Finding Your Potential
You know that pesky stuck place or nagging ache or shooting pain you encounter almost every time you practice?
Almost all of us have a few, whether it's the hamstring that protests when we forward bend, the sacroiliac joint that tweaks whenever we twist, or a twinge in the lower back when we backbend.
And if you're a teacher, you probably have a few students who present you with similar problems—pain or immobility issues that haven't gone away no matter what modifications or props or rehabilitative program you've suggested.
Now imagine you could get help with all these puzzling issues from a famed physiotherapist, a hands-on magician who has helped rehabilitate some of the the premier dancers of the last 30 years (think Mikhail Baryshnikov and Mark Morris).
That's the opportunity we had in the teachers' track at Yoga Journal's San Francisco Conference when kinesiology expert Jean-Claude West presented his seminar called "Seeing Bodies."
West focused on teaching us specific details about body mechanics so that we could deepen our knowledge and intuition in making adjustments, not just to our students but to our own poses as well. "I hope you can enhance your visual perception of your students' asymmetries and of their potential—their structural potential as well as their functional potential," he said.
As a rough guideline, you can think of structural potential as the movement range your skeleton allows. Every body is a little different; some people are capable of the extreme turnout required for world-class ballet dancers, but many of us can never develop it, no matter how hard we try. Functional potential, on the other hand, is the movement options your soft tissue allows and supports, and is much more amenable to change.
Jean-Claude began by focusing on the hip joint. "The hips are a key," he said, "because they affect everything above and below them."
If you want to forward bend efficiently and to the end of your range, he said, the head of your femur bone must glide back in the socket. And for that to happen, your femur head needs to rotate internally in your hip socket. In turn, your ability to internally rotate can be limited by tightness in your deep external hip rotators (and, secondarily, by tightness in the posterior part of your pelvic floor). In fact, the body doesn't have any muscle that actively creates that glide of the head of the femur bone. Instead, it comes entirely from letting go.
All that might sound quite abstract, but Jean-Claude grounded it in hands-on testing functional testing and then in specific asana work.
To assess someone's internal rotation, simply have them lie facedown on the floor. Bend their knee to 90 degrees; then, with one hand on the sacrum, gently use the other hand to move the upraised foot out to the side until you encounter resistance and the whole pelvis starts to move, rather than just the leg.
Almost all of us discovered that we were quite asymmetrical. In other words, we had a lot more functional mobility on one side than on the other. And that meant that our deep external hip rotators were much more able to release on one side than on the other.
We then applied this knowledge to Warrior I. Many yogis have a hard time creating a basic alignment of the pose: squaring both hip points so that they face forward. In trying to bring the front-leg hip back, however, we often tend to engage the external hip rotators, when in truth they need to let go. Most of us in Jean-Claude's seminar instantly discovered more freedom and better alignment when we concentrated on allowing the sitting bone of the forward leg to feel as though it were moving away from our midline.
Jean-Claude emphasized that often gross muscular corrections aren't the best way to train the body. Often much more subtle invitations to release, like this release of the external hip rotators, are the best foundation for efficient and effective movement.
Jean-Claude's seminar was full of such specific work, but if I had to boil down his message to one general point, it would be this:
Yogis should strive to work within the true current movement potential of our joints, rather than striving for the external aesthetic of the pose.
If you focus on producing the most efficient biomechanical actions in a pose, your body will eventually strengthen and open in optimal ways. If you push for the outer form of the pose in ways that ask your body to greatly exceed its true movement potential at a given joint, you'll instead recruit the movement from some other body part, and avoid the slower, more patient, more conscious—and safer and healthier—movement that will truly deepen your practice.
Comments
Does anyone know if there are books or workshops taught by Jean-Claude West. This blog has made me want to see more information and ideas from his teaching!
MINDY
Posted by: mindy | January 15, 2006 10:24 AM