When practicing yoga, many asanas fail to achieve the expected effect, which is likely to be the wrong asanas, so the body compensates.
What is compensation? How to avoid it? What is compensation for the muscles that should work? If they don’t work correctly, let the muscles around the body or even joints replace them to complete the task.
But the muscles or joints pushed out do not have such abilities and functions.
Although compensation cannot be seen, it does damage the body, and this damage is an accumulation process.
When the body produces pain, it is too late.
Then, let’s learn about compensation methods and try our best to avoid them! There are three ways of compensation in yoga.
The first one is the compensation between muscles.
Yoga teachers often hear such questions: teacher, I’m practicing raising my hips these days, but I find that my hips are not raised, and my legs are thick? Teacher, I want to practice my back and arms and eliminate butterfly sleeves, but recently I found my neck getting thicker and thicker? These problems are caused by muscle compensation.
The main reason for this compensation is that the synergetic muscle compensates for the excessive participation of the active muscle.
Each action is performed by one or more groups of muscles.
When multiple groups of muscles are required to work together to complete a group of actions, one of these muscles will play a major role, that is, the active muscle.
The other muscles only assist the active muscle to complete the whole action, which is called the synergetic muscle.
After knowing this concept, it is easy to understand why you want to practice raising your hips, resulting in thicker and thicker legs; If you want to practice your back, your neck is getting thicker and thicker.
Because when practicing hip lifting, the hip muscles exert too little force, from the active muscle to the synergetic muscle, and the legs exert too much force, from the synergetic muscle to the active muscle.
For example, in yoga, one of the postures for practicing hips is the phantom chair pose.
The correct way to force is like this.
When the action is done in place, you will really feel the strength of the hip.
The main muscle for exercise is the hip, and the thigh is only used to coordinate the muscle groups of the hip.
When there is a mistake in posture, muscle compensation will appear.
For example, how to avoid such muscle compensation? Take gluteus maximus as an example.
You need to “activate” it before practicing.
This activation is divided into three steps.
1.
Before doing magic chair pose, be warrior one and warrior three first.
Let the center of gravity come to the heel, clip the central line of the sitting bone, keep the feeling of retraction, activate the gluteus maximus, and let it actively participate in the next action.
Soldier 1 soldier 3 2.
Put your consciousness on the gluteus maximus (pay attention to the active muscle) and keep a high degree of attention in practice, so as to put your consciousness on the active muscle, that is, the arm, and always pay attention to the feeling of your hips in this action.
3.
Feel the maximum that the active muscle can bear.
Take the phantom chair as an example.
When the hip drops to a certain angle, you will feel that the hip uses a lot of force, which is the maximum that the active muscle can bear.
If you go down again, your gluteal muscles will be relaxed instead, which means that this action is too much.
At this time, you need to adjust it back a little and keep it where the active muscle feels the strongest.
The second kind: compensation between joints.
1.
Small joints compensate for large joints.
The most common joint is the knee joint to compensate for the hip joint.
The arm can’t twist the thigh, the knee can’t twist the hip, and the small joint can’t twist the big joint.
For example, the requirements of the warrior’s second style: the hip joint is facing the front; Left foot palm micro buckle; Rotate the palm of the right leg outward 90 degrees; The right knee is not buckled in the direction of the leg toe.
However, many people have tight hip joints and insufficient external rotation ability, which will occur: when the hip is facing the front, the knee cannot be in the same direction as the toe, but buckle inward; If you align your knees, your hips can’t be straight ahead.
At this time, if all the key points must be adjusted to the positive position, the knee of the straight leg will be squeezed and worn, and the compression of the knee joint will exchange space to compensate for the lack of external rotation ability of the hip joint.
Solution: reduce the difficulty and put the small joint in the right position first.
It is still the Warrior II above.
Increase the internal rotation angle of the left foot palm and reduce the external rotation amplitude of the hip joint to ensure that both knee joints are in the positive position and in the same direction as the toes.
At the beginning, the difficulty is reduced, but the two knees should be placed in the right position.
With the deepening of practice, the external rotation ability of hip joint increases, and it can be completely in the positive position.
2.
Flexible joints compensate for stable joints, the most common is the compensation of the lumbar spine.
Whether bending forward or backward, let the lumbar spine compensate.
Forward flexion: it should be folded from the hip joint.
But the hip joint is tight, while the lumbar spine is flexible.
From hip folding to lumbar downward bending.
Retroflexion: it is a retroflexion extending from the thoracic spine.
But because the thoracic spine is more stable than the lumbar spine, the lumbar spine is more flexible than the thoracic spine.
From the thoracic vertebra to the lumbar vertebra.
Solution: correctly grasp the practice method of asana, step by step.
The third kind: compensation between muscles, bones and joints.
Sometimes when muscle strength is not enough, it will transfer its strength to bones and joints.
Take the goddess pose as an example: the positive position in the goddess pose requires that the tailbone be rolled and the upper body be upright.
The purpose of this requirement is to let the leg muscles bear the strength, so as to achieve the purpose of exercising the leg muscles.
But when doing goddess pose, we often make two mistakes: 1.
The pressure on the legs will be reduced after collapsing the waist and hips.
This pose will become very labor-saving and can be maintained for a longer time.
This is because hip lifting changes the direction and transmission of the whole body force, so that the lumbar spine compensates for part of the body force.
The result was that although it was maintained for a long time, the strength of the legs was not exercised, but the waist was injured.
This is the lumbar spine compensates for leg muscle strength.
2.
The same is true for knee buckle.
After knee buckle, you will find that this action becomes very easy and can be maintained for a longer time.
This is the knee that compensates for the strength of the leg muscles.
As a result, the strength of the legs was not exercised and the knee was injured..