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

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.

Remember, one model posits that the purpose of our ligaments is to restrain a joint from moving too far and damaging itself. However, we have seen that often, our range of motion and mobility is too restricted; we are not in danger of going too far—we are suffering from not being able to access our natural and normal range of movement. The only way

Ligaments do not become tense only at the extreme range of the joint’s movement; when the muscle tenses, the tendon and the ligaments both undergo stress. This stress may restrict our full range of movement long before the joint has reached its limits.

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

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.

With strength-building exercises, we can coax the body to add sarcomeres, which will result in longer muscles and thus a greater range of motion.

Like tendons, ligaments are made up of fibers, but unlike tendons, the fibers in ligaments are not linear or lined up along one axis of stress. Instead, they are arranged in several directions, depending upon the variety of forces acting on the ligament.

Articulating, or hyaline, cartilage has a very low coefficient of friction (it is five to 20 times more slippery than ice!154

When we are stressed, when we are sick, we lose physical mobility. We have all noticed this—when you have a cold or the flu, you feel stiff. You ache and cannot move as easily as you usually can. You have stiffened up and your body has become tight; there is tension all over. We can now start to understand why. One of the above mentioned cytokines