Hips and Shoulders Yoga

 

Friday, August 6, 2021

The Breakfast Club

AO: The Woodshed (Tanglewood Church)

Q: The Force

PAX: Little Mittens, Elevate, Green Thumb

The Thang: Today's focus was stretching and working on tight hips and shoulders. At most workouts that I attend, I hear shoulders, hips and back quite often in terms of injuries, soreness and tight muscle areas, so I wanted to bring the focus on at least 2 of those areas this morning and introduce some new ways to stretch these areas using props and the wall. 

  I have added a picture of my notes that I wrote out for this sequence as some of the poses are quite extensive in terms of the amount of instructions that I needed to give. As you can see, there is not a warmup or cool down, all that is naturally incorporated into the sequence. If you look at the bracket portion that says 'Shoulder stretches at the wall', we moved away from our mats and used the wall to achieve various shoulder stretches. I have a few pictures (my fancy stick figures) for most of these poses, but the one called 'clocks' isn't drawn out. That is where you stand at the wall with your arm up overhead in a '12 o'clock' position, palm pressed into the wall and fingers slightly away from the wall. Then you move the arm around the hours of the clock, moving the arm to 1 o'clock, then 2 o'clock and so on until the shoulder has done a full rotation. Elevate suggested making some short videos where I demonstrate some of these stretches so others can incorporate them at home or in their workouts. 

We moved back to the mats after this to do some kneeling lunges to stretch out the hips. Then, in downdog (adho mukha svansana), we did big hip circles, 5 forward, 5 back. 

 This is the back page of the hips and shoulders sequence. I think the shoulder rotations while holding blocks was the highlight of this page. I ran out of time, so we did not complete many of the supine poses. We were able to practice supine side big toe (supta parsva padangusthasana), with a strap, and end in corpse pose (savasana) for a few minutes. 

I hope the ladies enjoyed the stretching and learned some new ways to stretch and work their shoulders and hips using various props. We used foam blocks, straps, towels and the wall to help achieve subtle and some not-so-subtle stretching. Thank you!