How to move your arms and shoulders easily into bound lotus postures
The following two minute video is an extract of one of our lectures on the applied anatomy of yoga showing how you can practically use the information to make your yoga better.
Essentially the video shows you how to make it easier to for a relatively stiff person to get into a position like binding the arms in the lotus position or a for more experienced practitioner to do a more advanced posture like the Paripurna Matsyendrasana Bianca Machliss is demonstrating in the photo below.
The lecture explains how shoulder joint movements are inter-related and that if you want to do something like reach your left arm to grab the left foot in a half lotus posture (or any similar simpler or more complex movement) then it is generally more effective to turn your shoulders outwards first, then reach your arm behind the back (which brings your shoulder blades closer together) and then turn your shoulders inwards to complete the posture. This is counter intuitive because the final posture has the shoulders turned inwards. So most people will tend to try to achieve this posture by beginning with turning the shoulders inwards and then reaching their arms behind their backs. However, if you begin the posture in this way you will not be able to reach quite as far. In other words if you begin the movement with the shoulder turned inwards then that will make your shoulder blades move away from each other and make the final pose harder to reach.
To understand the theory behind this you can see the more extended four minute version of this lecture below and you can see how by understanding these ‘associated movements’ of the shoulders you can enhance many posture and movements and prevent mistakes from happening when learning or teaching yoga.
To learn more please join one or more of our Yoga Synergy courses on Practical Applied Anatomy and Physiology of Yoga:
