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

universal aesthetic cues for alignment fail to protect students from danger in yoga postures. We will also discover that, due to the nature of human variation, an alignment cue that works well for one student may be harmful to another, while another alignment cue thought to be dangerous for all students may be benign or even beneficial for some.

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

FIGURE 1.52 The shoulder joint uses only rolling when a little abduction occurs but includes sliding as well when the movement is larger. The knee requires a similar motion, as shown in figure 1.53. When the femur flexes over a fixed tibia, it rolls downwards, but the condyles slide forward on the tibial plateau. When it extends, it has to roll up,

We can generalize and say that muscles are elastic, which means that after the stress ends, they return to their original length, while ligaments and tendons are plastic, which means they won’t stretch very much at all; but if the stress exceeds the ability of the material to resist stretching, they will remain stretched. This is a generalization,

Is the tension you experience when you reach your edge in a yoga pose due to the makeup of your fascia? Maybe. And, just as our fascia is uniquely constructed, so too are our ligaments and joint capsules. All these tissues have the capacity to contract, and that capacity is uniquely determined by nature and nurture, by our biology and our biography

Rolling and sliding often occur together in a joint movement, again to maximize surface area contact. This happens, for example, at the knees and at the shoulders. As shown in the shoulder example in figure 1.52, when the humerus is abducted to the side, it rolls in the shoulder socket, but it also slides down a bit so that the surfaces stay in con

With a little stress, it may stay at that original length, but it will become taut. With a bit more stress, now it starts to stretch. The amount of stretch it undergoes is called the strain, usually measured as a percentage of its resting length. The ratio of the stress to the strain is called the material’s stiffness, as shown in

anytime we refer to the hips or movement of the hips, we will mean movement at the hip joint or hip socket. Another anatomical term that we will use interchangeably for the hip socket is acetabulum.

while we are moving—for example, when we flow through vinyasas or through Sun Salutations (Suryanamaskar); this creates dynamic loading of the tissues, sometimes called cyclic loading.