A few months ago, a Facebook discussion on hyper-extended knees got me thinking about a stable knee. I didn’t post on the thread, because it was difficult to condense my thoughts. Then I made several attempts at the video posted above. None seemed adequate, but if you follow it, I think you’ll get the gist.
Then today, a student asked me why he couldn’t get into the twisting forward bend during Tadasana sequence. The question seemed to be about releasing a tight hip, but it was really about stability and freedom. He needed to let go of a gripping glute muscle that was providing false stability, to find true stability in the smaller, deeper muscle. Then the glute would be free to stretch into the position. As it was, that posture was literally holding the body hostage.
The student was going into a common pattern in which people squeeze their glutes forward and push the knees back. The glutes start doing the work of stabilizers. Then when we want to side bend, they can’t stretch because they are contracting. What’s more, when we do an action that needs the glute muscles to contract, they feel weak or immobile. They’re not weak, they’re unavailable. The glutes are doing the job of the deep stabilizer muscles, leaving them unavailable to do the work for which they were designed.
As you follow the video, remember, there is an ease in true stability. It is not gripping into a hard body. That ease is the small muscles working to hold a position leaving the large muscles available to move freely. The stable knee is at the heart of this concept. But the simple exercise of pushing your feet into the floor and moving up is the soul of it. You have to allow the posture to find itself rather than pushing and pulling forward and back to force the position.
Years of doing something out of alignment can freeze us up in two ways. One way is habit. The old path feels right and it’s hard to step off of it. The other is physical. The old movement pattern has created physical imprints in the body, that may be slow to change. You might have developed the pattern because various reason, like, for example, an overly rounded upper back. This “kyphosis” is essentially a tight chest. When you push your ribs up and forward and your hips chest remains tight, you just shifted the bones to look better. Sometimes this postures misaligns the low back and hips. When you stop the shifting, it may reveal true tightness. Changing that won’t be immediate.
True change requires patience and practice. Brute force will accomplish nothing and may create a new issue.
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