Smart Yoga: What Your Yoga Teacher Won’t Tell You That You Should Know
Smart Yoga: What Your Yoga Teacher Won’t Tell You That You Should Know
I like to hop around to different studios and take classes in different styles and see what’s up. I love tapping into the vibe of different tribes of yoga and communities, seeing new teachers and familiar faces alike. And even as a senior teacher of 20 years, I always learn something new!
But occasionally I cringe when I hear a verbal cue that could injure someone. I’ve had my fair share of injuries along the way, some of them from athletics, some from yoga. One of my missions is to help yoga professionals prevent unnecessary injuries from yoga.
The cue I heard went something like this: Pull your knee into your chest until you feel pinching and pain in the hip joint.
Simply put, this is bad advice. I bristled inside and purposely did not follow the instructions. But I worried, How many follow along not knowing the potential harm?
Tip: Never practice yoga that causes pain in a joint. NEVER, even if the teacher tells you some convincing reason to do it or scolds you. And, if you have pain in your hips, you’ll want to read this important article on impingement.
Now let me know here if you have any other burning questions about what NOT to do in your yoga practice. 🙂
Love and brilliance,
Laurel
“In the beginner’s mind, there are infinite possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are but few.” – Shunryu Suzuki
One Response to “Smart Yoga: What Your Yoga Teacher Won’t Tell You That You Should Know”
3 THINGS I WISH MY YOGA TEACHER HAD TAUGHT ME
1. How to recognize the difference between good pain and injurous pain.
The message I got was, “Ohh,hee hee, pain good”. Not all pain is good and students need to know how to recognize what is good pain that will push them a little further, and what is pain that means STOP.
2. The signs of “over-training”.
We live in a culture where we are encouraged to push overselves- No pain, no gain. I had never heard of over-training and, unfortunately, learned about it the hard way. My yoga practice made my healthy body weak with messed up cortisol levels and depleted adrenals.
3. Expectations.
The best gift a yoga teacher ever gave me was to say, “Take two weeks off”. This may sound silly, but students look to their teachers as authority figures. What the teacher says, is what they do. (At least those up us with lots of fire, and pitta, and a desire to be a straight A student). Make the expectation clear. That may mean saying something like, “take two weeks off” even though it seems logical that if someone were tired and hurting they would choose to do that on their on. You’re the map until the student finds the terrain.