As a yoga practitioner, you might have come across the instruction “listen to your own body” more than once. However, these simple instructions are hard to follow when it comes to doing challenging yoga poses that often require practitioners to go beyond their limits. The whole motive behind the yoga practice is to improve our body alignment, which eventually enables us do what we are not able to do currently. And as our body alignment improves we become able to do poses that we once thought were beyond us.
What is Body Alignment?
A good yoga teacher always refers body alignment as a process instead of an end result. The word alignment is often associated with one’s proficiency of performing yoga poses. In other words, a person is considered to have better alignment if he can perform yoga poses rather easily, and with much accuracy. However, since different human bodies have different limits; therefore, there cannot be a single ideal state that defines a perfect body alignment. Also, even the different forms of yoga have different standards for perfect body alignment.
As a practitioner, you don’t have to necessarily follow what alignment standards are set by your instructors or in the yoga form you have opted for. The only thing you have to concentrate is to become best you can be at yoga practice and that would be the state of perfect alignment for you.
Let’s go through some guidelines that will help you in achieving better body alignment while doing yoga.
Engage Your Core Muscles
The muscles of your torso and trunk are the core muscles, which primarily provide the support for your spine. Engaging core muscles in your exercise routine inevitably aligns your spine in the perfect manner, as well as provides you better control over your body movements.
Use Your Tailbone Effectively
In asanas like AdhoMukhaSvanasana, Parsvottanasana, and others, you need to balance your body on your limbs. During these poses, when you try to bring your tailbone downwards, it puts pressure on limbs, which consequently improves their strength and alignment.
Spread Your Fingers Wide
Always spread your fingers wide open whenever you are doing a yoga pose that requires you to support your body weight on your hands. In this way, your body weight is divided across your palm and fingers and every point is placed on the floor with equal firmness. Also, covering wide area inevitably allows you to have better balance.
Align Hands with Shoulders and Knees with Hips
A simple way to achieve better body alignment is to keep your hands directly below your shoulders and your knees hip distant-apart, whenever you do a yoga pose that requires you to place your limbs on the ground. This simple alignment technique allows you to achieve a better balance by distributing your body weight across the limbs uniformly.
If you want to learn more about body alignment and want to have an in depth understanding of the subject then learning yoga in India by joining one of the yoga retreats in Rishikesh or Goa or in other yoga hubs in the country, can be a good choice. Yoga is taught the traditional way by learned teachers and as such the process of learning is an experience in itself.