Sun Salutation Basics: 10-Min Startup Tutorial (Part 1)

So you're squeezing your legs so your whole body is engaged. Your arms, your chest, your hips, your legs, your knees. So this is the position I want you to be in when you assume plank pose. And if you look now this is usually what happens.

You either hang with your hips or you stick your butt up. And the reason you're doing this is because you're compensating. You have strong muscles and you have weak muscles. And what you're doing when you're compensating for your weak muscles is you're overusing your strong muscles.

And what I want you to do in plank pose is to be more symmetrical and even out the differences. So when you're perfectly straight, which is something completely unnatural to be, it's not the position your body goes in automatically. You actually have to work a lot to get a straight line through your body. But that's a really good thing because it takes a lot of work and you create much more balance when you're straight than if you are relaxed in the wrong muscles and overworking other muscles.

So this is plank pose. This is a bad plank pose. This is plank pose. This is not plank pose.

So hence the name plank. You just want to be straight as a plank and try to lift your body up off the floor. That was technique number one. We have two more to go.

The second one is the forward fold. And I'm going to show it from two different angles. It's the same pose but tilted. And we start with the standing one.

So a standing forward fold, feet the same distance as in down dog, hip width. And then grab your, I want you to grab your, your chins and bend your knees. So you're almost squatting. You're not bending your butt under your knees, but you have a generous bend in the knees like this.

If you have the proportions to place your, your palms flat in the ground, you can do that. If you have strong legs, then it's probably going to be hard. If you can't place your hands on the ground, keep grabbing your ankles like this. And then drop your head and try to straighten your legs maybe 25% here.

So you start with a really good bend in the knees. And when you drop your head, then you try to stretch your legs. This approach, bending the knees first and then straightening them is vastly superior to this kind of forward. This is not even a forward fold.

This is just a pathetic hamstring stretch and back pain inducer. So try to avoid this at all costs and always start with bent knees. And then when you're relaxed, you start to stretch. And don't worry about straight legs.

That's purple brown belt level. If you're really stiff right now and you try to straighten your legs immediately, you're only risking injury and you're not going to reap any benefits. Same thing when you're sitting down and you're forward folding. Instead of sitting like this, this is more of a core workout because my weight is behind my hips.

There is no way I'm going to get more flexible if I stretch here. But if I start with bent knees and try to get my belly and my upper body connected with my thighs and I wrap my arms around my legs, I can catch my hands, my wrists, forearms or elbows wherever I can grab. And I start breathing here. As soon as I start breathing deeply, my back starts relaxing because there is nothing that is necessary to hold me up here.

The pose is self upholding. So when I've been here for a while, I can move my butt back slightly and drop my head. And if you sit there for a couple of minutes, then you will be a bit deeper into the pose. Again, you're not going for this.

You're not going for as deep as possible. That's maybe one, two, three years down the line. But the difference between being here and here is huge. So every time we're forward folding in the sun salutations and in the flows, this is what I hope that you're aiming for.

You go down and you stretch a little bit. And hundreds of repetitions of that will take you much further than trying to use force holding your breath and pulling yourself deeper into the forward fold. Okay, so we did the plank and the forward fold and you have enough details to cover the basics for weeks to come in those poses. The last one is a back bend for the solar plexus and up.

It's called Cobra pose and it's much more subtle than it looks. So when I lay down on my belly like this, I place my thumbs right under my nipples and I squeeze my elbows in. So there should be a lot of engagement between the shoulder blades. So you should squeeze your lats, your elbows with your lats into your body like this.

And then you look forward and lift halfway. So it's not like this. You don't push all the way up and go backwards because that is a lower back cranker like nothing else. For most people, this hurts a lot.

So instead, just squeeze your elbows in, lift halfway and use your back to lift yourself up but also help with the hands. So you can think that the start of the pose is you just lift with your chest, with your lower back and then you push and help with the hands. But never like a push up. You're not trying to lift your head as high as possible.

All you're doing when you're lifting in Cobra pose is inhaling and exhaling. Inhaling, exhaling, inhaling and exhaling. And if you can do this with a relaxed neck, you're not cranking, lifting your shoulders or cranking your neck. You're just lifting your upper body and making a nice curve through your lower back and your chest so your lower back is more or less engaging and it's the upper body from the solar plexus and up that you're bending.

So you're trying to break open your chest and your lower back is just following along for the ride. If you're pushing up and backwards, then you put all the stress into the lower back and if you have a healthy lower back, no problem. But if you have some kind of twitchy little injury there, then it's just an accident waiting to happen. So every time I say Cobra pose, inhale, lift your chest, I don't mean inhale and push everything you've got as high as you can because that's not going to help at all.

So go 50%, never more. We did plank, forward fold and Cobra. Now let's put these together into the Sun Salutation A and never mind all the other poses we do, we just do them and don't think so much about them. But every time you get to plank, every time you forward fold and every time you do Cobra, try to get the details that we talked about here into the flow.

Okay? See you in class.