Why can’t I do this yoga pose? Or, there’s the other version: why can’t my student do this pose? This is one of the two most common questions I hear in every workshop and class that I teach. The other question I hear most often is some variation on: why does this pose hurt, cause pain, or how do I work with an injury in this pose? There are many reasons why someone struggles with a posture. But what students so often don’t consider is that it likely isn’t just one thing that prevents us from accessing a pose in yoga.
We could group the reasons why we struggle with a posture into categories to help conceptualize them. Our challenges in yoga postures could be grouped like this:
- You need more flexibility in some area
- You need more strength in some area
- You have an anatomical restriction, for example, proportional relationships between body parts like torso and femur length, or a past surgery, like a joint replacement or spinal fusion
- There is an important piece of technique missing from how you’re approaching a pose
- You are missing an essential pattern for a more complex pose that you haven’t been training in simpler poses
- You simply need more time and practice for the pose to evolve
The above list can help you consider reasons why you are struggling with a particular type of yoga pose, but what isn’t necessarily clear from this list is that the real reason you can’t do a yoga pose is probably not just one thing. If you are trying to problem-solve, either because a posture seems inaccessible or because something hurts, it’s essential to understand that you are probably looking for more than one thing.
As humans, we like a good story, one with a clear plot and a single villain. We have what I’m going to call a singularity bias, a bias towards wanting every situation to have one single cause. We habitually carry that desire into arenas that are far too complex to be delineated in that way. The human body is not simply a system of pulleys and levers. It’s more akin to a complex ecological system with a long list of always interrelated variables.
When our yoga practice is humming along smoothly, we don’t necessarily stop to consciously think about that. But when we feel stuck, confused, or experience pain, we hopefully pause and begin to problem-solve. This means zooming out and not just looking for the one answer, but for the multiple interrelated factors that we need to change.
Let’s look at some examples of how this impacts our understanding of problem-solving in yoga postures.
Marichyasana C
Let’s say a student is struggling to do the twisting posture, Marichyasana C with a bind. Where might you look to see what’s restricting them? There are multiple issues that might come up, most of which can occur at the same time.
Flexibility issues
Tight hamstrings can pull the pelvis under (into a posterior tilt). That makes it harder to sit up in Marichyasana C and bring your torso towards your knee. That means you have to reach farther to bind. Tight shoulders might also contribute to restricting a bind.
Strength issues
This is the one type of issue that probably isn’t going to come up in Marichyasana C.
Anatomical issues
Certain body proportions can make Marichyasana C more challenging. For example, if you have a long torso relative to your femur, it will make it harder to keep a connection between your binding arm and the knee you’re binding around. Additionally, long tibias relative to femur length can make it harder to sit upright.
Missing technique issues
A habit of leaning back and resting your weight into the back hand will set you up with your torso farther from your binding knee in Marichyasana C. This will make it harder because you’ll have farther to reach to connect the arm around the knee and bind. If you are very flexible and/or have long arms relative to a narrower torso, you might still be able to do the pose even with the missing technique piece, but it’s still worth considering each of these pieces as you assemble your pose.
Training the essential patterns in simpler poses
The essential pattern of moving your body toward your bent knee and connecting your armpit before reaching the arm is a pattern that comes up in other postures. Often students have encountered other twists like revolved side angle before they try Marichyasana C, for example. If this person has been doing other poses with the essential armpit-to-knee connection that’s necessary to bind in Marichyasana C, such as revolved side angle or ardha matseyndrasana, have they been working on that pattern in those other poses?
Need more time and practice for the pose to evolve
This is a possible part of accessing any pose. Marichyasana C in particular has multiple parts that intersect to create a complex pose. The more complex, the more time a posture will typically take.
I hope you can see how all of these aspects of a pose come together to make it more or less accessible. Which of these things is the reason that the person in our example is struggling with Marichyasana C? Trick question. The answer, of course, is that all of them might contribute. Although we might be primed to look for a single cause, it’s almost always more than one thing.
Let’s look at another example.
Bakasana
In this example, let’s say we are trying to help a student who is struggling to balance in bakasana, the basic version of crow pose. Let’s go through our list of where we might look for what is getting in the student’s way of finding a consistent balance and a confident bakasana.
Flexibility issues
While it’s possible that some tension around the pelvis or shoulders might restrict movement in some way, flexibility issues are not the most likely culprits for restriction in this posture.
Strength issues
Strength issues are likely contributors to struggling with bakasana, but again, there’s not only one strength issue we might need to work with. The first place I would look for sufficient strength is in the muscles that support the base of this pose. In an arm balancing posture, your base of support is your hands, arms, and shoulder girdle. The main large muscle that supports your shoulder girdle when you are weight-bearing on your hands and arms is the serratus anterior.
In this pose, I’m also interested in whether the student has sufficient strength in the erector spinae to keep the pelvis lifting. And, of course, developing a connection to the true core muscles, like iliopsoas, is also important. One of the complicated parts of this pose is that there could be multiple areas of the body where a student needs to develop more strength and make a connection to. It’s typically not just one thing.
Technique
What about techniques in bakasana? It’s not uncommon for students to imagine that arm balances are all about strength. But actually, learning to control anterior and posterior pelvic tilt while upside down is one of the main essential patterns for so many arm balancing poses. The pelvis contains our center of gravity, and it’s the heavy part in the middle of our body that we are trying to orient in space when we’re balancing upside down. Strength alone is not enough without technique.
Anatomical issues
Past shoulder injuries might make this pose feel unstable or even make it contraindicated depending on the situation. Other anatomical issues like proportional relationships in our body can also make this pose more challenging. Any anatomical issues we come in with will intersect with how long it takes to build strength, and how easy or difficult it is to apply the techniques in this pose.
Training the pattern
Knowing what the techniques or skills are isn’t enough. The more complex the technique, the more we need to train that pattern for some time in order to implement it reliably. If a student is struggling with bakasana, have they been training the arm-balancing base pattern by leaning into their hands in the forward fold in sun salutations and other simpler movements? What about practicing the pelvic tilt motion in postures like headstand?
Need more time to practice
Building strength and training the technical skill to do bakasana typically take time. Building connections to moving in new ways routinely takes some time to unfold. This is especially true when we’re talking about learning to balance on our hands, as well as building the strength to do so. With arm-balancing postures, even simpler ones like bakasana, the combination of skill-building, acquiring strength, and adapting the pose to our individual body often takes months, not days. All of these aspects have to come together in order for a student to reliably set up bakasana.
Conclusion
Yoga postures are composed of multiple interrelated pieces. Although we tend to have a singularity bias and want to name one thing to blame our challenges in yoga on, postures all have multiple moving parts. Next time you or a student is struggling with a yoga pose, ask yourself about all of the pieces and parts that come together to create the pose. Then consider how you might work with all of them, not just one, to create a cohesive posture.
Originally published at Yoganatomy
