Vinyasa Flow & Shoulder Injury Prevention: 14-Min Class

You can notice that when she does it like this her elbows are over her wrists and her chest is far forward of her wrists. So that's the way to instruct it. And some people are much weaker than they believe they are. So on the way down I always give the options no shame using your knees.

Going slowly down from plank to the floor with or without the knees. All the strong guys would never in their life dream about doing it with their knees. But if you see that their elbows are pointing out you say keep the elbows in. If you can't do that put your knees down.

Put some shame. Shame and guilt usually works as methods of the teaching. So when we're in dog, plank we move all the way down to the ground with grace and perfection. Keep your hands exactly where they are.

Lift your chest. Cobra. We talked about the cobra already. I forgot about the feet.

Flatten out the feet so that they don't push with the toes. So feet should be, your legs should be engaged but the legs are not the most important right here because the hips are in the ground. So most of the weight is in the hips. Let's talk some more about the cobra.

We just mentioned the cobra in the turtle cobra rolling section we did before. But cobra, the way most people do it is they push a lot with their hands. And they go too high so that the hips lift. The shoulders are forward, the neck is cranked.

And if you go up high in the cobra and then you release your hands off the floor. Boom. So 70% of the pose is done with the hands and only a little bit engagement of the back. That's how it's usually done.

What we want instead is basically we're doing a skydiver pose. The one with the arms back. Do that one. So we're basically doing this one with support from the hands.

So do that again. You have your hands back. Look how high she is. And then she places the hands down.

Shoulders stay in the same place. Now she can lift higher. But there is so little going on. If she removes the hands now.

Then she only drops down a little bit. So 70% of the pose is done with engagement of the butt and spine. Only a little bit support with the hands. You don't have time to talk about all of this.

But in your mind when you watch you want more of this and less of what? Pushing and lifting and straining. And you can hear. You can go over to a person and just listen.

If they're breathing correctly. If they're breathing deeply. They got it. If they're not breathing and they're.

Then they're struggling against their own inflexibility. So the test is. If you see someone. If you see a lot of people here ask them.

Okay now without the hands. Remove the hands. But it's also nice to have them lift without the hands first. Because then they engage.

And then they just help with a little push. And you can go higher. It doesn't mean I can keep myself here without the hands. But I already have my whole back body engaged before I go up.

Stine has been teaching this for well over 10 years. And it has taken many years to figure out what works and what doesn't. One more subtle detail is that you're not trying to push your chest. When you do a push up.

You're basically pushing your whole body up and back. What you're doing here is you're lifting with the spine. Helping with the hands. And you're basically trying to drag your hands back.

So that your chest is moving up and a bit forward. So the movement would be this way in theory. So you're pulling your elbows in and you're kind of trying to drag your chest between the arms. This was a cumbersome way to explain it.

I'm not the world master of English. But find a way to encourage people to lift up. Support with the hands. And get extension and length in the spine and the front side.

Because it's both a stretch for the front. It's also a good opener for the spine. Anything else you want to add to the cobra? Nope.

Nope. That's it. And then on the way back. Again getting up from the floor because we're moving back to plank and back to dog.

So tuck your toes. Inhale to prep. Tense up your whole body and push back to plank and back to dog. And this takes a considerable amount of technique and effort.

Do it again from the belly. This is usually what it looks like when people do... Usually each body part is moving separately and it's basically all the way. They get back to dog for sure.

But what you want to help people with is get the engagement. They want to tense up their whole body when you ask the body to. So here again, knees is okay. Knees.

Doing it from the knees for better technique. You can always say the modification instead of saying if you're a weak ass pussy, then you do it with the knees down. That's not the way you frame it. You frame it by telling them if you want to do it correctly, take away a little bit of the strain, use it with the knees down and try to move your whole body as one piece.

You're fighting people's ego when you're teaching. You need some strategies to deal with that. The goal is to do five rounds of the vinyasa. We've just been talking like seven or eight minutes about this, so you don't have time to say everything, but you should know a lot more than you teach.

You should know ten things and teach one thing. Teach one thing. One thing each round. But I think you only have two rounds to talk about the basics.

So you ask people to roll forward to plank, lower down on the exhale, talk one or two things about the cobra, and then pushing back to plank and back to dog. That was one round. So do one round where you actually cue it. You cue it the whole way for one round.

I cue it for the whole first round with a few cues, and then the second round I say... They want you to cue me for them. Right now. This is called marriage.

Okay. Dog. Lift your heels, roll forward to plank, inhale. To prep.

Exhale, lower the whole body down, squeezing the elbows in. Stay here. Lift the chest using your back. Lift your...

Oh, sorry. Flatten out the feet. Lift your chest using your back, supporting with the hands. Inhale.

Exhale, lower down. Inhale to prep here. Tuck your toes. Your whole body is one piece.

Push back up to plank and back to dog. Let's repeat this slowly. On your toes, rolling forward, inhale to prep. Lower your whole body down.

No shame in placing the knees in the ground. Squeeze your elbows. Lift your chest. Don't strain the neck.

Exhale, lower down. Tuck your toes. Inhale to prep. Use your knees for better technique.

Push back to a plank. Back to dog. Now, we did it two times. Do it three more times on your own, trying to flow with the breath.

Remember to go a bit slower than feels natural. That's how I would frame this section. Yes. So, there's a lot of information that you want to know and practice on yourself.

But when you teach devinyasa, you don't want to hold people for five minutes in a plank, not in dog and not in cobra. So you want it to flow and feel good. So you give two cues the first round, two cues the second round, and then they can flow. And they will probably also come back, so they already know a few cues after a while.

So you don't need to feel like you have to give them all ten things at once. Just the most important stuff. And when I see a good jiu-jitsu instructor, the good jiu-jitsu instructors tells the basics. This is the foundation.

Everybody go out and practice. He doesn't ask any questions, and then this person has a super individual weird question that he answers to everybody. No, he teaches the basics in two minutes. Everybody goes out and practices, and then he walks around, and people ask the weird questions, and he can give the weird answers that fit that question.

So when you do the first two rounds, you only talk about the basics, and then you walk around, and you know this guy has a weird elbow and shoulder. You go and you talk about the modifications there. You have 15, 20, 30 seconds to help people like that, and that really puts you into the right frame of mind, and it saves you so much babbling instead of holding everybody in planks for five minutes while you try to catch everything at once. Do two rounds, two cues the first time, two cues the second time, and then you save the nuance for when you walk around.

You agree? Yes. So the easiest way to do it is from dog. Inhale, roll forward to plank.

Exhale, lower down to your belly, left knock your feet. Inhale, engage the back, lift the chest, cobra. Exhale, lower down, tuck your toes, engage the front body. Push up into plank, back to down dog.

And then if you see a lot of people struggling, the next one will be a multiplication. So inhale, into plank, lower the knees to, you know, help yourself with this pose or whatever you want to say. Exhale, lower down, make sure the shoulders are away from the floor. Inhale, push down to lift the chest.

Exhale, lower down, tuck your toes. With or without the knees, push up through plank, back to down dog. And then you can just keep adding one thing or the other. You see the room on the first round.

If everybody lowers their shoulders down, then the next round you make sure to cue the shoulders a lot. So you just look at the room also and add what you think they need. We went through a couple of really foundational principles other than the vinyasa in this sequence. And I just want to remind you many of the things we talk about as these digression side tracks we have in separate videos in the helping you become a good teacher sections later in this course.

So that's the vinyasa. So the recap is basically just the vinyasa is moving from down dog through plank, down on your belly, doing the cobra back to down dog. It's just a lot to know about that transition because we do it a lot in yoga. And I always finish when we do five rounds of this and we're finished, I say that was the last one.

We will do this one several more times throughout the class to maintain the flow of the breath and keep the heat in so that people understand why we're doing it. It's not a yoga push up. It's the foundational of vinyasa yoga is the vinyasa, the movement with the breath, keeping the heat up.