Yoga is not an escape. Yes, you are bound to feel nicer and calmer on the mat. But you do not switch between several different realities – they are all part of you and you carry them along regardless of the time and place. Unless and until you can embrace the better part of yourself and there is no worse. A journey where you turn from a variable into a constant.
Yes, this post is about backbends even though you may have started to wonder. Backbends are the ultimate test of the balance of the body and mind. It is easy to deceive the body in the backbends, to listen to the mind instead. So hard to embrace what I HAVE, not to turn into what I WANT to have. I speak from my personal experience. All I have ever lied to myself while pushing myself into Urdhva Dhanurasana – the Wheel – about the range, the tone of my spine and the alignment has come back to haunt me, sometimes years later. This pose has taught me how futile lying is. It has proved that no deception may add positive value in the long run.
Backbends are challenging. The trouble with this pose is that it is often recklessly practiced by people who sacrifice the content for the form. Like me when I started with yoga and like many others who still do it.
Rule number one. There is the healthy range of the spine (I wrote about it last year in August the blog) which is good to be aware of. On average the spine can healthily extend up to 135⁰ but surprisingly, the biggest range and extension in the backbend comes from the cervical spine – the neck – which has the range of ca 70⁰. Those two spinal curves – the lumbar and the cervical are connected and if the neck is not relaxed, the lower back spine will get too much tear and wear in this pose. A healthy range for lumbar spine would be ca 35⁰, half the range of the neck. And for the thoracic spine which is less bendy due to the ribcage, the range is only about 25⁰. In addition to the spine, there is the hip joint and the shoulders and their mobility to think about. And when practicing the wheel, it is also the feet and the hands and the weight distribution.
Why are backbends good?
If practiced with caution and care, they are extremely therapeutic for the back because:
- They improve the posture
- They increase self-confidence – they open up the heart and make the practitioner more emphatic
- They stimulate the anterior longitudinal ligament to retain its plasticity – the anterior longitudinal ligament starts in the base of the skull along and goes all the way down until the sacrum. Its role is to resist the neck and lower back from overextending. Gymnasts, extreme yoga practitioners and also acrobats unfortunately overextend this ligament so that it does not provide the spine the required stability any longer. Google backbends and you see many photos with people killing their health in those poses. Only form and no content whatsoever.
- Backbends require a good mobility in the hips and sacroiliac joint but it needs to be built as a prerequisite before going into deep backbends not in conjunction with them like it is mostly done
- If practiced right, backbends keep the tightest part of the spine, the thoracic spine in agood and healthy mobility
- They maintain the health of the shoulder joint and all the muscles that need to shorten during countless forward bends such as pectoralis and deltoids and frontal neck muscles.
Backbends are many – Bridge Pose (Setu Bandha Sarvangasana) which is a prep pose for the Wheel, Cobra (Bhujangasana) which is part of Sun Salutation, Camel (Ustrasana), Bow (Dhanurasana). Before you try the Wheel, ensure that you are comfortable with all the previously mentioned poses. If any of them poses a difficulty, work with it and when the mission is successfully completed, test the Wheel (Urdhva Dhanurasana). I have linked the names of the poses to illustrative photos in yogajournal but unfortunately I was not able to link to the Wheel pose in this journal because the person in the photo is standing with feet and palms too close to each other which makes her to compensate with an overextentson in the lower back. This is not a good example of the Wheel and there are many similar or even worse examples out there in the World Wide Web. But like I said in the beginning – it is sometimes hard to distinguish between the the truth and an illusion of the truth.
Below, however, are quite good cues for the Wheel pose for an experienced practitioner:
The Wheel pose should be practiced really slowly and always with ujjayi. If ujjayi leaves you, you go too deep and too fast. Integrity matters:)
Good luck!
Useful links:
https://yogainternational.com/article/view/the-easiest-mistake-to-make-in-backbends
http://embodyphysicaltherapy.com/bending-over-backwards-stay-safe-in-your-yoga-practice/
https://yogainternational.com/article/view/5-steps-to-safer-backbends
http://www.yogajournal.com/article/practice-section/the-max-factor/