Featured Sequence: Core Strength Practice

by Baxter
There is a lot of talk these days about developing core strength for benefits such as better posture, less back pain and better overall body strength. When I started doing yoga in the mid-90s, I never gave this much thought, perhaps because core strength was not all the rage then but also because I found that my well-balanced yoga classes were already cultivating strength in the areas that I consider “core” musculature.

So what are those areas? The most obvious ones are the focus of many exercise or Pilates mat classes. I’m referring to the four layers of the front abdominal muscles, from the most superficial and famous six-pack known as the Rectus Abdominis, the next two diagonally oriented layers, the External and internal Obliques, to the deepest corset-like layer, the Transversus Abdominis. And this is where a lot of the focus in other core strengthening sometimes stops. But I also think of the lower back muscles, such as the Erector Spinae and the Quadratus Lumborum (sometimes referred to as the QL), the deeper belly muscles, such as the Psoas and the Iliacus, and the pelvic floor muscles as all contributing to “core” strength. 

So, in addition to one or two obvious poses that will address the four layers of the abdominals, such as Boat pose, the other poses in my sequence address the other areas we should also be interested in if we truly want to focus on a strong core. As with our other strengthening sequences, working towards longer holds, somewhere around 90 seconds, is your longer-term goal. But always listen to the feedback of your body, and if you start to feel shaky, lose form and alignment, or feel weak, stop at that point and note the time and use that as your initial baseline hold. 

Core Strength Practice

1. Gentle Reclining Warm Ups: For a couple of minutes, lie down and do some simple movements to wake up your lower back and belly area, perhaps bringing your knees into your chest one at a time a few times, or from Constructive Rest pose, rocking your knees side to side. 

2. Upward Extended Feet Pose (Urdhva Prasarita Padasana): Lying on your back, stretch your legs out long on the floor and make them strong, as if you were standing on them. Find and maintain a slight natural lumbar curve in your lower back. Don’t let this space enlarge or diminish as you work. 

On an inhalation, take your arms overhead and down toward the floor and keep them there. On an exhalation, lift one leg (easier if you need to start off slowly) or both legs up about 30 degrees off the floor and try to maintain this spot for 20 seconds or so while breathing normally. Then, on another exhale, take your legs up another 30 degrees (now at 60 degrees off the floor) and repeat the hold. Finally, take your up to 90 degrees and hold there for about 20 seconds before lowering your legs slowly to the floor on an exhalation. Bring your arms back to your sides and rest for a few breaths, and see if your body seems up for trying it one or two more times. This pose activates the abdominal muscles, the Psoas and Iliacus, the pelvic floor and some of the lower back muscles.

3. Revolved Abdomen Pose (Ardha Jathara Parivartanasana): Lying on your back, bend your knees and place your feet on the floor. Take your arms out to your sides, in line with your shoulders. Then, lift your shins up and bring them parallel with the floor, keeping your knees positioned right over your hips. Keep your legs snuggled against each other as you work. 

On an inhalation, slowly drop your knees and turn your hips to the right, hovering a few inches off the floor while keeping the backs of your shoulder blades on the floor. Then on your exhalation, slowly swing your legs and hips back to center. Repeat this process on the left, slowing your breath down a bit as you work. Do this side-to-side about six times, then bring your feet down, stretch your legs out on the floor and take a brief rest. This pose strengthens the Oblique layers of the abdominals, and if you can maintain a slight arch in the lower back, also gets the Transversus in the mix, too. 

4. Locust Pose (Shalabhasana): Roll onto your belly and chest, and bring your arms along side your body, hands by the hips. I think doing a few rounds of one-legged or two-legged dynamic Locust is a good preparation for the full pose so wee Dynamic Locust Pose for instructions for the dynamic version of this pose.  After you are warmed up, on an inhalation, lift your chest and head and one or both legs up a few inches off the floor. Keep your head and neck in line with the rest of you spine (which is coming into a small backbend). Stay in the pose for 10-20 seconds, breathing normally. Lower down on an exhalation and release all effort for a few breaths. Depending on how you are feeling, repeat one to two more times. This pose strengthens the back core muscles such as the QL and the Erector Spinae.

5. Hunting Dog Pose: Come up to hands and knees and do Hunting Dog pose once on each side, keeping close attention to maintaining the natural curve in the lower back. See Hunting Dog Pose for instructions. In addition to the back core muscles, this also works the Transversus and the pelvic floor muscles if you can maintain your back arch without wobbling! And feel free to release your wrists by giving them a quick shake out before proceeding to the next pose. 

6. Plank/Forearm Plank Pose: From all fours, come into Downward-Facing Dog pose, and then shift your shoulders forward until your shoulder joints are directly over your wrist joints. Keep your ribcage lifting up towards your shoulder blades and your elbows strong and straight. The rest of your body should be in a Mountain pose-like shape, so you need to keep your core and legs engaged, while maintaining a natural curve in your lower back. To come out of the pose, swing back to Downward-Facing Dog, then to hands and knees. Afterward, give your wrists a good shake out and brief rest. Similar to Hunting Dog, the core muscles are strongly engaged, but much more so in Plank and Forearm Plank.

To get a whole different experience and give your wrists a nice break, you can also do Forearm Downward-Facing Dog and swing into Plank pose with your forearms on the floor.  

7. Arms Overhead Pose (Urdhva Hastasana): In our Opening Tight Shoulders Sequence, we showed you several variations of this pose, but the one I want you to try today is different. From Mountain pose, on an inhalation, take your arms overhead alongside your ears. 

While firming your leg muscles and simultaneously pressing your fingertips as high as they will go, notice what happens in your lower belly and pelvic floor. If you get the up-down action of your arms and legs going, your lower belly often hollows a bit towards the spine without flattening the spinal arch, and your pelvic floor muscles will firm and may even slightly lift. I call this a natural belly and pelvic floor “lock,” known in Sanskrit as Uddiyana and Mula Bandha.  It is “natural” because it arises as a result of the physical effort of the reach of Arms Overhead pose, and strengthens the Transversus and pelvic floor muscles nicely. You can also make those locks happen for your pranayama practice separately, but we won’t get into that today. (Shelly Prosko has some information in her post Treatment of Incontinence if you want to learn more about locks.)

8. Triangle Pose (Utthita Trikonasana): As I had you do in our Lower Body Strength Sequence, you may want to start by coming in and out Triangle pose dynamically a few times to warm up for full Triangle pose. Then hold full Triangle for 10-20 seconds while breathing normally. To engage your side core muscles, such as the Obliques, more fully, try this variation: Bring your palms together in front of your heart in prayer position, and keep your arms and hand like this as you side-bend into Triangle pose. Notice how much more your leg, hip and side waist muscles have to work when your bottom hand is not supporting you. Repeat on second side.

9. Half-Downward-Facing Dog Pose at the Wall (Ardha Adho Muka Svanasana): This is a great counter-pose for the asymmetric standing poses like Triangle pose you just did. See Half Dog Pose at the Wall for basic instructions.   While you are in the pose for 20-30 seconds, draw you lower abdomen up towards the spine without changing the arch of your lower back.

10. Extended Side Angle Pose (Utthita Parsva Konasana): From Mountain pose, step your feet wide apart, turn your right foot and leg out 90 degrees and kick out your back heel an inch or so. Bring your arms up parallel with the floor and bend your front knee. Then side-bend your hips and torso over your front leg and put your right hand on a block on its highest height, placed snug up against the outside of your front shin. Swing your top arm up and overhead, completing the side angle from your back leg through your torso and into your top arm. Push down firmly into the block with your bottom hand and feel your right shoulder blade firm into your chest and slightly down toward your waist. Reach your top arm and shoulder blade strongly forward towards your fingers. Inhale as you come up, relax your arms at your side and repeat on the second side.

Doing the pose this way can start to work the side core muscles, but for this practice, I’d like you to try Extended Side Angle pose with your hands in prayer position as you did with Triangle. After side-bending into the pose with your hands in prayer position, line up your spine with your back leg so you create one long angle. Your side core muscles will have to work quite a bit harder to keep you in position then when you use your bottom hand for support, so you may have to shorten your time in the pose initially. Repeat on the second side.

11. Repeat Half Downward-Facing Dog at the Wall here if you like.

12. Boat Pose (Paripurna Navasana): Come to a seated position, with your knees bent and your feet on the floor in front of you. Tip your torso back a bit, keeping some good length in the spine, but not overly back bending it. Hold onto the back of your knees and rock back to balance on your buttocks with your feet just off the floor. See how long you can stay before your front thighs begin to tire. If Version 1 is easy, try Version 2, which involves bringing your shins parallel to the floor and holding there. If Version 2 is easy, try Version 3, letting go of your knees and stretching your arms forward. Finally, if Version 3 isn’t challenging enough, try Version 4, straightening your knees so your upper and lower body forms a “V” shape. Start with six breaths and work up from there.

13. Marichi’s pose 3 (Marichyasana 3): Start by sitting in Staff pose (Dandasana) with your legs extending forward. Feel free to place a folded blanket or other lift under your hips if your hamstrings or lower back are tight and stiff. Then, keeping your left leg straight, bend your right leg so your knee is upright and the toes of your right foot are facing forward. Then, move your right foot close to your right sitting bone. Place your right hand on the floor to your right and a bit behind you and support your torso with that arm. Turn your upper belly and chest towards your right knee and wrap the crook of your left elbow around your right knee. Maintain a nice vertical lift up through your spine, and, using your arms simply to keep you in position, focus on your abdominal muscles firming and contracting to take you a bit deeper into the twist. This pose focuses mostly on the diagonal Obliques. Stay for 20-30 seconds to start, then release and repeat on the second side.

14. Reclined Cobbler’s Pose (Supta Baddha Konasana): As a treat for your core and all the hard work it has done, this restorative pose is a great way to release tension from your abdomen and all the muscles around it. It’s the first pose in our Mini Restorative Sequence  and you can watch me teach it on YouTube here:

Stay for a minimum of 10 minutes, if your schedule permits, and focus on softening the core area of your body as you feel your natural breath enter and exit. 

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Featured Sequence: Upper Body Strength

by Baxter

Over the years, a consistent desire expressed by many of my students is to have more upper body strength. I suspect that being confronted with yoga poses in their weekly yoga class that require more strength shines a light on an underlying weakness and fatigue that plagues many students of all ages.

So today’s sequence is designed to get you started on the road to a stronger upper body. As with our previous strengthening sequences, start with static holds to the point where you begin to fatigue or get shaky, and then gradually add more time to your holds until you can work up to 90 second. You can always warm up your muscles, connective tissue, and joints with a dynamic version of a pose, but I won’t describe those here today.

Upper Body Strength Practice

1. Hunting Dog Pose: See Featured Pose: Hunting Dog for basic instructions. Today I’ll add that since you are focusing on upper body strength, be mindful to keep your chest lifting towards your shoulder blades, especially on the side where your hand is on the ground. And strongly reach your lifted arm and shoulder blade forward. After you come out, be sure to shake out the wrist of your supporting arm. 

Hunting Dog Pose

2. High Lunge  (hands on the high side of blocks): From hands and knees position, take your right foot forward between your hands, and use the blocks on their highest height to support your straight arms. Turn the toes of your back foot under, then lift your back knee up and fully straighten your back leg. Position your front knee over your front ankle joint and keep your feet hips-distance apart, side to side. Press down into your front foot and the ball of your back foot, but for this sequence try to use your arms more for support to the point where you imagine you could lift your front foot off the floor (only imagine it!). Start with six breaths and gradually increase to 90 seconds over time. Repeat on the other side.

3. Downward Facing Dog: From hands and knees position, come up into Downward-Facing Dog pose. See Downward-Facing Dog Variations for variations you can use to experience the upper body strengthening of the versatile pose. Try any or all to find the variation that is right for you! I especially like Full Downward-Facing  and Forearm Downward-Facing Dog. 

Forearm Downward-Facing Dog Pose

4. High Plank Pose: Start in Downward-Facing Dog pose, and then shift your shoulders forward until your shoulder joints are directly over your wrist joints. Keep your ribcage lifting up towards your shoulder blades and your elbows strong and straight. The rest of your body should be in a Mountain pose-like shape, so you need to keep your core and legs engaged, while maintaining a natural curve in your lower back. To come out of the pose, swing back to Downward-Facing Dog, then to hands and knees. Afterward, give your wrists a good shake out and brief rest.

To get a whole different experience, and give your wrists a nice break, you can also do Forearm Downward-Facing Dog and swing into Plank pose with your forearms on the floor. 

After all that work with your hands and wrists, you can shift to standing and do some poses that bear less weight on the arms but that still strengthen the upper body!

5. Arms Overhead Pose: In a previous post, we showed you a version of this pose where you bind the hands. For this version, I’d like you to take a block between your hands, with your hands on the small ends of the block. Then, starting in Mountain pose, keeping your legs active swing your arms forward and overhead to the place your shoulders permit. Press your hands into the block, and lift your shoulder blades and arms actively towards the ceiling. You might repeat this twice.

6. Extended Side Angle Pose: From Mountain pose, step your feet wide apart, turn your right foot and leg out 90 degrees and kick out your back heel an inch or so. Bring your arms up parallel with the floor and bend your front knee. Then side-bend your hips and torso over your front leg and put your right hand on a block on its highest height, placed snug up against the outside of your front shin. Swing your top arm up and overhead, completing the side angle from your back leg through your torso and into your top arm. Push down firmly into the block with your bottom hand and feel your right shoulder blade firm into your chest and slightly down toward your waist. Reach your top arm and shoulder blade strongly forward towards your fingers. Inhale as you come up, relax your arms at your side and repeat on the second side.

7. Powerful Pose: We’ve featured this pose in the past, so for the basics, see Featured Pose: Utkatasana. 

For this sequence, as with Arms Overhead pose, place a block between your hands to bring more work to your arms. Make sure to listen to your shoulders if they are tight, and only take your arms up as far as you can safely go. When you come out, rest a moment and then repeat it one more time.

8. Side Plank Pose (Vasthithasana) on the Wall: Although the classic version of this pose (Vasthithasana) is done on the floor, the wall version of the pose is much more accessible because you stand on the floor and bear less weight on your arm. To come into the pose, start with your right side to the wall, and reach your right arm out to your side, parallel with the floor, and place your palm on the wall with your fingers pointing up. Engage your right shoulder blade into your chest wall and down slightly towards your right waist. Then, step both feet out away from the wall, until your right foot is positioned directly under your left shoulder. If your balance is good, try bending your left knee and bringing your left foot into Tree pose. Then take your left arm up and overhead, reaching strongly towards the wall with your left arm and shoulder blade, aligned it like the top arm in Extended Side Angle pose. Repeat on the second side.

9. Upward Plank Pose (Purvottanasana): Although this pose is often discussed as a great way to stretch the front chest muscles, it also strengthens the back of the upper body musculature. 

See Friday Q&A: Upward Plank Pose  for some easier variations. If your wrists are spent, you can get some of the same muscle strengthening by doing a static version of Bridge Pose, where you press the upper arm bones down into the floor actively while lifting your hips and breast bone skyward (see To Peel or Not to Peel).

10. Wrist Care: As I have mentioned before and Nina has discussed in her post on Upward Plank Variations, it is a good idea to do some counterposes for your wrists, and my favorite is the “wrist flossing” shown in this post. You could actually do this more than once during a strong upper body strengthening sequence like this.

IF you still have more in you, you could do Upward Facing Dog with blocks under your hands to give you a bit more lift off the floor, keeping your chest lifting up to your shoulders and your collarbones broad.

As with all practices, I would recommend you finish with a few minutes of mindful breath awareness and then set yourself up in a comfortable Savasana, making sure to support the back of your upper body so your arms, upper back and neck and head are resting comfortably and can release the work of the practice completely. There are many other yoga poses you can eventually add into a home upper body strengthening practice, but this is a good start!

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Featured Sequence: Lower Body Strength Practice

by Baxter

Warrior 3 Pose

Lower body strength is vital to so many of our daily activities, from the simplest tasks, such as, getting out of bed in the morning and moving around the house as we start the day, to elective activities, such as, getting up and down in the garden on a lovely spring day, to unexpected events, such as helping to move furniture for your best friend. So, from from my perspective, we are talking about strengthening the muscles around your hip, knee, and ankle joints as well as the bones that make them up. I’ve designed this Lower Body Strength Practice for you with all that in mind.

In previous posts we have described how yoga asana practices can build both muscular strength and bone strength. Modern exercise physiology and other research has given us suggestions for how long we might want to hold our static poses to either build new muscle or new bone. And although different timings are suggested in the literature, I’d recommend that when you try out these poses on your own, you start by noticing when you start to feel tired or weak or shaky as you try holding the poses. Make a mental note of how long it was before those sensations arose and then make that your starting goal point. And as you practice over time, add a few seconds to your baseline hold until you can safely work up to my suggested hold times. 

Research on bone building has suggested that holding poses or doing weight-bearing poses for up 10-70 seconds will turn on the bone-building activity in thin bones. For building new and stronger muscles, you will want to shoot for 90 second holds of the static poses. So, for combining these two goals, I suggest that you gradually work your way up to 90-second holds over the course of a few weeks or even months if you tire quickly when you start out. I will emphasize both the static poses variations and dynamic mini-vinyasa sequences (moving in and out of a particular pose). The mini-vinyasa sequences make use of strength, while at the same time requiring and challenging agility and balance, two of the other skills we want to develop in yoga for healthy aging!

And even though the following sequence is designed to address lower body strength, keep two things in mind. First, any time you are doing a yoga asana practice, you get way more then just your intended focus. So, even though I am recommending the following poses for lower body strength, know that you are also likely getting some core strengthening, upper body strengthening, and a decent amount of opening or stretching as well. Second, this is by no means an exhaustive list. I am focusing on some of the more common and accessible modern yoga poses, but you could add others on your own, if you find they challenge your lower body strength.

Warming Up 

Dynamic Reclined Hip Stretches: Since we will be working with all the joints of the lower body, it is nice to start by warming them up to their fuller range of motion. Do this a few times on each side. 

Active Practice

1. Bridge pose: Do six rounds of dynamic Bridge pose, inhaling your hips up and exhaling them down. Then come up into the pose and try to hold it for six breaths, gradually working up to a 90-second hold.

2. Locust pose: Lying on your belly, do six rounds of full or half Locust, inhaling while lifting your chest, head and either one or both legs, and exhaling back to the starting position. Then come up into the pose and try to hold it for six breaths, gradually working up to 90 seconds over time. Take your time with this one, as it can be challenging for some lower backs.

3. Boat pose: Sit with your knees bent and your feet on the floor in front of you. Hold onto the back of your knees and rock back to balance on your buttocks with your feet just off the floor. See how long you can stay before your front thighs begin to tire. If Version 1 is easy, try Version 2, which involves bringing your shins parallel to the floor and holding there. If Version 2 is easy, try Version 3, letting go of your knees and stretching your arms forward. Finally, if Version 3 isn’t challenging enough, try Version 4, straightening your knees so your upper and lower body forms a “V” shape. Start with six breaths and work up from there.

4. Hunting Dog pose: Come to your hands and knees. Extend one leg back behind you with your knee straight and toes on the floor. Keep your pelvis and lower back steady as you lift up your back leg about parallel with the floor. Hold for six breaths, gradually working towards 90-second holds. Repeat on the other side, of course!

5. Mountain pose: Practice Mountain pose with a block between your thighs and your feet set so you feel a nice squeeze of your inner leg muscles against the block. Stand for 60-90 seconds with your legs actively squeezing the block. This will strengthen your inner thigh muscles in addition to working all of the standing muscles in your legs.

6. Dynamic Arms Overhead pose with Heels Lifted: Starting in Mountain pose (with or without the block in the previous pose), inhale your arms overhead and lift your heels a few inches off the floor, keeping the balls of your feet evenly on the floor. Then exhale as you return your arms and heels to the starting position. Repeat six times. Then try to hold your heels up for six breaths, adding time gradually. This is great way to strengthen your calf muscles and work on balance!

7. Powerful pose (Utkatasana): From Mountain pose (with or without a block between your thighs), inhale yours arms overhead. Then exhale into high squat, with your knees bending forward, your hips sitting back a bit and your torso leaning out over thighs a bit. Then inhale back to Mountain pose with your arms overhead. Repeat six times. Then try holding the pose for six breaths, gradually lengthening over time. This pose works your hips, knees and ankles.

8. High Lunge: From Mountain pose, take an easy forward fold, placing your hands either on blocks by your feet, or on the floor. Then step one leg way back into a high lunge as you bend your front knee. Position your front knee over your front ankle joint and keep your feet hips-distance apart, side to side. Press down into your front foot and the ball of your back foot and try to use your arms less for support to increase the work of your legs. Start with six breaths and gradually increase to 90 seconds over time. Repeat on the other side.

9. Straight Leg Standing poses: You’ll be doing a dynamic sequence as a warm up for the full static hold. I will use Triangle pose to illustrate this, but you could do this with Pyramid pose as well. Start with your legs apart and feet aligned as usual for Triangle. Inhale your arms up parallel with the floor, and then exhale into Triangle. Inhale back up with arms out to sides, and then exhale your arms down to your sides. Repeat six times. Then hold full Triangle for six breaths, and work on increasing your time in the pose. Repeat on second side. So, do the dynamic sequence as a warm up for the full static hold.

10. Bent Knee Standing poses: You’ll be doing a dynamic sequence as a warm up for the full static hold. I will use Warrior 2 to illustrate this, but you could do this with Warrior 1 and Extended Side Angle Pose as well. Start with your legs apart and feet aligned for Warrior 2. Inhale your arms up parallel with floor, and then, as you exhale, bend your front knee over the front ankle joint. Inhale while straightening your front knee and exhale as you release your arms to your sides. Repeat for six rounds, and then hold the full pose for six breaths, working up to 90 seconds gradually. Repeat on second side.

11. Balancing Poses: You’ll be moving with your breath to enter the pose. I will use Warrior 3 to illustrate this, but you could do Half Moon Pose, Tree Pose or Eagle Pose similarly. Stand with your feet and torso aligned as for Warrior 1 pose. Then inhale your arms overhead. Next, exhale and bend your front leg over your front foot, and as you inhale, tip your torso forward over your front leg, pivoting onto the ball of your back foot. Exhale and step your back foot toward your front foot about six inches. On your next breath cycle, with hands to hips, tip forward and balance on your front foot, straightening your front knee, lifting your back leg up for Warrior 3.  Hold for six breaths, then step back foot down to the floor. While in the pose, attempt to keep your hips square with the floor beneath you, and work toward getting your back leg and your torso parallel with the floor. Repeat on second side. Gradually add more time in the pose.

Cooling Down

After strong standing pose work, it is a treat to rest your legs nicely for a few minutes. I recommend any of the following three poses:

Savasana with a bolster under the knees (see Corpse Pose Variations): 

Easy Inverted pose:

Legs Up the Wall pose (Viparita Karani), my favorite:

Aim for 10 minutes to try and cultivate the Relaxation Response for your body and your mind!

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Friday Q&A: Strengthening Your Quads

Q:  My parents have started to suffer from osteoarthritis and have a transfer problem due to knee pain. I have started including some asanas to strengthen my quads. Do you think it is a good idea to use ankle weights to strengthen the quads?

A: As long as you have a relatively healthy body and joints, I think using something like ankle weights to strengthen the quads could be quite reasonable. Now, if you have significant knee or hip arthritis, you would obviously want to be guided by the amount of pain in the joints that the extra weight might cause. And if you were not particularly keen on using yet another extra item in your practice, rest assured that using your own body weight for resistance and strengthening can help to strengthen you quads, as well as longer hold with some of your standing poses. See Ram’s excellent post on Endurance Training for more information.

The ankle weights would be most likely to help build more quad strength when you take your leg into flexion a the hip joint, especially in poses like the standing pose Hasta Padangusthasana. In this pose, you start in Mountain pose and balance on one leg as you lift the other one up parallel with the floor or higher and use your same-side hand to hold that lifted foot (or use a strap if you are limited by tightness or leg/arm length challenges).

Another pose in which you could use the ankle weights is Reclining Leg Lifts, which in the yoga practice is called Urdhva Prasarita Padasana. I do these starting in Savasana, inhaling the arms overhead, then while exhaling the arms back to my sides simultaneously swinging one or both legs up to vertical. On my next inhale, I simultaneously lower the leg/legs back to the floor and take the arms back overhead, and finish by exhaling the arms to my sides. This can be repeated for a set of six or more. The ankle weights will make it a bit more challenging, and could potentially result in more muscle building in the quads.

Other postures that you could do that would not necessarily require or benefit from the ankle weights but would work to strengthen the quadraceps muscles in whole or part (since one of the four muscles that make up the quads flexes the hip joint, but all four extend the knee to straight), would include all of the straight leg standing poses done with attention to creating an isometric contraction of the muscles while in the held pose for a while. I usually shoot for about 90 seconds when working on muscle building and strengthening. You can actually check to see if you are engaging the muscles group by touching the front mid quad with your fingers to verify the muscle is firm and working. The straight leg poses poses I am referring to include Mountain, Triangle, Pyramid (Parsvottanasana), Half Moon pose (Arda Chandrasana), and Warrior 3 to name the most common.

You can get a slightly different effect of strengthening the quads by doing the standing poses where one or both knees are bent and once again working towards longer holds (gradually, of course, if you are starting out from a weaker places) of 90 seconds or so. My favorites are Powerful Pose (Utkatasana), Warrior 1 and 2 and Extended Side Angle pose. 

Extended Side Angle Pose

I also like to do a wall version of Powerful Pose, with my back to the wall, feet about two feet from wall and a block in between the legs near the knee joint so the part of the quads towards the inside of the leg, the vastus medialis, will get stimulated to contract due to the block squeeze. (This part of the quads is notoriously weak in many people, even regular yoga practitioners and can cause kneecap-tracking problems that can lead to arthritis in some.) You then slide your torso and hips down the wall until your thighs are no lower than parallel with the floor, and your knees are positioned over your ankle joints, and you hold the pose for a bit. This pose is often more challenging to weaker quads, so start off holding for a few breaths and very gradually over the course of weeks or months, extend the time in the pose.

So, with and/or without ankle weights, you can definitely improve quad strength with your yoga practice!

—Baxter

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"Transferring" and Yoga: Wisdom from Jane Fonda (Rerun)

by Baxter

Nina recently shared with me some fascinating information about Jane Fonda, who has lived many lives, from actor to fitness guru to political activist, just to name a few. Fonda reportedly used to practice a more strenuous yoga two hours a day. “But,” she says now, “those days are long gone. It got to be too hard.” All of that hard work has paid off even as Fonda approaches her golden years, though. She puts it this way:

“Every single time I go to get out of a car now, I say ‘Thank you, Lord, I have strong quads. Because if I didn’t have strong quads, I couldn’t be independent. You have to keep your back and legs strong so you can remain free and independent.”

Truer words could not be spoken! In my years as a Family MD, I cared for a lot of seniors, seeing them in my office if they were still living independently, or making trips to the nursing home if they needed special care. And one of the key skills that often allowed my aging patients to remain at home, which is were they all preferred to be, was the ability to “transfer” independently. By this I mean that they could go, typically, from a sitting or reclining position, such as their bed, to a standing position without any assistance. And they had to be able to do the reverse, that is, safely transfer from standing to sitting. Obviously, if they could do this from the floor to standing or vice versa, they would be way ahead of most of their peers! I have a 75-year-old student who does just that each week in class with me.

I found this expanded definition of “transfer” at the medical web site medicine.jrank.org:

“"Transferring" is the term used for moving from one condition to another, such as out of a bathtub, chair, or car, or getting into bed. The ability to transfer depends on many factors, including strength, balance, vision, and flexibility.”

Because of the physical benefits of a regular yoga practice, specifically maintaining flexibility, promoting muscular strength, improving balance and keeping the body agile, students who maintain a regular yoga practice are likely to remain independent much longer than their age-matched community, all other factors being equal. And even if they don’t have a vigorous practice like Jane did in her younger years, even a moderate or gentle yoga practice is likely to have the same four categorical benefits listed above.

Many of the standing poses would be likely to help with such daily activities such as getting in and out of the car.  Any standing pose that requires the knees to bend and straighten, such as entering, holding and exiting from Warrior 1 or 2, is simulating the action the knees, legs and hips perform for our car example (see Warrior 1 and Warrior 2 Mini Vinyasas). Even better would be Fierce pose (Utkatasana, also called Chair pose), especially if you added in a twist. One of the more challenging transfers for older people is using the toilet in a standard bathroom. It is usually lower than a typical chair, and so presents more potential challenge for most. Yet, if you continue to practice in an intelligent, age-adjusted yoga class, such situations may be non-issues for the aging yoga practitioner.

In classes designed for seniors with no previous yoga experience, it is quite common to utilize chairs to modify many yoga poses. So, just by virtue of getting in and out the chair in class a few times in class, with mindfulness and attention to detail, the student is again performing a similar movement to other important daily activities. The stress-reducing practices of yoga, as well as the mental sharpening skills of dharana, or concentration practice, are also likely to improve our chances of remaining independent well into our later years. So, let’s follow Jane’s example and keep our body and mind strong and agile via a regular yoga practice, so that we won’t even need an extra thought as we push away from the dinner table, stand and move onto the next activity of our full and satisfying day!

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