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

Some researchers are suggesting that deliberately stressing a tendon may be therapeutic when that tendon is injured, or to avoid injury in the first place.

In advising how to train an elite athlete, Stuart McGill, a medical researcher of lower back disorders, notes, “Each person has different proportions of body segment lengths, muscle insertion lengths, muscle to tendon length ratios, nerve conductance velocities, intrinsic tissue tolerances, etc. . . . Imposing a stereotyped ‘ideal’ technique will o

If compression were bad, every massage therapist would be out of work, and walking would be one of the worst forms of exercise. We need to compress tissues in order to stimulate the body at a cellular level. Compression stimulates healing. Take bones, for example: we have known for over 100 years that bones can be coaxed into growing thicker and st

(whereby in the face of imminent danger, we freeze or faint), or, especially in women, a tend-and-befriend response (whereby in the face of danger, we seek out the company of others120). Such responses are adaptive; they help us to survive, and they helped our ancestors avoid

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

Mechanoreceptors sense stress. When we apply a stress to our body, whether through movement, posture or gravity, through tension or compression, through yoga or other exercise, through massage or through daily living, the stress reaches and affects our cells.

FEET: Women have a much wider range of foot movements than men, which may be a result of how much time our ancestors spent in trees. Girls, not boys, are the better tree climbers and spend more time playing on monkey bars at the playground. It is speculated that our early ancestors had a difference in gender preference for spending more or less tim

we mean if these two people have the same tensile resistance on the front side of their body—for example, if their stomach muscles are equally flexible.

It is dangerous for a yoga student to think that she can do any pose to any depth if she tries harder, and the risk of injury is made worse when the teacher believes the same thing. Our bones are as unique as anything else in our body. Depending upon their shape, structure and orientation, we will be more or less able to move as others do.