You know me, I love all things anatomy.
There are several blogs that I follow even though they are not yoga, because I can always learn something.
There was this one blog post I saw recently where they were advertising their 10 week program to fix a particular postural pattern.
They stated the problem as a forward head posture and a forward pelvis. At the end of 10 weeks, the posture looks better.
But, this picture is making me crazy!
As a yoga teacher I have always been instructed to teach the base and to teach from the base. This posture could be 100% better if they started with the base.
Here they seemed to address the head, then the pelvis.
Certainly this guy looks more toned after 10 weeks (and he can definitely grow hair)! So something in their program is working.
But - the first thing I would have addressed in regard to the pelvis is the feet and legs. If the base is wrong, then everything else is affected by the base.
In both photos the feet are turned our, which means that the legs are turned out which means that the heads of the femur bones are externally rotated in their sockets. This causes the pelvis to tilt forward, the abdomen to protrude, the chest to cave in and the head to be forward of the shoulders.
Can you also see that his calves are bowing backward?
I would first fix the base by making the feet parallel. The calves have to be moved forward. That comes from hamstring engagement. The fronts of the quads have to lift up, straightening the leg against the slight contraction of the hamstrings, and the tops of the thighs have to move back. That causes the chest to lift. Turning the fronts of the thighs in and the backs of the thighs out seats the heads of the femur bones in their sockets, which corrects the tilt of the pelvis. The rest is muscle tone.
This reminds me of the teaching from the yoga sutras which lists avidya - lack of self-knowledge or incorrect knowledge - as the first klesha or obstacle. Without this basic understanding, we suffer.
We talked about this at my Women’s Yoga Retreat this past weekend where we studied the teaching of Sri Ramana Maharshi which says: “Happiness and the self are not different. Happiness is the very nature of the self.” The Yoga Sutras describe avidya as: Mistaking the transient for the permanent, the impure for the pure, pain for pleasure, and that which is not the self for the self: all this is called lack of spiritual knowledge, avidya.
We always have to start at the base!