Featured Pose: Standing Side Stretch

by Baxter and Nina

This simple pose is a wonderful all-over stretch. Like last week’s Upward Bound Hands pose, Standing Side Stretch, also called New Moon or Half Moon pose, is the perfect antidote to working with your arms down by your sides all day. Raising your arms overhead reverses the effect of gravity on your arms and reestablishes the full range of motion of your collar blades and shoulder blades. This pose also lengthens the front of your legs and the backs of your knees, which are typically closed in the sitting position. Side bending brings greater length and opening to the muscles and joints on your side body, and stretches the muscles that run from the shoulder blades to upper arms, from lower back to the arm bones, and all the side waist and side hip muscles.

In addition, by taking your spine into conscious side bending, a movement that occurs rarely in every day living, you are helping to maintain the mobility of your spine, nourishing the joints and disks.

Lengthening the sides of your torso is a good preparation for back bends, forward bends, and twists. It’s also a good way to warm up for standing pose, and for seated poses that involve side bending, such as Revolved One-Legged Forward Bend or Gate pose. This pose takes up very little space and requires no props, which is why we’re including it in our office/travel yoga practice. If standing isn’t possible, you can do the arm position and side bending from a seated position.

Baxter prescribes this for:

• Shoulder stiffness
• General strengthening needed due to weakness or fatigue
• Improving breathing for conditions such as asthma and COPD
• Stabilizing the knee joint (for people with knee injuries)
• A counter-pose for runners, bikers and hikers, who tend to hold a lot of tension in their lateral hips
• Carpal tunnel (because releasing the shoulders can be helpful for the hands)
• Rotator cuff injuries
• Arthritis
• Balance problems (because you are shifting the weight slightly from one foot to another)

Instructions: Start by standing in Mountain Pose, with your feet about hips-width apart (or sit on a chair with your feet flat on the floor). Strengthen your legs, pressing from your hips into your feet. Then, on an inhalation, bring your arms forward and up, with the palms facing each other. Lengthen your spine and lift your collarbones as your lift your shoulder blades. Move your arms toward a vertical position, keeping your head in a neutral position. Once you encounter resistance in your shoulders or upper back, resist the impulse to take your arms further back.

Now, on an exhalation, let your hips shift to the left a few inches as you tip your torso and upper body to the right, making sure you’re not rotating your hips or chest as you do so. As you tip to the side, maintain the parallel relationship between your arms. Also, keep your head evenly positioned between your arms, and in a neutral position, aligned with your spine, your eyes gazing forward.

As you maintain the side bend, press strongly from the hips down into the feet, especially from the left side. Some people have a tendency to collapse the right side of the body as they stretch the left side. So encourage a sense of length on both sides of your torso, even on the concave side. Because your body is dropping to the side and gravity is trying to pull your deeper into the pose, this is pose is muscularly demanding. Therefore, stay in the pose for just six breaths, maximum.

You can do this pose dynamically as a preparation for the Moon Salute by inhaling to one side, exhaling back to center, inhaling to the other side, and then exhaling back to center. Repeat the pattern up to six rounds.

When you are reading to come out of the pose, return to vertical on an exhalation. On your next exhalation, let your arms float back down to your sides. Exhale back to vertical. On the following exhalation, let your arms float back to your sides.

If raising your arms overhead is not possible, you can do a side stretch with your hands on your hips as shown below. While this does not provide the same stretch for your shoulders, you still get the benefit of the torso stretch and spinal side bend. 

Cautions: In general this is a pretty safe pose. However, you should approach the pose cautiously if you have significant arthritic pain in your neck or lower back or a history of osteoporosis, especially in the lower spine. Stop immediately if it fires up your pain. Because your arms are overhead, and you are holding the pose statically, this pose can be challenging for heart conditions or high blood pressure. For those conditions, do the pose dynamically, moving in and out of the pose with your breath.

If your SI joint is unstable, be sure to lift your torso away from your hips as you bend to the side. If you have shoulder problems, you can spread your arms wide or practice with your hands on your hips.