Active Stance, Passive Stance

Hey again. I know that when you watch my classes I sometimes throw around a lot of terms and we have a whole separate clip that talks about what those terms are called Talk Like Me, but today I'm just going to use a really easy clean example to kind of express to you how I feel about how we should approach Asana. And I'm going to use tree pose because tree pose is a quintessential yoga pose that just about anyone can practice and I'm going to use it to demonstrate active versus passive range of motion. So most often when you go to class you try tree pose you're given all the normal cues and what we do is we end up bending over picking up the foot and placing it as high as it'll go and then we do our tree pose whatever arm variations we choose. The issue with that is it's not true range of motion it's a passive range of motion that you have put yourself in but you might not be able to get there on your own. So again if you see me and my passive range of motion I can get my foot as high as it can go and here we are. But if I really try to test how much range I have control over meaning I'm not using an external force in my arms to put my foot in place I would actually have to lift my leg on its own and without hiking up my hip using the muscles of the hip joint without hiking up the pelvis get my foot into the hip crease and you can see there's quite a distance and my hamstring is cramping like crazy because I don't have a lot of strength at this range some days are different than others but this is really a true testament to how well I can be in tree pose and how much control I have of the position. This is just a passive external space. So anyway I encourage you to try that in tree pose and when you watch my classes and you see that I talk a lot about trying to put yourself in the pose or get yourself out of the pose that's really what I'm referring to. Can you get there on your own like the Hanumanasana class? Can you go down into Hanumanasana the splits using gravity but then can you get yourself back up without using anything else? So it's really something to play with in your practice and if you start to strengthen at these end ranges of motion you'll see changes actually pretty fast. So good luck with that. Let me know how it goes.