This blog is part of a series about the hips. So far, we have covered three out of the six movements of the hip joint. We began with flexion and extension. In the last blog we discussed external rotation. There are three more movements of the hips to cover in this series. They are: internal rotation, adduction and abduction. Let's look at internal rotation. This is a very small movement that occurs when your femur (leg bone) rotates in toward the center of your body. It is far less common than the prior three movements. It is not a movement worth working on to any significant degree. Rather, it's just beneficial to be aware of. Muscles of Internal Rotation We do not have a muscle dedicated to internal rotation of the hip. That is why this movement is not particularly powerful or coordinated. Instead, we have a few muscles that aid in internal rotation. These are smaller muscles that do other jobs in the body. These muscles include the tensor fascia latae and two adductors. Depending on what position the body is in, they can work together to internally rotate the hip. Let's take a closer look.
It is not surprising that when we discuss about hip adduction, these will come up again! Their main job is to adduct the thigh, which means to pull the thigh toward the centerline of the body.
However, if the hip is externally rotated to begin with, the adductors can help bring the thigh back to a neutral position. To say this another way, from a neutral position the adductors will not internally rotate the hip to a significant degree. It is when the hip is already externally rotated that the adductors will help to internally rotate. Conclusion Remember, internal rotation of the hip occurs within a small range of motion. It isn't a movement that is particularly coordinated. Rather than develop it in your body, be aware of it and use it to inform and bring clarity to your understanding of the other movements of the hip joint.
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2020 has been an incredibly yogic year.
By that, we mean that it’s been a time where we’ve been forced to question or change our patterns of behavior and take a deeper look at our desires. To a yogi, these are great blessings. We may think that our actions are important, but far more interesting are the desires that lead to action. Desire itself is always something to investigate. For thousands of years, yogis (and Buddhists) have recognized that desire is a cause of suffering. Therefore, they teach the removal of desire as a means to spiritual liberation. We can only confront our desires when we recognize them. Most of the time they lie low beneath the surface of our awareness. A time that forces us to recognize desire is helpful. It may not be pleasant, but it is beneficial for yogic progress. Beyond desire, 2020 has been a time to recognize impermanence. Not only did many of our patterns die, many of us have lost someone we are close with, or lost some of our (perceived) comforts. These again are great teachers on the yogic path. Finally, self inquiry is inherent in philosophical systems. The Upanishads and Bhagavad Gita teach the nature of the self, the Buddhist Nikayas teach the idea of non-self, the Yoga Sutras examine the relationship between consciousness and matter. For centuries, inquiry into the true nature of the self has been a part of human existence. This is because incorrectly identifying the self is also a source of suffering. In a year like 2020, we’ve been stripped of things we identify as self. Our customs, patterns, habits have been interrupted. The crisis we have felt is our sense of self being pulled out from under us. To a yogi, this is incredibly useful! We never needed those patterns in order to be who we are. We simply are. This blog is part of a series about the hips. The next movement of the hips we will explore is external rotation. This movement is subtler than flexion or extension. However, external rotation plays a big role in yoga practice. External rotation of the hip is needed for challenging postures like Leg Behind the Head, but is also needed for all seated postures. For this reason it plays a big role in enabling pranayama and meditation practices. It is a physical skill that is needed for practices that take us beyond the body. Muscles of External Rotation External rotation is when the leg bone (femur) rotates away from the body. There are a lot of muscles that facilitate this motion, and any one of them can give us trouble. These muscles include: piriformus, quadratus femoris, two obdurators and the gemelli. (The gluteus maximus also aids in external rotation.) External rotation is not particularly difficult when standing. Most of us have no problem pointing the toes of one or both feet out to the sides. However, this action is complicated quite dramatically once we had hip flexion.
Seated postures like Lotus can become problematic because the knee joint is much less stable than the hip. If we attempt to sit in Lotus without being able to do so safely, the knee tries to compensate for tightness in the hip.
In cultures that sit on the floor, external rotation is not a challenging movement. For those who sit in chairs, this movement is much more challenging. It can take time to develop this skill. This blog is part of a series about the hips. The second movement of the hips we will explore is extension. Extension is when the front of your thigh moves away from your pelvis. The main muscles of hip extension are the gluteus maximus (butt muscle) and the hamstrings. Unlike quadrupeds, humans walk upright. So, one of the strange things about the hips is that they are already in extension while we are standing. We don't have much range of motion in the hips past 180 degrees. What might feel like hip extension beyond that, often begins to incorporate the spine. Let's look at the muscles that extend the hips. They are the muscles that work in a posture like Locust, or when we stand up out of Chair. They also work in poses like Balancing Stick or the back leg in a Lunge.
The second main group of muscles that extend the hip are the hamstrings. There are three main hamstrings. They are the semitendinosus, the semimembranosus and the biceps femoris.
In Practice In yoga poses, these muscles often work to stabilize the pelvis. For example, in the standing leg of Balancing Stick, both the hamstrings and the gluteus maximus are what hold the pose. It's common to hear that tight hamstrings are the cause of trouble in Balancing Stick. However, it's quite the opposite. Weak hamstrings are the issue. It is important to recognize the muscles of hip extension and strengthen them. Unlike the hip flexors which do not need to be strengthened, strength in the hip extensors should be cultivated. They are big and powerful muscles. Especially in cultures that tend to be sedentary, they are often underdeveloped. This leads to further imbalances in the body. This blog is part of the series about the hips. The first movement of the hip we will examine is flexion. Technically speaking, flexion is movement in which the anterior surfaces of the limb move toward each other. Simply put, it is when the thigh moves closer to the upper body. The hip flexes often. When we walk, jump or run, our hips flex and extend over and over again. This is a natural movement and one that isn't difficult for our body to comprehend. Let's look at the muscles in the body that make this motion possible.
Finally, the sartorius is a very long and thin muscle that runs from the pelvis to the tibia (shin bone). It is the longest muscle in the human body! It is perhaps the lesser known of the "hip flexors" but can play a moderate role in flexion.
The muscles that flex the hip are not huge, powerful muscles. Aside from addressing any significant imbalance, it is not particularly useful to focus on strengthening this part of the body. Instead it's usually worthwhile to work on developing the muscles that extend the hip. This will help lengthen the hip flexors. In day to day life, the hip flexors are often in a shortened position. This has to do with how much we sit on a regular basis. When we sit, the hip flexors are short and they tend to stay that way even when we try to lengthen them. Back discomfort often comes from tight hip flexors (the psoas in this case). Tight hip flexors can also keep us from back bending affectively.
The hips are a big focus in asana practice. We may have heard instructions like open the hips, breathe into the hips, compress the hips, decompress the hips, or stabilize the hips. All of this begs the question, what are the hips? And what should we be doing with them?!
Let's start with the basics. The hip is a joint. This is important. It is the point of connection between the head of your femur (leg bone) and your pelvis. The hip joint has a relatively big range of motion, allowing us to walk, jump and move our legs forward, back and to the sides. It can rotate internally and externally, though in a much smaller range of motion than the previous movements. To complicate things further, the hips usually work in a combination of movements. Because of the various ways in which the hip joint moves, there are many muscles or areas of the body we could be referring to when we talk about the hips. We will examine these in detail in the next few blogs. Before that, let’s consider a few other ideas about joints in general. Any and all joints in the body are moved by muscles. Muscles move the body. Bones sustain the body's weight. Joints serve as connections between bones which enable us to be something other than a concrete statue. Since joints need muscles to move, it’s not possible to affect a joint without using muscles. A cue to engage, stretch, or lengthen a joint can therefore be misleading. This may seem like splitting hairs, but our ability to understand the way in which our body moves is what gives us freedom in our practice. If we know exactly what we’re trying to do and how, progress comes easily. Over the next few blogs we'll look at the different movements of the hips and how they relate to postures. As students, we do not know what our teachers know. That is why we are a student. In order to learn, a teacher tells us something beyond our understanding. Then over time, we practice, study and integrate the information. As we do this, we have to balance our own consideration of the new information with the fact that we may not yet understand what we are learning.
Eventually, the information should make sense to us. We should know why we are doing what we're doing and how it works in the body or mind. This is where it becomes important that we don't just repeat words or actions without understanding the deeper meaning of them. A good test is to check whether we can articulate the purpose of a certain posture, for example. Can we explain what the purpose is and how it is accomplished in the body? Can we back up our answer with greater anatomical understanding or textual support? To articulate this on our own, it means we can't just repeat what we've heard without it making sense to us. We have to truly understand. As students of yoga, we should all seek to understand what we're doing. We should look to multiple sources to see how they correspond to each other, continue to question our understanding, come up with further areas to investigate or practice. Of course this will take time, and that's ok. Yoga is a practice, not a destination. This is part of a series of blogs called Practice Tips.
As we expand our understanding of yoga, the amount of practices expand with us. We become aware of pranayama, meditation, more postures. We realize we could study texts, philosophy, or anatomy. Quickly, we realize there are so many directions we could go in. How do we choose? There is no right or wrong answer. The best thing to do is to follow our interests. Choose what we are excited about and what intrigues us. The best practice is the one that we'll do. If we choose to focus on something that we are interested in, chances are we will actually come back to it on a regular basis. If we choose something that we should do, but don't care much about, chances are we won't. This is not to say we should never practice something that we don't like. Of course, we should develop areas of weakness either in our practice or our understanding. But we need to be careful. We shouldn't choose only the things that we struggle with, if it will make us give up the practice entirely. If there is a posture that excites you, practice that one everyday. If you're taking a class and the teacher doesn't include that posture, practice it after the class. Commit to your own interests and develop them. If you are interested in an old yogic text, start reading. Take it page by page. One interest leads to another. Over time, we end up with experience in many different areas. But this doesn't happen all at once. Choose the practice that interests you today. The right practice is the one you'll do. Therapeutic exercises are simple movements of the body that take the major joints and muscles through their functional range of motion. They are not fancy or particularly beautiful to look at, but they are quite useful to keep the body strong, mobile and painless.
These exercises are the basis for the yoga method taught at Ghosh's Yoga College in Kolkata, India. They are central to the goal of building and sustaining health. Because modern life is full of imbalances — lots of sitting, hunching and looking at screens — our bodies and minds get out of whack pretty often. We get tight hips, tight lower backs, achy necks, tight shoulders, etc. Most often, these tight achy areas are directly linked to an imbalance in a major joint. On the opposite side of the tightness is weakness. We use these Therapeutic Exercises as precisely as we can to target the issues in the body. Some exercises are good for balancing the lower spine — like the Torso Lift and Leg Lift — while others are good for balancing the upper spine — like Cobra and Full Locust. Still other exercises are useful for balancing the hip — like Squatting and Hip Hinge — or the shoulders — like Butterfly or Chest Expansion. After years of consideration and discussion with the Ghosh family, we are finally releasing a book that contains more than 40 Therapeutic Exercises. We try to explain the use of each exercise as precisely as possible, both what it does in the body and what imbalances it is good for. At the end of the book are a handful of practice sequences. You may know that 'sequences' are unusual in therapeutic yoga, as each person is different and gets a unique prescription. But we have identified a few of the most common issues and imbalances and provided sets of exercises to target them. We truly hope that this book will be useful to you, whether you are a beginning student, have an injury, are a yoga teacher, a yoga therapist or a historian of this method. The book is available for preorder here. It will ship on December 7. This is the first in a series of blogs called Practice Tips.
When we start learning a new skill, it's brand new. We know nothing about it. Once we start learning a little bit about it, all of the sudden we know something. Even if it's the smallest piece of information or one brief experience, we just went from nothing to something. This is a big jump. For example, when we try a new posture for the first time, it's really exciting! In that moment we go from never having done it before, to having direct experience of it. That is why in the beginning we can feel like we're growing so much. We feel like we're gaining so much experience and understanding even if what we are doing is challenging. Then we plateau. We start learning about technique. If it's a posture we're working on, we might start to realize we're lacking understanding of anatomy. We might realize we have no idea how to breathe in the pose, or what the goal even is. All of the sudden we feel like we know nothing. We feel lost. This thing that we've been working on is showing us just how far we are from proficiency. All the sudden what we think we know comes into question. Be careful here. This is not getting worse! This is what it can feel like to get better. In this moment, we get a glimpse of understanding beyond the level we're at. This is where we expand our understanding. This expansion is illuminating where we have room to grow. This is the very expansion that can and will push our practice forward. Embrace it. We will always have moments where we feel like we don't know anything. Of course, this is not the case. We know what we know. If we continue on, we will expand what we know. This is what it means to practice. |
AUTHORSScott & Ida are Yoga Acharyas (Masters of Yoga). They are the head teachers of Ghosh Yoga. This blog is about their experience with yoga practice, study and teaching.
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