  In my pre-yoga days, I had no desire to learn human anatomy.  In college and grad school, I studied political science and criminal justice.  This is all to say, interests can change!  AND, as I often say when training yoga teachers, you do not have to love anatomy, but you should care about it and try to know something about it, as it is nearly impossible to teach a good yoga class without some knowledge of anatomy! How can we fully understand poses and sequencing otherwise? 

This year, I have been taking an online 300-hour anatomy course with Christina Sell and Tiffany Denny.  IT. IS. SO. FUN.  Its been such a great mix of reaffirming what I already know and am teaching, as well as learning some cool new stuff.  

A huge takeaway from my training thus far is this principle: Our tissues respond and adapt to the forces put upon them.  This isn’t just my opinion.  Its literal physics.  Its science.  I have been thinking about this a lot and what this means in terms of exercise and movement, specifically yoga asana (asana = poses).  

We come to the mat with all sorts of drama in our bodies.  We are humans and due to patterns of activity or inactivity, we are going to have some pain and discomfort!  There is of course a wide range of what this means and the degrees of severity.  I think early on in my teaching, if someone said “this hurts, what else should I do?”, my go-to was to have them skip it or rest.  Take a child’s pose or lay down.  The drawback to that approach is, what if that pose is good for us to do?  Is skipping it altogether really ideal? After time and more study, that answer evolved and has become “Well, this pose might not be good for them to do, so how can we do something similar but have it be less painful or difficult?”.  This approach really applies to the principle above!

Let’s take a common example: wrist pain in yoga.  Super common.  And it makes sense right?  Humans are not typically weight bearing on our hands in daily life.  We did not evolve that way.  So it is a challenge!  And we do A LOT of it in yoga.  Down dogs, planks, arm balances, inversions, you name it.  There are certainly people with true, acute wrist injuries who need to skip it, do it on their forearms or fists etc.  REST IS NOT BAD! However, how are we ever going to get better at weight bearing on our hands if we never actual practice weight bearing on our hands?  Childs pose or savasana is a temporary band aid, but the next time down dog rolls around, you are in the same conundrum.  Sometimes the line between pain and “this is really hard” gets blurry.  

The truth is, we make some extreme shapes in yoga.  It is up to the individual to modify if needed!  It is also up to the teacher to be well-trained enough to disclose that to people.  However, If we look at the fact that our tissues respond and ADAPT to the forces we place upon them, that means we can often overcome these challenges!  We just have to do the thing.  So maybe in the case of wrist pain, we still weight bear in the wrists but we put our knees down in plank.  OR if we do go into a child’s pose (this is not a shame child's pose blog, I love it!), we keep our arms active, and continue to press hands into the mat AS IF we were in down dog.  

This principle is not new.  It's how we grow and build muscle in weight lifting, it's how we learn to play new sports with practice.  Our body can adapt and learn and grow, given the right stimulus. Our body is designed to bear loads in lots of different ways.  BUT every body is SO different so ultimately, we have to be safe and listen to it.  Oftentimes it turns out, we can do more than we think we can.