Muscle Tension vs Skeletal Limits: 19-Min Compression Flexibility Q&A

So you let them shorten up their step and what stick their butt out. So it's more hamstring stretch pelvic tilt than bear the weight into the arms. So would you say for teachers like one of the morals of your talk is that when you make be careful on what you're saying because they might not be able to do that posture. Is that kind of one of the morals of the story is when you tell someone to bring their arms up, up and don't bend your elbows and they don't ever seem to be listening to you.

It may be because they can't. It's either bring them up or bend them. You can't have both or it could be in the warrior pose. You bend the knee.

You try to turn your pelvis. The reason they can't turn their pelvis the way you're screaming at them to do is because of compression. Because when you go to adjust someone, particularly after you practice this a little bit, you're going to feel on them. I'm pushing against the wall here.

I'm pushing into compression here. Or you're going to feel on someone else. There's some give there. This is a tensile adjustment I can give them.

And the more you feel it in your body, your own body, you're going to be able to feel it in someone else. And when you go to grab them and adjust them, you're like, oh, that's it for them. If I push this guy anymore in downward dog, I'm going to hurt him because I can feel the compression. It'll just be that obvious to you.

What I'm gathering is that there really aren't any kinds of poses you can do to compensate for compression. It's really anything that you could really do would have to do with props. Is that correct? Or maybe there aren't even props for most of them?

That's a great question. It gets back to the downward dog question. Once you start to go more in depth into anatomy's tension and compression, is if you start to ask yourself, why do you want people to do the downward dog if these two people or three or five or 12 are having completely different experiences of the pose? Once you start to analyze whether it's the downward dog or a headstand or a backbend, once you start to break it apart anatomically, what does it do?

You will be able to say, oh, OK, what I want out of this posture is how it works the hamstring. So I will substitute a hamstring posture. Or what I want out of this posture is shoulder movement. But I could have someone do this or grab a towel to get around their compression and not have them have to be upside down bearing all the weight because you want them to go into shoulder, upper spine motion.

So the question is well put. It's like, if you've identified compression, what do you do with it? And it isn't always obvious that you avoid it. Someone I'm assuming in my answering to this in the previous question was someone's in pain in the downward dog.

It's hurting their shoulder. It's hurting their elbow. Well, what if they're not in pain? They're not very good at it, but they're not in pain.

Well, so what? Just have them still do it. So my presumption, and I think your presumption of the question is, if they're in pain, what do you do? Well, you could find based on your skill as a teacher.

You can find any number of ways to substitute. I think props could be used very, very well to a very great advantage. When we had Sherry demonstrating how much he could do a side bend as opposed to Ivy. Well, if we could put Sherry's hand on a block or a table, she could relax the strain in her muscles and just stay there.

Ivy didn't need it because she could rest. She has her own arm as a prop to rest herself on. So I think if you like props and you use them to position your students, this is the ideal sort of thing to do. Everyone do triangle pose.

Tilt your pelvis the best that you can. For some of you, when you tilt the pelvis the best that you can, you're going to have your hand on your ankle or the floor, which is going to make it easier for you to relax and stretch. For someone else, because they can't tilt their pelvis enough, they're struggling to reach the floor, and there's a lot of tension here. You give them a block or a pillow or a bolster.

Now they can use their arm the same way the guy next to them is using their arm, and now they can relax this and get the same benefits. Can you explain the difference internally, the experience of compression and tension, to be able to identify it within the practice? Try to. That's why I tried to do these demonstrations here that you can feel.

This is a compression, and so is this, but they feel very different. This is a compression. Bring your shoulders down. Why can't you go down more than that?

Because you can't dissolve your scapula through your rib cage. So here's a compression. Here's a compression. The ankle was a compression.

What they share in common, in spite of their subtle differences, is that you feel it in the bones, typically the joint. You feel it in the joint, and you feel it in front of the way that you want to go. If I tried to bend forward and there was something in front of me, I can't go. Compression.

If there's something behind me, whether it's my butt or my hamstrings or my spine, that's tension. So if I want to go that way with my elbow and it's behind where I want to go, tension. If it's in front of where I want to go, compression. If I was doing this and something back here was really being stretched, that would be tension.

But I get stopped where I want to go. It's like I'm pushing into something. When we did the ankle thing, it was like, I can't push it down anymore. And it's in front.

It's not behind where I want to go. I just realized that the bones are actually living organs and being moist, not necessarily how we see them here. I'm just wondering how that affects what you're addressing. Yeah, it's a good question because the bones are actually moist, full of biological tissue, pliable and bendable when you're young and if you're a different anatomical type.

So why can't we just slowly bend up the neck of the femur if we work slowly and passively at it? Why can't we just slowly change where the facets in the spine are compressing and moving? I think theoretically it's possible. I think you'd have to stay in a position like that for a long, long time.

I think probably that you'd end up fusing joints together rather than changing their shape because I think that the joint is the weak link. If I could just take the femur out of the socket and bend up on the neck of it, you know, with common sense, just like traction, just very minutely keep a pressure on it, hours each day, I think absolutely that you could slowly change the shape of the bone. But in real life, when I start prying up on the neck of the femur, it's in a socket and it grinds against the cartilaginous lining and connective tissue of the socket. And so the relentless, if slight, stress I would need to put on that to change the neck of the femur over years would injure the cartilaginous surface.

One last example of that is in the ballet, Kirov Ballet in Russia, after a certain age, 13, 14, whatever it is, they take their young dancers that have been in their program maybe since they were three or four or five and they x-ray their pelvis because now they're going through puberty and their bones are changing from when they were kids. And they x-ray them to see is the adult female pelvis of this dancer, are the changes this dancer's going through going to disable them from being able to do full extension sideways and frontwards. And if the x-ray show that they will no longer be able to do that because the bones will hit, they're washed out of the program. Now these are girls who at that age are probably dancing five to six hours a day, six days a week and they're only 13, 14, 15, maybe years old.

If stretching and bending and doing the splits could change significantly, those girls would be doing it. And the fact is that even though they've been doing it since they were three or four, the bones will change so significantly as they mature into women, they won't be able to do it anymore. I'd like to know why, according to your theory, in Ivy's case, her humor is popping out of her armpit socket isn't unstable or dangerous in the long run. Because her subjective experience of it is not painful, it's actually pleasant.

What about in the long run? Well if your answer is she's somehow going to distort the integrity of that joint that when she's old she's going to have an arthritic or incapacitated joint in some fashion. The diseases of age are a constriction of the connective tissue around the joints. So if you want your joints to stiffen up and become tight, don't do anything because this is going to happen.

Go to an old person's home and find me one person, one, who has a hyperlumbar spine. There must have been someone in that population who was hyperlordotic, not anymore. Go to an old person's home, the process of aging is this, these contract, hip flexors, I lose the curve of my lumbar spine, now I'm old. And when you go to an old person's home or a community where there's nothing that you can compare, they all walk like this.

Because they don't have any curve here anymore. A young baby pulls itself off the ground and in 18 months is running forward with his pelvis like this. In Chinese medicine that's because he's got strong kidney jing in chi. It is the kidneys, the source of yin and yang in the body, that pull us out of an embryotic curve and stand us up and put a curve in our back.

And then through aging and or abuse, if you overuse your kidneys and your adrenals, you slowly lose the curve in your spine. And the connective tissue that encases the spine from top to bottom shrinks so aggressively that if your bones become brittle and osteoporotic, it'll crush them. So the aging process is everything's going to constrict. My advice to someone like Ivy would be, as long as you're not injuring yourself sorely, keep taking your ranges of motion as far as you realistically can.

Because the day's going to come when you won't be able to without injury. The day's going to come when Ivy's only going to be able to do 70% of what she did when she was younger. More and more it seems like that there needs to be a real respect of the differences of each individual structure that we're faced with. And that it's really, really hard to have one dogma that's going to be appropriate for each body system.

And I'm just curious if you could say a little bit about that. That is what I'm saying. I'm saying that there is no particular dogma that works for every type of a body. It just doesn't work.

Nothing's better research or more money is spent on this country than drugs. They spend millions, sometimes hundreds of millions of dollars over decades to test a drug to see if it works. And when it's offered to the public, what comes with it? For 99% of those people this will give you a longer erection and make you fertile.

For 1% it will kill you. Here you go. For 80% of the people this will relieve your headache. For 10% you will have a heart attack.

Here you go. All drugs are like that. You cannot prescribe a drug for the general population. You can't.

Another example that's not so contrived. Cobra venom will stop your heart and your muscles from contracting. It will actually put them into tetany. You die of a cobra bite when it grows up to your diaphragm and you can't breathe any more than your heart stops.

If you have a heart attack and your heart is already in arrhythmia, how do you get rid of it? Dilute cobra venom. What is the antidote for a cobra venom bite? Dilute cobra venom.

Here is the absolute same substance. But if it's in concentrate or dilute solutions, that's completely the opposite effect. One concentration it will kill you. In a dilute concentration it will save your life.

I had a friend, Richie, great guy. He talks like this all the time. He's really good. He's like, I don't know what you're talking about.

It's great to see you. Let's do something together. I do yoga all the time. I'm in the class.

I still do it every day. I really love it. Every time I work with you it's been great. All the time like this.

At one point he said, you know, years ago I had a cocaine habit. I said, what? He said, yeah, it was the only thing that slowed me down. It's the truth.

There's a small segment of the population that cocaine slows them down. So what does cocaine do? Does it jack you up or does it slow you down? Make up your mind.

Let's vote, everyone. What I'm saying is that you shouldn't vote. You should just say, for some people, cocaine jacks you up. For some people, cocaine slows you down.

For some, concentrations of cobra venom, it will kill you. For some, concentrations of cobra venom, it will stop your heart. Why do we need to vote ahead of time for everyone, not even have met them, what they should or shouldn't do? And so I believe that in Hatha Yoga we just need to jerk the rugs out from under ourselves and throw away this natural human inclination to find out the right way and decide on it once and for all.

Where should your feet be? Where should your elbow be? Let's vote. Let's have a conference every year and vote where it all should be.

My point is, why? Why do that? Why not just painfully, slowly, one student at a time, decide for you, downward dog's okay. For you, just don't ever do it.

For you, headstand's great. For you, it's going to cripple your neck. And it's difficult because as human beings, we want a closed system. It's called the Taliban.

Everything in here is right. Everything out here is wrong. And every society and every religion has it. Everything in here is right.

Everything out here is wrong. So whatever you decide is the right way to do a yoga posture, someone has just been screwed. We need to not fall into that as yoga people. We need to walk into a room to a group of students and go like, I don't know exactly what I'm going to say or do or teach today because there might be someone in this room today who has an energetic, physical, mental, bodily type I've never experienced before.

And maybe what works for everyone else doesn't work for them or vice versa. I heard that you can get a lot of scar tissue in your hips. I was wondering, is that a source of compression and how you might get that or work through that? You can get scar tissue anywhere in your body.

There are huge schools of thought in energetic medicine and body work that all of the emotions good and bad ripple through the connective tissue of your body and either open up and make the flow of chi and fluid through those areas more or they bind them up. Over and above just a traumatic incident where you injured yourself, fell, twisted, scarred or broke something. And I believe you probably have scar tissue everywhere in your body because none of us are perfect. And our emotional life and our mental life is very rarely unless you're a saint at ease and flowing with all the events that occur to us in our lifetime.

And I don't explore it very much in my own yoga practice. But there are many yoga teachers who the whole bulk of their work is who cares where tension or compression is. Let's just work the energetics in such a way that we can find why a joint may not move or is there a scar tissue there that's not completing an expression of emotion or something that's interfering with my life and making me unhappy. And their whole thrust of their yoga isn't even about how far can I bend, how far can I move.

I respect that a lot. I'm just not a competent practitioner of it because I pretty much only have two emotions, hungry and sleeping. But I do think that there's a great deal of truth to that. I mean it's true in Chinese medicine that your body is a reflection of your mental and emotional life as well as your physical history.

I absolutely subscribe that it's true. But I think and I hope that other teachers who are already doing good work in this field will sort of come forward and do more elaborations of the type of emotional stuff that's stored in the various parts of the body and its patterns. What I encourage is to look to the Chinese medical tradition because they have thousands of years of history mapping pretty precisely where energetically the different emotions and the meridians of the body. So why reinvent the wheel?

Let's go back, look at the traditional Chinese medical view of the body and then test it and see what we need to tweak or change with that. So Paul, we've seen with the proportion of my humerus that I may have difficulty with poses such as headstand. But to what extent is flexibility also associated with that and specifically tightness of my shoulders? And how can I move more towards releasing some of that tension or am I always going to be limited with the proportion of the humerus?

You'll always be limited if that's the word. You'll always be limited by the proportion of your humerus. When you say tightness of the shoulder, again we want to go back to tightness is not specific enough. What if it's a tensile restriction, tightness, or is it compression, tightness?

We need to make a distinction there right away. If it's, the word tight in English language just carries with it a tensile element that's too short, that's too tight. I need to elongate this tensile element to get movement. Well what if it's not a tensile thing that's restricting me?

What if it's, I got all the tensile I need but it's bang, bang, compressive? If it's compression and proportion, those are the least changeable elements of your body. I would never say that they cannot be changed but in 23 years, almost 24 years of teaching, I rarely see it change to any significant degree. If it was tensile, it's actually there's, you know, wow I can change that maybe forever.

So if I, theoretically I could take hold of your arm or anyone's arm or leg and just start pulling on it and have you relax and not fight against me and if I did that enough, consistently enough, I could just stretch your humerus completely out of its socket over a period of months or years maybe, I don't know how long it would take. But is that desirable and to what end? So if it's tensile, theoretically you can always manipulate that. If it's proportion, I don't see that change in an adult.

Maybe as a youth it can be changed but in an adult I just don't see it happen. Compression and proportion are pretty much indicative of what are my bones. Most people are, their proportions work against them in some things and with them for others. And so your inability to extend your elbow way over your head doesn't make, that doesn't go upside down but you might have other strengths in your neck and the shape of your bones that more than make up for that.

But if you'd have gotten into Olympic weightlifting, one of the champions of the world was a young Turk, he's either an Armenian living in Turkey or the other way around. And he, when you look at photographs of this young man who was like 20 years old and he was lifting three times twice or three times his body weight over his head, when his arms were extended at this angle the bar barely cleared his head. Okay, well that's going to work for you to have short arms and powerful shoulders to bring that weight over your head is going to be much better than if you're a long legged Afghan and you've got to bring it way up there before you can lock out under it. So what may not work the best in one yoga posture may actually help you in another or maybe you're compromised in what you can do in certain yoga postures safely but not many people can do an Ironman.

I know I never could. My question is what effect weight has on proportion orientation if you're carrying more weight in certain parts of your body? It would make a huge difference. I don't know if you remember this but if you remember Ivy in the DVD, slightly built long slender young woman and Michael shoulders this broad at the top.

Look when Michael brings his upper body weight to help assist him in a deep back bend he's got much more force that he has to contend with. Maybe for good because it gives him the leverage he wants, maybe for ill because he has to fight so much against this upper body weight when he reaches back. Everything about us affects how we do yoga. I've had private students where you pick them up and you sort of after doing something to you grab their feet and you pick their legs up and you sort of shake them from side to side.

I've had particularly this one woman, beautiful woman, very slender, muscular, very fit. When I picked up her legs it was as if half her body weight were in her femurs. I swear at least half of her weight was in her legs. So when that woman goes up into a shoulder stand or a headstand that means she's got this slight upper body that's good for a lot of stuff that all of a sudden has to deal with a lot of compression coming onto her that she's not used to.

And she wanted because she was very athletic and talented she wanted to learn to do all the yoga and she wanted to learn to do a headstand. And then two months, three months later whatever it is she had neck problems, went to the doctor and the doctor says what did you do? Jump out of the pool and land on your head. She had actually slightly herniated a disc in her neck.

I don't have any proof that it was due to the headstand that she was doing but I have a suspicion. Whereas again you take someone like Michael who's got you know bull neck, bull shoulders like he throws his legs up over his head. There's nothing for him to control and to push around. Or someone who doesn't have Michael's breath and strength to his upper body but he's got elbows this long and he can bear if he had too much aggressive weight coming to his neck he can bear and push out of it.

All of it makes a difference. All of it makes a difference. If someone's overweight it makes a huge difference. They go upside down or try to go forward.

They compress they can't breathe. You wouldn't even know if could they bend or flex more. You can't know because they go upside down in a snail pose. All the weight falls against their heart and their diaphragm.

They can't breathe. It's like it makes a huge difference. Proportion, weight, strength, lack of, density. We're all different.

Our diets should be different. Our voices are different. Our fingerprints are different. Our eyes are different.

We're all absolutely different and unique. And part of the process of yoga should be take from this, take from that, take from this, take from that and put together what is your yoga.