Where Are Your Hips?

Just to clarify any ambiguity this photo might provoke, this is a post about hips and not my butt!

In this post I show you how to find your hips and give some tips on how to 'level' your hips in postures like parsvottanasana and parivrtta trikonasana.  I stress the importance of creating an internal body map.  There is a quiz, a video, and some instructions to help!

Figuring out your own internal body map is one of the benefits of yoga (or any mindful practice).

By that I mean understanding where a part of your body is in space without needing to look at it.  You 'feel' it from the inside.

Feeling where your hips are in space is a tricky one, but being able to do so can really enhance your practice.

One of the reasons it is tricky, as I discovered this week, is because some of us have come this far in life mislabelling where their hips are on their own body.

This week I asked all of my classes to put their fingers on their hips and most people put their hands somewhere else.

That was a great realisation for me because I have been cueing hips for a while and if your own internal body map of where your hips are is different from where your actual hips are then you will not be thinking about the body part I want you to.

For fun, let's start with a little guessing game.

Have a look at the photos below and see if you can tell me which photo has me with my fingers on my hips.

A: Are these my hips?

B: Are these my hips?

C:Are these my hips?

 The answer is C.

From my informal class survey it seemed the most common responses were to put the hands in position B, somewhere at the top of the pelvis, or A at the waist.

That likely means if I give an instruction about moving the hips your brain will think about the waist or top of pelvis and you will be moving from a different place.

Asking the question in the first place was inspired by a question from one of my students who was having a trouble knowing whether her hip position was correct in parsvottanasana and parivrtta trikonasana.

These two postures are ones where having a good internal body map of where your hips are is important.

A lot of people try to 'feel' a level pelvis in those postures by putting their hands on the back of their pelvis.

But that relies more on interpreting the position sense of your arms as they touch the pelvis when you might be better off trying to interpret the position sense of the actual hips and direct your awareness there.

How to find your hips
The first important step is to be able to locate your own hips.  Take a look at this video for some thoughts.  Turn up your volume as I speak on this video (a little like a robot it seems!).

In the video I show how if you find the front crease of your thigh and draw an imaginary line to the outer side of the thigh, and/or find the crease under your bottom and draw an imaginary line to the outer side of your thigh then you will be around the hip joint.

Level on a front back plane
Below I show how the hips are not level on a front/back plane.  The forward leg hip has come in front of the back leg hip.  This commonly happens if you are not mindful.  It is less likely for the back hip to come forward of the front hip in these postures.

One of the reasons the front hip creeps forward in this type of posture is because the front thigh starts to roll in, which reduces the lengthening around the outer hip and hamstring.

Allowing this to happen therefore reduces the efficacy of the posture in lengthening the outer hip and hamstring of the front leg.

It tends to happen if you try to come down with your spine more than your body is ready for.

Perhaps consider not coming down so far so you can maintain the hips level on the front back plane.

Another 'feeling' that the front hip has crept forward is that the side waist on that side starts to feel shorter relative to the side waist on the back leg side.

If you feel this is happening you can try to roll the front thigh out or think about moving the front hip backwards.

Level on an up/down plane
The other thing that can commonly happen is that one hip is higher than the other, as shown below.

One hip up and one hip down

One hip up and one hip down

Level hips

In a pose like parivrtta trikonasana (reverse triangle), it is more common that the back hips tends to go down.  As far as I can tell this tends to be due to trying to take the arm across the front leg and get to the ground, which can cause you to turn drop the hip in an effort to get that arm across and down.

If you practice that way you will be turning the pelvis but not necessarily doing any active spinal movement.

It is not necessary to get the arm across the thigh or down to the ground.

The way I teach parivrtta trikonasana is to keep the hips level and to turn the spine.  You take the hand on the inner thigh and only go towards the ground to the extent that you can keep the hips level. Most people will not be able to come to the ground with level hips but you will feel the benefit of haven actively rotated the spine and also of lengthening around the front outer hip and hamstring.

Below is a video that shows the difference between turning spine not hips and turning hips not spine.

Parivrtta trikonasana is actaully a very difficult posture, especially when you maintain level pelvis.

Overall
It was tricky to film this on my own and I hope I have at least been able to show you where your hips are.  In class I can help you to find them and feel level hips in your postures.  Learning from the internet is always tough for a practice like yoga.  

The postures I demonstrated in this post are complex and there are many more instructions I could have given but my main intent was to get you to think about hip position rather than overwhelm you with all of the other stuff going on

Hope you are happy and healthy.

Much metta,

Samantha

www.yogacafecanberra.blogspot.com
www.yogacafelk.blogspot.com