What You Should Really Know About Listening To Your Body And Working With Your Edge
Co-written by Steve Sampson, RYT-500, ERYT-200 and Michele Lyman, RYT-500
It’s not uncommon to hear a teacher give the instruction to “listen to your body” during practice. But what is your body trying to tell you? This week, Michele and Steve will help you interpret what you’re experiencing in a pose, and discuss how, with that understanding, you can appropriately work with your physical “edge” during practice.
Limits On Your Movement
A physical yoga practice typically involves coming into a pose, and then holding that position for some length of time before moving to the next pose. As your body moves into a pose, eventually it gets to a point where it can’t move any further in a particular way or direction. The instruction to “listen to your body” can help you understand why, for that particular shape or movement, you have reached a stopping point. That knowledge can help you make choices to work towards the functional goal of a pose using alternatives appropriate to your unique anatomy.
The stopping points we reach are generally the result of tension, compression, or a combination of those two. If you’ve been spending more time practicing at home over the past 18 months, you may also have experienced a third limitation on your range of movement, the presence of a dog or cat on your mat…but handling that situation is beyond the scope of today’s discussion.
Let’s talk about what tension and compression are, and how what you’re feeling can help you interpret why your movement is reaching a stopping point.
Tension In Our Tissues
Our bodies contain various types of tissue, including muscles, fascia, tendons, and skin. These tissues lengthen and contract as we move our body, although some move more than others. For example, assuming the tissues are reasonably healthy, the degree to which muscles and fascia may lengthen and contract will be greater than your more dense connective tissues. But eventually, all types of tissue reach a limit on how far they can lengthen. This resistance to lengthening any further is called tension.
Sound familiar? This tension is what draws some people to yoga…wanting to address that feeling of being “tight.” When you are experiencing tension in your tissues, it will be felt in a part of the body that is away from your direction of movement.
Think of coming into a seated forward fold with both legs straight. As you begin to hinge forward from the hips and move your chest towards your legs, you are lengthening the tissues along the back line of your body, such as the hamstring muscles and surrounding fascia in your legs. The further into the fold that you move, those tissues need to lengthen or “stretch” more, until they reach the point where they cannot continue to (safely) go any further. What keeps you from moving further into a pose is that the involved tissues cannot stretch any further, you have reached the point of tensile resistance.
Since we all start with unique bodies, and then layer on differences in lifestyles and activities, not everyone will experience tissue tension in the same way. The flexibility of your tissues can be influenced by the physical activities in which you engage, as well as the physiological effects of stress, and how well hydrated you are. In general, absent certain underlying health conditions, over time you may be able to improve flexibility and increase range of motion when the stopping point relates to tensile resistance.
Compression In The Body
Let’s go back to that example of a seated forward fold. But this time, as you hinge forward you’re not really feeling any tension in your back or legs, and you fold until your abdomen reaches your legs. You can’t move any further, because something in the direction of your movement prevents it. You have reached the point of compression. Compression occurs when two body parts come together. It may be a soft compression (tissue on tissue), hard compression (bone on bone), or often a blend of the two.
As with tension, the point at which you feel compression when moving into a pose is a function of the variables in your own body. Let’s consider an example. Many yoga poses involve opening your legs out to the side (abducting the legs), which involves movement of your hip joint. How far apart will your legs move before you reach the point of compression in your hip? It depends.
Here we have two femur (thigh) bones from different people that are similar, except for a 40 degree difference in the angle of the neck shaft at the top. Which of these bones represent the “typical” person? You guessed it: both of them. While both of these people have a perfectly normal femur, all else being equal, the person on the right will be able to abduct their leg to a wider position. Now, it is important to note that feeling compression is not necessarily a problem. An appropriate amount of compressive stress can be healthy, such as by building strength and resilience in our bones. But if the person on the left tries to force beyond that point of compression to match the position of the person on the right, they risk injuring themselves.
The types of normal variation you see in the angle of the femoral neck shaft occur all throughout our skeletal structure. Layer on the differences in the tension and shape of our body tissues, and it starts to become clear why two practitioners can have a very different experience of a pose….both from the perspective of what it looks like aesthetically, and how they are experiencing it functionally.
Now that you have a sense for what you might be experiencing in your body during a pose, let’s look at how you can use that knowledge to work with your personal “edge” during practice. It starts by considering what your intention is for that practice session.
What’s Your Intention?
In addition to the instruction to listen to your body, you might also hear your teacher say to “set an intention for today’s class.” So what does that mean? Setting an intention is bringing your awareness to a quality or virtue that you would like to cultivate for your practice both on and off the mat. Many times, an intention might relate to your time off the mat, such as wanting to cultivate more patience, grace, gratitude, or compassion in your life…and that can be a whole discussion unto itself! For today’s purposes, let’s focus on the intention for your time on the mat, while working with your yoga postures.
In the physical context, it may be your intention to work on developing your expression of specific yoga poses. This might be a building block as you work towards adding additional yoga poses to your practice, or could relate to preparing your body for specific movements or positions that you take in other physical activities, such as sports or dance. This type of intention may emphasize the aesthetic alignment of your body. Working with your edge when the aesthetic look of the pose is a focus may involve using props or (with your consent) a teacher-provided assist to safely come into a particular shape with your body, given any “messages” you might be getting in the form of tension or compression as you move. There is nothing wrong with an aesthetic approach, but an intention to work towards mastering the classical expression of a pose should still recognize that not every pose is suited for every body.
Rather than the aesthetic look of a pose, your practice intention may instead focus on how a pose benefits you as it contributes to your overall health. With this functional approach, emphasis is on what the pose is doing for your body, and less on the pose looking a particular way. Even with a functional approach to your asana practice, you likely will start each pose with queues to move toward a particular shape (particularly in a group class, where a lot of different body types may be represented), but coupled with instruction on the functional goal of the pose. Based on what you are experiencing, you can then make appropriate choices to work towards that goal.
Let’s go back to our seated forward fold example one more time. From a functional perspective, the goal of the pose is to stretch your hamstrings, not get your nose to your knees with a neutral spine. As you fold forward, you may reach a point of compression in your hip crease before you feel any significant lengthening on the back line of the body. Changing the alignment of your legs to separate them wider apart can give you the opportunity to avoid that point of compression as you come into your fold, allowing you to stretch the backs of your legs. Is that the classical expression of pashchimottanasana (a.k.a. seated forward fold)? Maybe not. But if your intention is to focus on the functional benefit of the pose, what you are feeling is the key consideration, rather than achieving a set aesthetic look to the pose.
Working With Your Edge
The “edge” of a pose (or experience) can be hard to describe. However, I like to think of it as a way to safely step outside your comfort zone in order to explore and grow. And, since every body has unique compression and tension limitations, as well as different intentions for practice, everyone’s edge will also be different and unique.
During your yoga practice, the edge is that point while holding a pose where you feel challenged both mentally and physically as you work toward your intention, but you are still able to maintain a steady breath. It’s the balance between the challenge of a posture and being able to maintain a sense of calm and ease. And remember that your edge may change. Those may be longer-term changes through regular practice, or even short-term changes based on your energy level on a particular day. The important thing is to be aware of your edge each time you come to your mat and know how you want to work with it on that specific day.
Another pose we can use as an example to bring together the concept of tension, compression and working at your edge is reclining hand-to-big-toe pose (or in Sanskrit Supta Padangusthasana).
This pose is done on your back with one leg extended above the hip with a strap around the foot, and the other leg is either bent with the foot on the floor or it is extended long on the mat. Holding both ends of the strap in one hand, you can increase the tension of this stretch by keeping your leg straight and drawing your foot closer to the face to elongate the muscles on the back of your leg. Or, to decrease the tension of the pose, move the foot away from your face and closer to the floor.
Once you are in this position, notice what you are feeling and bring your awareness back to your intention. If you want to increase your flexibility but you don’t feel any tension in the back of the leg, work the pose so that the tension increases. If you want to increase your flexibility but you are feeling pain and can’t maintain a steady breath, decrease the tension of the pose. In between these two places is your edge - the point where you feel challenged but can maintain ease.
In any given posture, you can choose to work at your edge or less than your edge depending on your intention. However, you never want to work past your edge. When you can’t maintain ease in a posture, your body will think it is in danger and your muscles will become stressed. And stressed muscles don’t feel safe so when you come out of the pose, they will actually go back to their original length instead of surrendering to their new length. Or, you may even injure yourself by pushing the muscles beyond a safe stretch.
These concepts also apply when you are working with your edge off the mat. Think about the first time you learned something new. It was probably challenging to work through all the concepts and you may have even wanted to give up from time to time. If you stayed calm and worked through the challenges, you may have eventually learned this new thing and it now may even seem easy to you! And now your edge is in a different place beyond where it was before because you have grown your knowledge.
So there you have it. Now you know how to “listen to your body” so you can make the best choices for your body and mind during your practice.