First Day of Spring: More Thoughts on Warming Up

by Baxter

Happy First Day of Spring!

As usual, Nina did a bang up job yesterday of getting into the topic of warm-ups for your daily home practice, mostly from an Iyengar perspective. I wanted to add in that, as may have been obvious from Nina’s post, you start by thinking about where you want to head in your practice on any given day. I think of this as an opportunity to pick what I and others call a “goal” or “crown” pose or poses that I would like to explore in my practice that day. My goal pose is usually one that I am working toward feeling more open or stronger in, or one that I feel has more to be discovered than what I already know about it. Once I have determined that, I can begin to consider appropriate ways to warm my body up for my goal pose.

Spring in Northern California by Nina Zolotow
(yes, we do have seasons)

Nina suggested four possible categories of goal poses you might work toward: seated forward bends, seated twists, backbends or inversions. And with each goal pose category, she gave you several areas of the body that need to opened up to safely achieve those poses. However, you could have as your goal pose a particular standing pose that is particularly challenging for you, say Revolved Triangle, which is part forward bend, and part twist, requiring you to blend warm ups from both of those categories.

Nina’s focus was mostly on the concept of stretching and opening areas, but don’t forget that many of your poses require an equal amount of strength and stability in order to successfully do them, such as Handstand or Heron pose, both arm balances that may require cultivating strength prior to attempting the full pose.  For instance, I often warm up with something I call “sag and lift” that looks a bit like cat/cow, except the movement is isolated to the shoulder girdle, and on an inhale, you sag your chest toward the floor a bit, and on the exhale you strongly press the space between the shoulder blades toward the ceiling. 

If you were to look at the back of Light on Yoga, Iyengar’s classic book on yoga asana, you would see a whole series of practices listed there. What you might not see was any clear “warm ups” listed.  At least not ones that are not already stand alone yoga poses. By contrast, what you may have noticed in your public classes is that there are often warm-ups that don’t fit directly into what we could call codified yoga postures. In fact a few days ago, in Shari’s interview on abdominals (see here), she recommend pelvic tilts and pelvic clocks, which are actually modern “poses” from the worlds of physical therapy and Feldenkrais technique. All this to remind you that you can think outside the box as you warm yourself up for you goal pose.

And since I have studied not only the Iyengar method, but also from the Krishnamacharya lineage, I do a lot of “mini-vinyasa” to warm up for my practice. The reclining hip opener sequence we introduced for the back care practice is one example (see here), but you can make it even more simple by linking a starting stance with the full pose, and moving back and forth between them with your breath, typically for around six breath cycles. As an example, take starting on hands and knees, exhaling into Downward-Facing Dog, then inhaling back to hands and knees, repeating this five more times. It’s a great way to prepare for a longer held version of Downward-Facing Dog. 

As there are a lot of different ways to warm up and sequence a practice, I am sure we will return to the topic again before too long, so in the meantime, give some of these ideas a spin if you have not tried them in your home practice yet.