Sun Salutation Quickie

Hi, welcome to my take on sun salutations. They're a little different. The poses are actually exactly the same, but the effort that you put into them is a little bit different. Mainly, it's a lot of work in the legs. And I also like to demonstrate how each pose really builds up to the next.

So if you haven't watched the Talk Like Me video, you might wanna go watch that because it might use a few terms that are new to you, but I'll do my best to explain them here as well. When you're doing sun salutations, one of the common first poses is chair pose, right? Utkatasana, so you sit back, arms are up. And most commonly, what people will do is they'll just jam the knees back and flop forward, which doesn't really do much for the muscles and the joints. If you close the chain and basically put your hands on the floor and find something to push into, you can work a lot harder.

It's kinda like using equipment, but you're not. You're using the floor and your body. So if you come to Uttanasana, forward bend from Uttkatasana, and you keep your knees bent and you bring your hands to the floor, hands will go flat. I don't care where they go, but hands will go flat. And then you have to straighten the legs against that resistance.

So right now, all of the muscles in my legs are working really, really hard. You might see me tremble. This is the first forward bend I've done today. But I'm not allowing my hands to lift. So I'm really working hard into the floor, kind of pushing away.

And then from here, from Uttanasana, we wanna go to Arda Uttanasana or Trini, whatever you wanna call it, depending on your style. And most of us, again, we just lose it and we just kinda come up and there's not really much there. But if you come into it with this closed chain, again, that means hands and feet grounded here, and you start to stretch your spine forward, now I feel all of my back muscles, the erectors, the ones that run up and down the spine, I feel them very involved. And my arms are trembling. They're like in plank, actually they are in plank.

And guess what the next pose is from here? It's plank. So all I do, my arms are in position, my spine is in position. The only thing that happens is that my legs go back. I extend my hips, but the poses really lead up to each other.

And then from there, I can move into downward dog. And then I can skip the cobra up dog part, because that's not really the part I'm talking about for today, I'm really more talking about the legs. And then you can step forward and it's the same thing. If you don't lift the hands, again, you'll have to really stretch into resistance. So your hamstrings will get a lot of work here.

I'm stretching the spine forward, because I came up from downward dog, and then I can just bend the elbows back and reach the head down to the floor. And then from there, you can stand all the way up, your legs are still working, and bring your hands down. I just broke a sweat, it's not that easy. The movement is nice, I'm all for movement, but every once in a while, we like to really work hard. And this is a really good way to stretch your muscles, and then strengthen them, both the back of your leg muscles and your back muscles.

So give it a try, I hope you like it. See you next time, namaste.