Yoga Asana Series - #1 Tadasana

Welcome to my first post in this series of yoga postures. 

As you know I am studying to become a yoga teacher and to help me in my studies I am going to write to you about the different yoga asanas that we know & love/hate 😉 

We will begin taking apart the well known Surya Namaskara (Sun Salutation) piece by piece and working our way through the asanas. Sun Salutations are for everyone. They warm up the body, loosen out the muscles, joints and aid you in connecting with your life force, your breathe. The first one is always an eye opener and you may curse at yourself for being so stiff. We can't all be as flexi as this gorgeous bear 😍 

There are a few different variations of Sun Sals and we will be going through the basic. 

As time goes on and you learn the names of the postures, you will come to love them and relate to them much more. Animals creep into the names a lot along with references to nature such as our first pose.

I will be using skeletal style pictures for many explanations because I am a geek and personal trainer who likes to strip away the layers of the human body to find out more more & more 😵💪

I hope you enjoy and please comment, share and discuss!

Tadasana

(Ta-daa-sana)

 (Mark Stephens)

Mountain Pose. A standing posture. A grounding posture. This asana brings awareness to the stable foundation you have in your body. You feel the support your feet give you, your legs, pelvis, spine, all the way up to the tip of your head!

I will give you a little check list below that you can run through in your head as you work from your feet to your head.

Feet

• Focus on balance 
• Distribute weight evenly between all corners of your feet (front, back, inside and outside)
• Bigs toes together, thumb size gap between heels

Legs & Pelvis

• Lift the knee caps and contract the quad muscles

So when we say this, we mean lift/squeeze/contract the front thigh muscles as seen in the below picture ( no. 9 & 10 )

• Slight internal rotation of the femurs (thigh bones) to broaden the space between the pelvis 

The feeling of this will be like contracting/squeezing your adductor muscles (inner thigh no. 8 ) slightly.

Try it now. Stand up, feet together, standing nice and tall. Now lift your knee caps as you squeeze your thighs upwards while SLIGHTLY rotating them inwards. You can feel the difference straight away. Legs locked on. Strength building in such a simple posture! Result 😍

If you tend to have anterior pelvic tilt (shown below), this may restrict you slightly so you want to focus on stretching your glutes (bum) more and strengthening your hip flexors and core.

Study Tip 💡

For any yoga teachers in training out there, the way I remember the anterior and posterior tilts are:

Anterior = front, falling forward. So your front hip bones tilt forward

Posterior = Back, falling backwards. So your front hip bones tilt backwards.

Okay shut up Elisa and get on with it 😀

Spine & Torso

• Lightly engage abdominals

Notice how your upper body magically lifts. By engaging our core muscles we are protecting our lumbar spine and helping to stabilize it.

• Once we are slightly engaged in our abdominals we lift slight, tucking our lower ribs in allowing our floating ribs to soften naturally.

Did you know we have floating ribs? Pretty cool I think!! (Don't puke 😂)

Shoulders & The Heart Center

• Lift your chest, heart forward
• Shoulder blades drawing down to blanket behind your heart

This motion creates ease in the neck by drawing your shoulders down and releasing any tension in your neck.

• Broaden the collar bones. 

A good way to get this is by shrugging your shoulders to your ears, draw them back and slowly bring them back down as you bring the shoulder blades together.

And last but not least......

Neck & Head

• Ears in line with shoulders
• Draw the chin slightly forward and slightly down.... don't look down. Just a slight tilt to lengthen out the back of the neck.
• Opening the crown of the head to the sky, standing tall.

We want to maintain this integrity in the body throughout our practice and our day to day lives. We slouch too much as a society so once you start feeling the benefits or correct alignment, you will catch yourself when you sit incorrectly. I do it all the time. I tend to slouch a little and suddenly I'll feel it in my lower back saying to me NOPE, sit up straight!!!

So the benefits of this posture:

• Body awareness
• The feeling of body alignment
• Feeling imbalances or tightness 
• Strengthening legs
• Lengthening spine
• Increased concentration
• The ability to restrain from fidgeting haha

Try stand in Tadasana without fidgeting.... not an easy thing to do 😉

Next up will be....

Uttanasana, a personal favourite of mine!

Let me know how you enjoyed this. Do you enjoy the anatomy and learning about your body? 

Looking forward to hearing from you. You can catch me on Instagram or Facebook! 😄

Love & light,

Elisa x

References:

Teaching Yoga - Mark Stephens

The key muscles of yoga - Ray Long

https://www.studyblue.com/notes/note/n/upper-extremities/deck/5418298

http://www.infobarrel.com/The_Amazing_Structure_Of_Shoulder_Joint_Anatomy

https://neurospine.wordpress.com/challenging-issues/