WEBVTT
00:03:59.264 --> 00:04:00.724
Welcome back to the podcast.
00:04:00.734 --> 00:04:03.464
I'm Monica, and I'm so glad you're here.
00:04:03.716 --> 00:04:13.711
Here is where we talk about anatomy, injuries, the nervous system, and answer a ton of questions that you wish had been included in your yoga teacher training.
00:04:14.020 --> 00:04:21.318
I'm a yoga teacher who specializes in helping teachers work confidently with students who have pain and injuries.
00:04:21.718 --> 00:04:29.012
I facilitate anatomy trainings for yoga teachers, and I mentor teachers inside my six-month mentorship program.
00:04:29.296 --> 00:04:41.661
And anatomy is one of my favorite things to teach because I have watched it completely change how teachers see and understand their students' bodies in their classes.
00:04:41.985 --> 00:04:51.526
Today, we're gonna bust three myths about anatomy that shape the way a lot of us cue, often without realizing it.
00:04:51.754 --> 00:05:06.125
And the reason this matters so much is because when we cue a movement, we are usually assuming that every student in class can perform that movement if they just try hard enough or practice long enough.
00:05:06.338 --> 00:05:14.397
But that assumption is often wrong, And I think we're talking about this more in the yoga world, which makes me so happy.
00:05:14.663 --> 00:05:31.235
Sometimes a student cannot do what we're cuing, not because they're not trying, not because they're not flexible enough, not because they need more time, but because their actual skeletal anatomy does not allow for it.
00:05:31.524 --> 00:05:51.978
And when we do not understand that or take it into consideration, we can end up cuing students toward positions their bodies will never achieve, which at best is frustrating for them and at worst can push them into compensatory patterns that can lead to even more challenges.
00:05:52.197 --> 00:06:13.544
So today we're looking at three specific areas, the knee and whether it is really just a hinge joint, the ankle and how its range of motion affects standing poses like warrior I and warrior II, and the hip socket, along with the length and positioning of the head and neck of the femur.
00:06:13.831 --> 00:06:27.115
By the end of this episode, my goal is for you to see these joints differently, and I want you to start cuing with the actual skeleton in mind rather than an idealized version of it.
00:06:27.492 --> 00:06:34.122
Before we get into the three myths, I wanna be clear about how I decided on the topic of this episode.
00:06:34.326 --> 00:06:49.442
Alignment, as we usually teach it, is a set of ideas about how a pose should be organized, where the joints should stack, what angle a limb should make, how the body should be arranged in space.
00:06:49.802 --> 00:06:53.293
And alignment cues can really be useful for this.
00:06:53.302 --> 00:06:55.972
They can help students find stability.
00:06:56.182 --> 00:06:58.002
They can help distribute load.
00:06:58.232 --> 00:07:00.643
They can help to keep students safe.
00:07:00.939 --> 00:07:02.829
But here is the problem.
00:07:03.002 --> 00:07:10.019
A lot of alignment instruction was built around an idealized generic body type.
00:07:10.220 --> 00:07:21.879
And when we take alignment rules that were built around that imaginary average and apply them to the wildly varied bodies in our room, they don't always fit.
00:07:22.187 --> 00:07:23.836
Sometimes they fit fine.
00:07:23.996 --> 00:07:27.146
Sometimes they fit some students and not others.
00:07:27.466 --> 00:07:35.002
And sometimes they ask for a movement that a particular student's skeleton simply cannot do.
00:07:35.310 --> 00:07:40.582
When you think about it, anatomy is the reality underneath alignment.
00:07:40.793 --> 00:07:46.153
And when the two conflict, anatomy is gonna win every single time.
00:07:46.382 --> 00:07:51.322
So let's take a look at a few examples of where they conflict most often.
00:07:51.735 --> 00:07:56.265
The first myth is that the knee is purely a hinge joint.
00:07:56.515 --> 00:07:58.755
We describe it that way constantly.
00:07:58.964 --> 00:08:04.856
The knee bends and straightens, flexion and extension like a door hinge And that is largely true.
00:08:05.057 --> 00:08:16.545
The primary movement of the knee is flexion and extension, and the knee is not built for the kind of free rotation you find in a ball and socket joint like the hip.
00:08:16.901 --> 00:08:19.901
But it's not only a hinge joint.
00:08:20.139 --> 00:08:29.308
The knee actually has some rotational capability, and understanding this changes how you think about a lot of poses.
00:08:29.580 --> 00:08:35.690
When the knee is flexed, meaning bent, it has access to some rotation.
00:08:35.904 --> 00:08:42.855
The tibia can rotate relative to the femur to a certain degree when the knee is bent.
00:08:43.070 --> 00:08:47.230
This is a normal, like built-in feature of the joint.
00:08:47.562 --> 00:09:03.079
There's also something called the screw-home mechanism, where in the final degrees of straightening the knee, the tibia rotates slightly to lock the joint into a stable extended position.
00:09:03.322 --> 00:09:07.133
so rotation is part of how the knee functions.
00:09:07.267 --> 00:09:10.236
But why does this matter for your teaching?
00:09:10.403 --> 00:09:19.517
It's because when we insist that the knee should never experience any rotation at all, we misunderstand the joint.
00:09:19.742 --> 00:09:23.903
The nuance is not that the knee should never rotate.
00:09:24.232 --> 00:09:31.192
It is about where the rotation is happening and whether the joint is loaded and stable when it does.
00:09:31.533 --> 00:09:37.052
The real risk in poses is not rotation of the knee in the abstract.
00:09:37.232 --> 00:09:53.873
It is rotational stress on a knee that is bent and bearing weight while the foot is planted, particularly when the rotation is being driven from somewhere else, like the hip or the foot, and the knee is caught in the middle.
00:09:54.027 --> 00:09:59.906
Think about a standing bent knee pose where the hip wants to rotate, but the foot is fixed.
00:10:00.206 --> 00:10:07.456
The knee becomes the place where that torque gets absorbed, and that's where we need to pay attention.
00:10:07.690 --> 00:10:09.950
so the useful reframing is this.
00:10:10.259 --> 00:10:27.818
Stop thinking of the knee as a joint that must be protected from all rotation and start thinking about it as a joint that has some rotational capacity which needs to be respected and not overwhelmed by forces coming from above and below it.
00:10:28.053 --> 00:10:42.334
Cue for a stable tracking knee in loaded standing poses and give the hip and ankle the freedom they need So the knee is not forced to absorb what those joints should be handling.
00:10:42.642 --> 00:11:03.778
The second myth is more of an assumption than a stated belief, and it is this: We assume that every student can achieve the same ankle position in standing poses and that if they cannot, it is a flexibility issue they will eventually stretch their way into.
00:11:04.197 --> 00:11:14.624
So let's talk about ankle range of motion because it has a huge influence on standing poses, and it varies a lot between people.
00:11:14.858 --> 00:11:25.011
The movement we care most about here is dorsiflexion, which is the movement of bringing the shin forward over the foot, or bringing the top of the foot towards the shin.
00:11:25.011 --> 00:11:26.731
It's like flexing the ankle.
00:11:26.915 --> 00:11:53.447
Dorsiflexion is essential in so many poses, and the available range of dorsiflexion varies significantly from one person to another based on the structure of their ankle joint itself, the shape of the bones, the length and tension of the calf muscles and the Achilles, and whether a student has any history of ankle injury or restriction.
00:11:53.713 --> 00:12:00.864
Now, let's apply this to Warrior 1 and Warrior 2 because it plays out differently in each of those poses.
00:12:01.283 --> 00:12:15.008
In Warrior 2, the front knee bends and the shin ideally moves towards vertical or beyond as the student deepens the pose, and this requires dorsiflexion at the front ankle.
00:12:15.238 --> 00:12:20.437
A student with limited dorsiflexion is going to hit a wall at some point.
00:12:20.467 --> 00:12:35.550
Their shin cannot travel as far forward, which means they cannot bend the front knee as deeply while keeping the foot flat on their mat, which means their Warrior 2 is going to look different from the student next to them.
00:12:35.740 --> 00:12:49.411
No matter how much they want it to look the same, if you cue them to bend deeper and get the thigh parallel to the floor and their ankle does not have the range, something has to give.
00:12:49.683 --> 00:12:59.751
usually they'll lift their heel from their mat, or they roll their foot towards the outer edge, or you can see them caving their knee inward.
00:13:00.142 --> 00:13:03.801
What's happening is they're trying to compensate around the movement.
00:13:04.048 --> 00:13:24.318
Then if we take a look at the back foot in warrior two, we are typically asking students to parallel their foot with the back of the mat, and depending on the width of their stance, that also asks them to practice ankle inversion, which is rolling the sole of the foot inward toward the midline of the body.
00:13:24.658 --> 00:13:32.108
But if a student has limited inversion, then they may do a couple of things to compensate around that movement.
00:13:32.398 --> 00:13:46.969
One, the outer edge of their foot may not touch their mat completely, or two, they may turn their foot so that it's less parallel to kind of work around the limited range of motion that they have in their ankle.
00:13:47.179 --> 00:13:52.311
It won't matter if you try to cue them more, if you try to offer an adjustment.
00:13:52.642 --> 00:13:57.561
Their skeletal makeup will not allow for them to perform the movement.
00:13:57.921 --> 00:14:05.816
In warrior one, we cue to plant the back of the foot with the heel down and the foot turned in somewhat.
00:14:06.064 --> 00:14:32.026
And keeping that back heel grounded requires a combination of ankle dorsiflexion and the ability of the whole system to accommodate the position students with limited ankle range or limited range in the back ankle specifically cannot keep the back heel down while also squaring their hips forward and maintaining an upright torso.
00:14:32.259 --> 00:14:37.950
They are being asked to solve an equation that their anatomy really makes unsolvable.
00:14:37.960 --> 00:14:46.353
So you'll see them trying to compensate by leaning their chest more forward, by turning their hips slightly at an angle.
00:14:46.539 --> 00:14:53.470
That'll give you a cue that the foot positioning probably isn't attainable for them, and that's okay.
00:14:53.539 --> 00:14:54.230
It's okay.
00:14:54.445 --> 00:15:16.859
So the reframing here is that ankle range of motion is limited by the structural limitation in standing poses and it's not something every student can stretch their way past because a lot of it is bony and structural rather than muscular or soft tissue.
00:15:17.103 --> 00:15:27.326
Understanding this helps you realize why you would stop cueing everyone towards the same shape and start allowing for variation in your classes.
00:15:27.625 --> 00:15:34.442
You would simply let them lift their back heel in Warrior I if that's what a student needs to do.
00:15:34.712 --> 00:15:40.432
You would accept that a student's Warrior II has a different depth.
00:15:40.629 --> 00:15:48.326
You would cue for stability and function rather than just a uniform appearance amongst all students.
00:15:48.563 --> 00:16:11.202
If you're teaching students with these kinds of structural limitations or students with injuries and you want help building classes that actually accommodate them, I have a free workbook called Sequencing for Different Injuries that walks you through how to structure accessible, safe classes for the real range of bodies you teach with the injuries in mind.
00:16:11.346 --> 00:16:13.945
That link is in the show notes for you to download.
00:16:14.390 --> 00:16:22.742
The third myth is one that I think creates a transformation in teachers the most when you truly understand it.
00:16:23.042 --> 00:16:31.985
The myth is that every student's hips can achieve the same range of motion and the same shapes if they work at it.
00:16:32.235 --> 00:16:42.482
And the reality is that hip anatomy varies so dramatically between individuals that makes this simply not true.
00:16:42.725 --> 00:16:46.316
Okay, the hip is a ball and socket joint.
00:16:46.326 --> 00:16:51.685
The ball is the head of the femur, and the socket is the acetabulum in the pelvis.
00:16:51.915 --> 00:16:53.046
Simple enough, right?
00:16:53.234 --> 00:16:59.754
But the specific structure of that joint varies enormously from person to person.
00:16:59.944 --> 00:17:02.571
A few variables matter a lot.
00:17:02.642 --> 00:17:06.907
First, the depth and orientation of the socket.
00:17:07.268 --> 00:17:20.632
Some people have a deeper socket that holds the femoral head more securely, but allows for less range of motion, and some people have a shallower socket that allows for more range.
00:17:20.971 --> 00:17:35.301
The socket can also be oriented at different angles, facing more forward or more towards the side, and that changes which movements are freely available and which ones are limited.
00:17:35.634 --> 00:17:45.597
Second is the angle of the femoral neck, which is the segment of bone connecting the shaft of the femur to the ball at the top.
00:17:45.865 --> 00:17:48.295
This angle varies between people.
00:17:48.541 --> 00:18:13.973
There is the angle in one plane that comes off at either a lower or a higher angle, and there's also rotation of the femur called anteversion or retroversion, where the whole neck and head are turned either more forward or more backward relative to the shaft Third is the length of the femoral neck and the way the head sits on it.
00:18:14.213 --> 00:18:30.059
All of this affects how far the femur can move in different directions before the bone of the femoral neck makes contact with the rim of the socket, which is a hard, bony endpoint that no amount of stretching will change.
00:18:30.250 --> 00:18:34.529
Now, here is why this matters so profoundly for your teaching.
00:18:34.960 --> 00:18:47.456
Take a pose that requires a lot of external rotation and hip flexion, like a deep hip opener, or a pose that requires wide abduction, like a wide-legged position.
00:18:47.740 --> 00:18:56.119
A student whose femoral neck angle and socket orientation favor those movements will find them relatively available.
00:18:56.379 --> 00:19:03.416
A student whose bony structure does not favor them will reach a hard, bony endpoint.
00:19:03.646 --> 00:19:09.916
That endpoint is not tight muscles, and it's not from a lack of effort on their part either.
00:19:10.196 --> 00:19:12.576
It's bone meeting bone.
00:19:12.926 --> 00:19:34.170
And if you keep cueing that student to go deeper, to try to open more, to get lower, you are asking them to do something that is physically impossible for their skeleton and the demand will get displaced to their knee, to their lower back, or quite possibly in their SI joints.
00:19:34.539 --> 00:19:46.680
This is why two students can do the exact same amount of dedicated practice for years and one settles easily into a pose while the other never seems to progress.
00:19:46.906 --> 00:19:49.977
It's often not about flexibility at all.
00:19:50.027 --> 00:19:52.086
It's about the shape of their bones.
00:19:52.263 --> 00:19:59.824
When you truly absorb this, it changes everything about how you cue hip-intensive poses.
00:20:00.144 --> 00:20:05.513
You stop treating the deepest expression as the goal everyone is working toward.
00:20:05.824 --> 00:20:21.386
You start understanding that different students have different available ranges based on their structure and that a student's in range is their in range and it's not a problem that needs more stretching or more practice.
00:20:21.651 --> 00:20:33.360
Let your cues guide students towards what is stable and functional for them individually rather than toward a single, like, ideal shape that every student is trying to attain.
00:20:33.554 --> 00:20:39.560
So many of the topics that I focus on on this podcast are anatomy topics.
00:20:39.778 --> 00:20:47.080
The cues that don't hold up, neutral alignment being different for every body, and now these three myths.
00:20:47.110 --> 00:20:53.090
And the feedback that I keep hearing is that teachers are hungry for this information.
00:20:53.263 --> 00:21:07.857
It's true that a lot of us never got a really solid anatomy foundation in our trainings, and more importantly we weren't taught how to connect anatomy to what we're teaching or seeing in class.
00:21:08.074 --> 00:21:31.564
And so as I've been recording these episodes, I realized that what would actually serve you is not just hearing me talk about anatomy in bits and pieces across different episodes Or in addition to hearing me talk about anatomy on the podcast, having a place to build a real, usable foundation is necessary.
00:21:31.804 --> 00:21:36.403
So I've been putting together a low-cost mini course called the Anatomy Refresh.
00:21:36.646 --> 00:21:57.023
It's an approachable, not overwhelming way to strengthen your understanding of what matters most in your teaching, the knee, the ankle, the hip, and so much more, so that everything we talk about on this podcast actually clicks into place and you can teach with so much confidence.
00:21:57.376 --> 00:22:14.898
It is designed for exactly the teacher who listens to an episode like this one and thinks,"Yes, I want to actually understand this." So keep an ear out because I'm gonna be sharing more about it soon, and I believe it's going to be a really useful resource for you.
00:22:15.208 --> 00:22:20.478
So let's bring these three myths together that we covered in this episode.
00:22:20.746 --> 00:22:34.501
The knee has rotational capacity we need to respect rather than it just being a hinge joint that we just try to protect from any and all movement that's outside of flexion and extension.
00:22:35.042 --> 00:22:45.051
The ankle has a structural range of motion that limits standing poses in ways students are not able to stretch past.
00:22:45.334 --> 00:22:57.841
And the hip has such profound bony variation between all of us that identical poses are simply not available to identical degrees in different bodies.
00:22:58.107 --> 00:23:00.398
In every case, the lesson is the same.
00:23:00.738 --> 00:23:06.638
This idea of alignment was built around a generic body that does not exist.
00:23:06.958 --> 00:23:22.458
The students in your classes, their bodies, their skeletons are varied, and when you cue as if everyone shares the same anatomy, you set some of your students up to fail at something that was never possible for them in the first place.
00:23:22.708 --> 00:23:25.938
And I know that we do not want to do that.
00:23:26.327 --> 00:23:39.408
Understanding anatomy helps you stop fighting against skeletal restrictions and helps you begin to work with them, and that is a completely and much kinder and much more effective way to teach.
00:23:39.778 --> 00:23:46.846
I have another episode called Neutral Alignment is Different for Everybody that speaks on this subject.
00:23:46.846 --> 00:23:53.411
You might wanna have a look for it and listen to it after this one to continue the conversation.
00:23:53.756 --> 00:24:08.436
If this episode lit something up in you and you want to build the kind of anatomy foundation that changes how you teach every single class, keep an eye out for my Anatomy Refresh mini course that I mentioned earlier.
00:24:08.676 --> 00:24:16.556
It's going to be the next step for teachers who want everything we talk about on this podcast to really come together.
00:24:16.736 --> 00:24:20.676
I'll be sharing the details soon, and you can watch for the link in the show notes.
00:24:20.966 --> 00:24:36.096
And if you want a free tool to start with right now, my Sequencing for Different Injuries workbook is linked in the show notes, and it will help you build more accessible classes for the real range of student bodies you're teaching right now.
00:24:36.312 --> 00:24:46.736
Again, thank you so much for being here and joining the conversations we deserve to have to help continue your education and evolve your teaching.
00:24:46.828 --> 00:24:48.009
All right, bye
00:03:59.264 --> 00:04:00.724
Welcome back to the podcast.
00:04:00.734 --> 00:04:03.464
I'm Monica, and I'm so glad you're here.
00:04:03.716 --> 00:04:13.711
Here is where we talk about anatomy, injuries, the nervous system, and answer a ton of questions that you wish had been included in your yoga teacher training.
00:04:14.020 --> 00:04:21.318
I'm a yoga teacher who specializes in helping teachers work confidently with students who have pain and injuries.
00:04:21.718 --> 00:04:29.012
I facilitate anatomy trainings for yoga teachers, and I mentor teachers inside my six-month mentorship program.
00:04:29.296 --> 00:04:41.661
And anatomy is one of my favorite things to teach because I have watched it completely change how teachers see and understand their students' bodies in their classes.
00:04:41.985 --> 00:04:51.526
Today, we're gonna bust three myths about anatomy that shape the way a lot of us cue, often without realizing it.
00:04:51.754 --> 00:05:06.125
And the reason this matters so much is because when we cue a movement, we are usually assuming that every student in class can perform that movement if they just try hard enough or practice long enough.
00:05:06.338 --> 00:05:14.397
But that assumption is often wrong, And I think we're talking about this more in the yoga world, which makes me so happy.
00:05:14.663 --> 00:05:31.235
Sometimes a student cannot do what we're cuing, not because they're not trying, not because they're not flexible enough, not because they need more time, but because their actual skeletal anatomy does not allow for it.
00:05:31.524 --> 00:05:51.978
And when we do not understand that or take it into consideration, we can end up cuing students toward positions their bodies will never achieve, which at best is frustrating for them and at worst can push them into compensatory patterns that can lead to even more challenges.
00:05:52.197 --> 00:06:13.544
So today we're looking at three specific areas, the knee and whether it is really just a hinge joint, the ankle and how its range of motion affects standing poses like warrior I and warrior II, and the hip socket, along with the length and positioning of the head and neck of the femur.
00:06:13.831 --> 00:06:27.115
By the end of this episode, my goal is for you to see these joints differently, and I want you to start cuing with the actual skeleton in mind rather than an idealized version of it.
00:06:27.492 --> 00:06:34.122
Before we get into the three myths, I wanna be clear about how I decided on the topic of this episode.
00:06:34.326 --> 00:06:49.442
Alignment, as we usually teach it, is a set of ideas about how a pose should be organized, where the joints should stack, what angle a limb should make, how the body should be arranged in space.
00:06:49.802 --> 00:06:53.293
And alignment cues can really be useful for this.
00:06:53.302 --> 00:06:55.972
They can help students find stability.
00:06:56.182 --> 00:06:58.002
They can help distribute load.
00:06:58.232 --> 00:07:00.643
They can help to keep students safe.
00:07:00.939 --> 00:07:02.829
But here is the problem.
00:07:03.002 --> 00:07:10.019
A lot of alignment instruction was built around an idealized generic body type.
00:07:10.220 --> 00:07:21.879
And when we take alignment rules that were built around that imaginary average and apply them to the wildly varied bodies in our room, they don't always fit.
00:07:22.187 --> 00:07:23.836
Sometimes they fit fine.
00:07:23.996 --> 00:07:27.146
Sometimes they fit some students and not others.
00:07:27.466 --> 00:07:35.002
And sometimes they ask for a movement that a particular student's skeleton simply cannot do.
00:07:35.310 --> 00:07:40.582
When you think about it, anatomy is the reality underneath alignment.
00:07:40.793 --> 00:07:46.153
And when the two conflict, anatomy is gonna win every single time.
00:07:46.382 --> 00:07:51.322
So let's take a look at a few examples of where they conflict most often.
00:07:51.735 --> 00:07:56.265
The first myth is that the knee is purely a hinge joint.
00:07:56.515 --> 00:07:58.755
We describe it that way constantly.
00:07:58.964 --> 00:08:04.856
The knee bends and straightens, flexion and extension like a door hinge And that is largely true.
00:08:05.057 --> 00:08:16.545
The primary movement of the knee is flexion and extension, and the knee is not built for the kind of free rotation you find in a ball and socket joint like the hip.
00:08:16.901 --> 00:08:19.901
But it's not only a hinge joint.
00:08:20.139 --> 00:08:29.308
The knee actually has some rotational capability, and understanding this changes how you think about a lot of poses.
00:08:29.580 --> 00:08:35.690
When the knee is flexed, meaning bent, it has access to some rotation.
00:08:35.904 --> 00:08:42.855
The tibia can rotate relative to the femur to a certain degree when the knee is bent.
00:08:43.070 --> 00:08:47.230
This is a normal, like built-in feature of the joint.
00:08:47.562 --> 00:09:03.079
There's also something called the screw-home mechanism, where in the final degrees of straightening the knee, the tibia rotates slightly to lock the joint into a stable extended position.
00:09:03.322 --> 00:09:07.133
so rotation is part of how the knee functions.
00:09:07.267 --> 00:09:10.236
But why does this matter for your teaching?
00:09:10.403 --> 00:09:19.517
It's because when we insist that the knee should never experience any rotation at all, we misunderstand the joint.
00:09:19.742 --> 00:09:23.903
The nuance is not that the knee should never rotate.
00:09:24.232 --> 00:09:31.192
It is about where the rotation is happening and whether the joint is loaded and stable when it does.
00:09:31.533 --> 00:09:37.052
The real risk in poses is not rotation of the knee in the abstract.
00:09:37.232 --> 00:09:53.873
It is rotational stress on a knee that is bent and bearing weight while the foot is planted, particularly when the rotation is being driven from somewhere else, like the hip or the foot, and the knee is caught in the middle.
00:09:54.027 --> 00:09:59.906
Think about a standing bent knee pose where the hip wants to rotate, but the foot is fixed.
00:10:00.206 --> 00:10:07.456
The knee becomes the place where that torque gets absorbed, and that's where we need to pay attention.
00:10:07.690 --> 00:10:09.950
so the useful reframing is this.
00:10:10.259 --> 00:10:27.818
Stop thinking of the knee as a joint that must be protected from all rotation and start thinking about it as a joint that has some rotational capacity which needs to be respected and not overwhelmed by forces coming from above and below it.
00:10:28.053 --> 00:10:42.334
Cue for a stable tracking knee in loaded standing poses and give the hip and ankle the freedom they need So the knee is not forced to absorb what those joints should be handling.
00:10:42.642 --> 00:11:03.778
The second myth is more of an assumption than a stated belief, and it is this: We assume that every student can achieve the same ankle position in standing poses and that if they cannot, it is a flexibility issue they will eventually stretch their way into.
00:11:04.197 --> 00:11:14.624
So let's talk about ankle range of motion because it has a huge influence on standing poses, and it varies a lot between people.
00:11:14.858 --> 00:11:25.011
The movement we care most about here is dorsiflexion, which is the movement of bringing the shin forward over the foot, or bringing the top of the foot towards the shin.
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It's like flexing the ankle.
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Dorsiflexion is essential in so many poses, and the available range of dorsiflexion varies significantly from one person to another based on the structure of their ankle joint itself, the shape of the bones, the length and tension of the calf muscles and the Achilles, and whether a student has any history of ankle injury or restriction.
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Now, let's apply this to Warrior 1 and Warrior 2 because it plays out differently in each of those poses.
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In Warrior 2, the front knee bends and the shin ideally moves towards vertical or beyond as the student deepens the pose, and this requires dorsiflexion at the front ankle.
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A student with limited dorsiflexion is going to hit a wall at some point.
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Their shin cannot travel as far forward, which means they cannot bend the front knee as deeply while keeping the foot flat on their mat, which means their Warrior 2 is going to look different from the student next to them.
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No matter how much they want it to look the same, if you cue them to bend deeper and get the thigh parallel to the floor and their ankle does not have the range, something has to give.
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usually they'll lift their heel from their mat, or they roll their foot towards the outer edge, or you can see them caving their knee inward.
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What's happening is they're trying to compensate around the movement.
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Then if we take a look at the back foot in warrior two, we are typically asking students to parallel their foot with the back of the mat, and depending on the width of their stance, that also asks them to practice ankle inversion, which is rolling the sole of the foot inward toward the midline of the body.
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But if a student has limited inversion, then they may do a couple of things to compensate around that movement.
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One, the outer edge of their foot may not touch their mat completely, or two, they may turn their foot so that it's less parallel to kind of work around the limited range of motion that they have in their ankle.
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It won't matter if you try to cue them more, if you try to offer an adjustment.
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Their skeletal makeup will not allow for them to perform the movement.
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In warrior one, we cue to plant the back of the foot with the heel down and the foot turned in somewhat.
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And keeping that back heel grounded requires a combination of ankle dorsiflexion and the ability of the whole system to accommodate the position students with limited ankle range or limited range in the back ankle specifically cannot keep the back heel down while also squaring their hips forward and maintaining an upright torso.
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They are being asked to solve an equation that their anatomy really makes unsolvable.
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So you'll see them trying to compensate by leaning their chest more forward, by turning their hips slightly at an angle.
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That'll give you a cue that the foot positioning probably isn't attainable for them, and that's okay.
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It's okay.
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So the reframing here is that ankle range of motion is limited by the structural limitation in standing poses and it's not something every student can stretch their way past because a lot of it is bony and structural rather than muscular or soft tissue.
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Understanding this helps you realize why you would stop cueing everyone towards the same shape and start allowing for variation in your classes.
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You would simply let them lift their back heel in Warrior I if that's what a student needs to do.
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You would accept that a student's Warrior II has a different depth.
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You would cue for stability and function rather than just a uniform appearance amongst all students.
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If you're teaching students with these kinds of structural limitations or students with injuries and you want help building classes that actually accommodate them, I have a free workbook called Sequencing for Different Injuries that walks you through how to structure accessible, safe classes for the real range of bodies you teach with the injuries in mind.
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That link is in the show notes for you to download.
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The third myth is one that I think creates a transformation in teachers the most when you truly understand it.
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The myth is that every student's hips can achieve the same range of motion and the same shapes if they work at it.
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And the reality is that hip anatomy varies so dramatically between individuals that makes this simply not true.
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Okay, the hip is a ball and socket joint.
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The ball is the head of the femur, and the socket is the acetabulum in the pelvis.
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Simple enough, right?
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But the specific structure of that joint varies enormously from person to person.
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A few variables matter a lot.
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First, the depth and orientation of the socket.
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Some people have a deeper socket that holds the femoral head more securely, but allows for less range of motion, and some people have a shallower socket that allows for more range.
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The socket can also be oriented at different angles, facing more forward or more towards the side, and that changes which movements are freely available and which ones are limited.
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Second is the angle of the femoral neck, which is the segment of bone connecting the shaft of the femur to the ball at the top.
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This angle varies between people.
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There is the angle in one plane that comes off at either a lower or a higher angle, and there's also rotation of the femur called anteversion or retroversion, where the whole neck and head are turned either more forward or more backward relative to the shaft Third is the length of the femoral neck and the way the head sits on it.
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All of this affects how far the femur can move in different directions before the bone of the femoral neck makes contact with the rim of the socket, which is a hard, bony endpoint that no amount of stretching will change.
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Now, here is why this matters so profoundly for your teaching.
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Take a pose that requires a lot of external rotation and hip flexion, like a deep hip opener, or a pose that requires wide abduction, like a wide-legged position.
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A student whose femoral neck angle and socket orientation favor those movements will find them relatively available.
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A student whose bony structure does not favor them will reach a hard, bony endpoint.
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That endpoint is not tight muscles, and it's not from a lack of effort on their part either.
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It's bone meeting bone.
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And if you keep cueing that student to go deeper, to try to open more, to get lower, you are asking them to do something that is physically impossible for their skeleton and the demand will get displaced to their knee, to their lower back, or quite possibly in their SI joints.
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This is why two students can do the exact same amount of dedicated practice for years and one settles easily into a pose while the other never seems to progress.
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It's often not about flexibility at all.
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It's about the shape of their bones.
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When you truly absorb this, it changes everything about how you cue hip-intensive poses.
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You stop treating the deepest expression as the goal everyone is working toward.
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You start understanding that different students have different available ranges based on their structure and that a student's in range is their in range and it's not a problem that needs more stretching or more practice.
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Let your cues guide students towards what is stable and functional for them individually rather than toward a single, like, ideal shape that every student is trying to attain.
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So many of the topics that I focus on on this podcast are anatomy topics.
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The cues that don't hold up, neutral alignment being different for every body, and now these three myths.
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And the feedback that I keep hearing is that teachers are hungry for this information.
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It's true that a lot of us never got a really solid anatomy foundation in our trainings, and more importantly we weren't taught how to connect anatomy to what we're teaching or seeing in class.
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And so as I've been recording these episodes, I realized that what would actually serve you is not just hearing me talk about anatomy in bits and pieces across different episodes Or in addition to hearing me talk about anatomy on the podcast, having a place to build a real, usable foundation is necessary.
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So I've been putting together a low-cost mini course called the Anatomy Refresh.
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It's an approachable, not overwhelming way to strengthen your understanding of what matters most in your teaching, the knee, the ankle, the hip, and so much more, so that everything we talk about on this podcast actually clicks into place and you can teach with so much confidence.
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It is designed for exactly the teacher who listens to an episode like this one and thinks,"Yes, I want to actually understand this." So keep an ear out because I'm gonna be sharing more about it soon, and I believe it's going to be a really useful resource for you.
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So let's bring these three myths together that we covered in this episode.
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The knee has rotational capacity we need to respect rather than it just being a hinge joint that we just try to protect from any and all movement that's outside of flexion and extension.
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The ankle has a structural range of motion that limits standing poses in ways students are not able to stretch past.
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And the hip has such profound bony variation between all of us that identical poses are simply not available to identical degrees in different bodies.
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In every case, the lesson is the same.
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This idea of alignment was built around a generic body that does not exist.
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The students in your classes, their bodies, their skeletons are varied, and when you cue as if everyone shares the same anatomy, you set some of your students up to fail at something that was never possible for them in the first place.
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And I know that we do not want to do that.
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Understanding anatomy helps you stop fighting against skeletal restrictions and helps you begin to work with them, and that is a completely and much kinder and much more effective way to teach.
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I have another episode called Neutral Alignment is Different for Everybody that speaks on this subject.
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You might wanna have a look for it and listen to it after this one to continue the conversation.
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If this episode lit something up in you and you want to build the kind of anatomy foundation that changes how you teach every single class, keep an eye out for my Anatomy Refresh mini course that I mentioned earlier.
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It's going to be the next step for teachers who want everything we talk about on this podcast to really come together.
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I'll be sharing the details soon, and you can watch for the link in the show notes.
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And if you want a free tool to start with right now, my Sequencing for Different Injuries workbook is linked in the show notes, and it will help you build more accessible classes for the real range of student bodies you're teaching right now.
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Again, thank you so much for being here and joining the conversations we deserve to have to help continue your education and evolve your teaching.
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All right, bye
