Boat pose can strengthen the core, exercise hip flexors, and test your balance and stability.
It has many benefits, so it’s best to use it as a routine part of yoga practice.
However, I find that many practitioners don’t like it very much.
Instead, try these interesting and challenging variants.
You can add torsion to the classic posture, test your strength and flexibility, and add more leg and hand changes.
Here’s how to practice the traditional boat style: make sure you master the traditional boat style before doing the variant exercise.
Sit up, bend your knees, put your toes on the ground, put your hands on the outside of your thighs, tilt back slightly, find balance on your sitting bones, inhale when extending your spine, raise your chest, start the core and stabilize your lower back, exhale, lift your feet and make your shins parallel to the ground, enter the modified boat style, tighten the inside of your legs, keep breathing slowly, look at the front or somewhere under your feet, straighten your legs and enter the traditional boat posture, Use your core to maintain balance (not just the strength of hip flexors and legs).
Put your hands behind your back or grab your thighs for additional support.
After mastering the boat, you can try the boat variant for challenge.
1 Boat sitting on a yoga brick adds an additional balance challenge.
Harder than it looks! Put the Yoga brick on the floor, sit on the Yoga brick, and enter the boat balance.
It is much more difficult on the Yoga brick.
2 Twist boat type adding twist to the boat type can increase the difficulty.
It can be used in the sequence of preparing torsion arm balance.
In the traditional boat pose, hold the right big toe with the fingers of the left hand, exhale, twist to the right, extend the right arm, open the chest, move the line of sight to the outstretched right hand, and cross the ankles to add additional challenges.
3.
Low boat style starts from the traditional boat style, slowly put the middle back and legs to the ground, hover about 20 cm away from the ground, keep the legs together, palms up, hover the arms over the hips, keep the core muscles extending to the side of the spine, and switch between the traditional boat style and low boat style to really play your core role.
If you feel a strain on your neck, you can put your hands behind your head.
4 This version of the boat style combines the core and balance as well as the stretching butterfly of the hamstring.
Grasp the big toe with your fingers.
When the knee is raised, transfer the weight to the sitting bone, lift the foot off the floor, find the balance point, slowly extend the legs to the front, keep the spine extended, prevent the back from becoming round, lengthen the legs from the pelvis, hook the toes back, and stare up at the toes.
5 Wide legged boat this position is similar to the balanced hand grasping toe pose, which may be more challenging when balancing.
Start with butterfly pose, grasp the toe with your fingers or the outside of the foot.
When the knee is raised, transfer the weight to the sitting bone and extend one foot to the side of the cushion at a time.
Once stable, try extending both legs forward or upward to look at the ceiling at the same time to maintain balance.
6 Start the boat posture walking stick pose with yoga belt, make a big circle with the yoga belt, wrap the yoga belt around the upper body, put it under the armpit and near the shoulder blades, bend the legs, make the knee close to the chest, put the Yoga brick laterally on the bottom of the foot, wrap the other end of the yoga belt around the Yoga brick, and when ready, put the arm parallel to the ground.
When the upper body is lifted up and backward, push the feet forward to the Yoga brick 7 Before attempting this position, please make sure your body is warmed up.
Start with walking stick, bend your right leg, pull your right foot to the root of your left thigh, pull your right arm back, grasp your right toe with your right hand or bend your left leg with your right foot, put your foot on the ground, find a balance point on your sitting bone, and grasp your left big toe with your left finger.
Put your left leg forward and stare at your left leg.
It’s fun to practice these changes of boat posture! The next time you feel bored practicing core asana or traditional yoga posture, you can try the above boat variant!..
