What's up everyone?
Welcome to Yoga With Adriene.
I'm Adriene and today we have some yoga tips for you.
These come straight from our reboot family.
In fact, I want to give a shout out to Mark from
Australia who actually brought this up on the reboot page.
Thank you Mark for being so active and for asking such great questions because the
questions benefit us all.
So today we're going to take a little look at the standing foundation of
warriors.
These are tips to engage the lower body particularly that back
leg when we're in the standing postures.
If you've practiced reboot or you're in the reboot family already, you know
that we do warrior one, warrior two, high lunge, and warrior three.
At least those in our reboot sequences.
So hopefully this will be beneficial for you and I think in
general this is a nice little reminder for most standing asinine postures.
So let's just see what happens.
Let's hop on the mat.
All right, so my first tip in terms of warriors is build from the ground
up.
So rather than sometimes in class we kind of come into it from already
standing.
I want to, like, get it down low.
So we're going to start in a runner's lunge.
Let's start with the right leg forward and the left leg
back.
So take your time getting in there and I'd really like for us to pay
attention . . . We can lower that back knee for a sec to our center today
because for me in finding those engaging qualities that I feel like we're
looking for is really about engaging your center, your center gravity.
So come into a nice runner's lunge and just bring your awareness to the
space between your navel and your spine and your awareness to your tailbone
here as we just connect to the center.
All right, so nice and easy.
I'm going to pivot on the back foot and I'm not
going to lift up.
You guys take your time.
Again, we're building from the ground up.
So I'm going to soften that back knee just so I can feel the difference
and then plant the left heel.
Left toes are pointed maybe towards the front left corner of the mat
or the front left corner of the room.
,
I'm not on a tight rope.
I'm on two skis here, so I might walk the right
foot out.
So I have two nice long planes.
So you might have heard before right heel in line with the arch of the left
foot.
For the sake of our yoga tips today, I'm really in general teaching
like this these days, sharing like this these days to have nice spaciousness
between both feet.
All right, now hang with me.
Were you looking at the video?
Okay, you're looking at me, I'm looking at you.
Take your left palm, bring it to the top of your left thigh.
Now imagine a spiral here.
I'm going to take my index finger and you can too and I'm going to imagine
the top of the left thigh spiraling in.
You can even see it turning a little bit here.
Now what wants to happen though is that outer edge of the
back foot starts to peel up, so I'm going to do what my happy Yoga's all about.
Just find that opposition, right; the sun and the moon, the masculine
and the feminine, that opposition.
So I ground down through the outer edge of the foot.
In fact, I don't know if you could see my foot there, but nice and
strong and then I keep the spiral of the top of the thigh in.
Now bring your left palm to the inner thigh.
Slap it like a pancake and just see if you can engage and what this
does is for me wakes up my center.
Reminds me, oh yeah, it's all connected because before this is kind of all spilling.
You can even see this and what I'm going to do is charge this.
Let that wakeup call send out through the body and begin to engage my center, maybe
lengthen the tailbone, and now we're talking.
Okay, bend that front knee.
Hopefully we're talking.
If not, then keep working.
Waking up, waking up, waking up.
Now I'm going to bring the hands to the waist line here and slowly come up
to warrior one.
Don't worry about the back of that thigh being parallel here
today.
I'm working on this back leg and eventually I'll get to where I can
sink really deep with the power of that back leg, so take a second here to
just bring the hands to the waist line and notice if we've kind of lost
that engaging quality in the leg, which is what I think the feedback was.
It's like I can't seem to get or maintain that energy in the back leg.
So again, I ask you to bring your awareness now to your center, to the
tailbone.
Is it sinking to the front?
Is it sinking to the back?
Is it going towards that right buttock or that right
[inaudible 00:04:35] bone or that left [inaudible 00:04:38] bone?
Can we let it kind of dangle in between like this?
Yoga With Adriene.
Yeah.
Finding that center and then from there, again, see if we can spread
awareness and find that opposition as we've rolled the top of that back
thigh in and ground down through the outer edge of that back foot.
Back leg is super strong.
Now use the power of your mind imagination to draw energy
up from the arches of the feet.
So this is an energetic thing not an anatomical thing or an alignment.
This is now the energy drawing all the way up from the arches of the feet as we hold
onto our action alignment and then maybe I reach the fingertips up.
The legs are working super strong her my friends.
You can see my [inaudible 00:05:21] is just kind of tearing north to
south, excuse me, strong legs.
Check it out here then open up to warrior two.
Just check it out maintaining strength, power in that back leg.
Now I went and watched my past warriors videos and they're amazing.
Check them out now.
I do talk about squaring the hips and I think we shot warrior one in 2012.
Two years later, I'm no longer interested in squaring the hips like this
anymore.
Thank you Leslie Cavanaugh who first kind of like gave me
permission to start experiencing this and I like that in general,
challenging the rules of yoga, what people teach you because it's really
about your experience.
So now I'm teaching or un-teaching the squaring of the hips and I feel like
if you're not trying to power through squaring these hips, you're really
going to build from the ground up and feel that engage in quality in the
back leg.
So maybe you're here, maybe you're here.
I was about to make a really bad joke.
I was going to say maybe you're here.
Who's watching, but no.
Let's take it to the other side.
Turn the right toes in.
Take the left toes out and we're going to come back
all the way to our lunge just so we can feel that again building from the
ground up.
So nice, slow dissolve into your lunge, can lower that back
knee, and then here we go again coming into the lunge bringing your
awareness to the center.
Pivoting on the back foot whenever you're ready.
Finding that action.
We're drawing energy up from the arch of the foot, but
again bring your right finger now to the top of that thigh.
Imagine it spiraling in.
So I have this spiral, back foot wants to come up, but I'm going to really
let the root of this posture be in the outer edge of that back foot.
Now you can almost see my quadriceps is toned
here.
You can slap that inner thigh allowing it to not just engage the inner
thigh, but wake up the center.
A lot going on here.
Then hands come to the waist line as I check it out.
Strong back leg, strong, strong, strong.
Again, check in with your center.
Don't worry about squaring the hips, but rather really leaving no part left behind.
So if I start to get to this and this is still like not engaged, it's like,
what's the point?
So really drawing energy up from the arches of the feet,
finding places to ground, places to lift and then just checking it out
on the other side.
Again, so if we're talking about these two headlights
in the hips now pointing forward, I say let's cheat.
Let's undo that and just let them point out to
the side.
Again, tailbone dangling in between and we just work here.
We don't master the pose, but we keep checking in, going through
that check list.
You can check it out with the arms up.
You might open out to warrior two here just to check out what's happening in the back
leg as we move.
Outer edge of that back foot nice and strong.
Cool.
Reach the fingertips up.
Slowly make your way back to the lunge and we're
going to rock that back foot up to meet the front.
Take a second here and forward fold just to release the lower back
and then slowly roll up and I'm just going to do one last thing.
So in order to kind of engage the inner thighs this is a great little trick and I
realize we don't all have a block.
So I'm going to use the block, but you could fold up a towel or roll
up a towel or a blanket and use that.
We could surely come . . . Oh, look!
Here's a cigar box from my buddy Crishay [SP] gave me.
That would totally work so you could, I mean, just find a firm
thing.
Oh, my God.
Find a firm thing to put between your legs.
Okay, this is going down south fast.
I'm going to take the block, I'm going to bring it to my inner thighs.
Toes pointing forward.
Feet, hip width apart.
Now you can kind of imagine.
It's like a little Pez dispenser here, this exercise
that is kind of hard to communicate in real life, so it might be difficult
in the video too, but I feel like this is a great little way to engage
those muscles and remind ourselves that it's not just about these isolated
muscles.
It's about this center.
It's about everything, right?
So I come into a strong tadasana and first take your object or the block
away and you can just kind of feel this loosey [SP] goosiness [SP] and then
I'll bring the block in between squeezing our thighs together.
Press firmly into all four corners of the feet and defined
length through the crown, open the chest.
Now I'm going to take the tops of the thighs just as I did
before and I'm going to spiral them inward just like I did in my warriors.
So you can really see the visual here and you can see maybe the block from
a side view.
Here I am just kind of sitting out, but when I draw energy up
through the arches of the feet and spiral the tops of the thighs in, you
can kind of see the block perching out like a little Pez dispenser here.
So I'm going to work on putting those two things together finding the
spiral and the tops of the thighs, bringing one hand to the belly, one hand
to the lower back or sacrum and then finding an upward encouraging in the
front body and a downward encouraging through the back body.
So again, I'm not forcing, but those two things together
you can really feel strong through the inner thigh.
So again, I'm just spiraling.
I'm drawing energy up through the arches of the feet.
I'm spiraling the inner thighs in then I find this upward encouraging through the front
body as I keep the legs engaged and this downward encouraging through
the back body and I begin to feel this incredible sensation in the inner
thighs.
So we can practice here again.
Here's kind of where I might sit naturally.
Obviously I'm exaggerating a little bit.
I'm going to spiral this in, draw energy up from the feet.
Tops of the thighs go in.
An exaggerated version would be like this, my little buttercup, but
then I'm going to take my yogie awareness and I'm going to find lift
and through the front body and grounding through the back body.
Cool.
So even if you don't have a block you can try this.
With a block it's awesome.
If you have a block, you're starting to maybe feel what I'm
throwing out there and if you don't have a block, we can just play with
this in time.
Again, just think, energy drawing up through the arches,
spiral of the thighs, and then this opposition which is what again our
healthy yoga's all about.
Finding balance while still engaging.
All right, so that was just a little check in with warrior or more
importantly building, I think, from the ground up.
I think it's important to remember that it's a practice, that it
takes time and I think that what's most important.
The biggest tip or just reminder of all is to stay
curious, keep working at it, and keep inviting all those little muscle
fibers along for the ride.
Yeah!
If you're interested in reboots, please check out the website or the link
below and we'd love to have you on board.
Leave questions or comments below.
If you have a request for yoga tips, let me know and I'll do my best
to answer it and let's all keep enjoying the ride.
All right, talk to you next time.
Namaste.