Beyond Flexibility: Building Strength and Control in Yoga with Michael Henri

0:00 Hey there, before we get started on this week's episode, I would love to ask for your support by reviewing this podcast. We want to share yoga with as many people as possible and this free resource, this podcast is one of the ways that we can do that. And the best way that you can help support us is by giving us a review.

0:16 So if you go to Apple Podcast or Spotify or whatever podcast platform you use, Scroll down until you find that star review and then give us some love. Thank you so much and let's get started. With this week's episode. The misconception of, let's say, stretching being bad for you, we're more so talking about when we go into deep stretches where we're not actually engaging or using muscles to support that stretch. And then we go so far into a particular stretch and we're not really connected to our breath

0:51 that our bodies might actually be fighting against that, that lengthening that we're trying to create. And then eventually, it's possible that something might actually snap, right? Because we're going so much into a passive stretch, we're trying to push ourselves, push ourselves in the other way, but not actually supporting that stretching. Welcome to the Going Pro Yoga podcast. If you love yoga.

1:16 As much as I do, then this podcast is for you. We talk all things yoga related for teachers in order to supplement and complement and even support after a 200 hour yoga teacher training. Or if you've never done a training before, this podcast is all about just learning more about yoga in an authentic way. Together with Paul Teodo and Byron de Marseille, we put together this podcast to provide you with a. Free resource.

1:39 To learn more about yoga, whether you want to share yoga or teach yoga or just practice yoga, this podcast is talking all things yoga related. And we're trying to talk from the teachers perspective and also the students perspective to make sure we get a full 360° angle on what yoga is all about and how it's evolved in the modern world.

1:56 Welcome to our podcast. Hello, and welcome to the Going Pro Yoga podcast. Michael here and I am your host for today. No guest. This is going to be the first time in a while actually, we've done a podcast like this where it's just going to be me talking to you in your ear. In this episode, we're actually going to be focusing on the mechanics of stretching or more or less like what's actually happening in your tissues.

2:21 Call it fascia, call it muscles. When we're performing yoga or these long holds or these engaged contractions or active stretching. All of these words, but basically talking about the the things that we're doing when we're actually practicing the physical awesome of practices of yoga. Now, this stemmed because of a guest, not a guest, excuse me, a listener who's reached out a few times and asking about more clarity on some of the stretching aspects and active stretching, passive stretching,

2:51 even talking about pales and rails a little bit. So we're going to kind of talk about all of those things in today's episode. We can see if we can try to kind of wrap it up. Now, granted, and admittedly, sometimes learning about some of these stretching techniques is easier to watch in video. So I'm going to do my best to try to translate this through the ear and use examples that you can use your visualization and imagination to kind of picture what we're actually trying to do.

3:16 And we'll use some yoga poses to do that as well. But before we kind of dive into all of that, let's actually just talk about the simplicity of what's stretching and or let's just say warming up is because the reality is when we're actually practicing yoga, it's not just about stretching.

3:32 I think most of us understand that, right? We're actually trying to create range of motion or flexibility in the body while also building strength within that flexibility. Now a lot of us call that mobility and mobility would be defined as being able to activate muscles or have some sort of strength control or stability near the end range of motion of a joint or muscle or whatever it is you're stretching.

4:00 So the idea, excuse me, is that when we're actually near the end range of motion, we have some control there, right? There's some stability, there's some strength that's actually going to hold it all together. Now, when it comes to injuries in the body, most injuries usually results in US going beyond our normal range of motion, overstretching, tearing, pulling, going too far in some sort of way or something kind of let's go because it can't, it can't hold on anymore.

4:31 So I've been approached by several other people about wanting to come on the podcast and talk about how stretching is bad for you. And I declined because I didn't like how it was presented in the sense of kind of misleading and how that statement is not very clear.

4:50 But I thought I would address it that, you know, stretching is. There's nothing wrong with stretching, but the way that we stretch, the way that we practice yoga is really important to understand how it's best for our body.

5:02 Now to kind of jump ahead when we talk about is stretching bad for you? I think the idea behind what some of these people that requested to be on the podcast wanted to talk about is just excessive passive stretching, excessive passive stretching, not enough active stretching, not enough engagement. And this is basically what we're talking about, this mobility of trying to create strength near the end range of motion of our joints.

5:24 So we're going to talk about that. We'll talk about the pales and rails a little bit and we'll probably go into some other things. But before we do that, I actually want to just kind of create a baseline understanding of what warming up the body actually is. Because in yoga, generally speaking, yoga asanas, we're progressing our practice from more of a, let's say, beginner poses or entry level poses into more advanced asanas. Typically call it a peak pose,

5:48 call it a peak flow, something where a body is now warmed up to be able to do. Now then the question is what does warmed up mean? So think about that. What is being warmed up or what does warming up the body mean to you? So it can mean a couple different things, right? I would say that most people think like actually creating heat in the body, which is true.

6:10 What does that mean? That could mean, you know, increasing the circulation in course, increasing the activity, the stimulation in parts of the body. OK. Now, if we're thinking about warming up the body and preparing the body for, let's say, more advanced postures like like Warrior one or, I don't know, standing splits or something like this, right?

6:32 There are certain poses or certain movements or certain stretches or things that we want to do to prepare the body or warm up the body for those advanced postures, right? Makes sense. So what we need to make sure we understand is the difference between, well, what does warming up mean? Because warming up is like very non specific. But if we were to give specifics of what the warm up actually is, then it can help us to clarify specifically what we're trying to do to prepare for those

7:00 postures. So when I look at warming up, I look at two different things. One of them is stretching, creating tension or length or space in a particular area of the body, which is a lot more specific. So let's just say warrior one. Warrior one is a lunge.

7:20 The neutral posture and the lunge results in having mostly a stretch in the front of the thigh, front of the hip flexors, the front of the hip. Now for a lot of body types, especially modern body types, and because of the back foot is planted on the ground, this can be a really intense posture or stretch for certain people, especially depending on, you know, the seeded habits and how tight their hip flexors might be. So in order to prepare accurately prepare for a pose like this, we want to actually

7:51 open up that part of the body first, right? So opening up part of that body is basically saying how do we stretch that part of the body? So, you know, other types of lunges, low lunges, high lunges, these things are less intense of a stretch but allows the tissues in the front of the hip to prepare for a deeper stretch of warrior one.

8:12 So now we have a warm up that involves stretching or creating tension, right? But I would also argue that warrior one probably requires a little bit more warm up besides just that. And that would bring in the second thing that I consider warming up, which is activation, activation or engagement of muscles.

8:33 So this is kind of like actually contracting your muscles, like using the muscles, right? We can stretch muscles, which creates space, but then we can actually contract our muscles, which is actually making them shorten and be used to create muscle contractions. So if we use the same example of warrior one, I would say that what would be supportive for activating or preparing for Warrior one would be to have the legs engaged beforehand. So something to activate the

9:04 legs, particularly the thighs, probably the glutes a little bit, but ultimately activating a lot of the leg because of that back leg requiring stability to protect the back knee. And then also to be able to hold that position, especially if you're going to kind of go into the a bit of the back bend, which a lot of people do. Because we usually what that happens or what when that happens, people tend to lean back and they collapse in their back leg.

9:30 But if we can warm up the body adequately, and by warm up, I mean stretch the front of the hip, that's one type of warm up. Activate the back leg or activate the legs in general to have some strength and stability. That's going to help the support the foundation of this pose.

9:45 Then that's going to help us prepare for that pose. The other thing that I'd probably add in there is something to do with core. Activating the core, right? You say warming up the core. Well, OK, let's be more specific. When we say warming up, do we mean stretching? Do we mean activating?

9:58 So I would say activating the core. So the core could be the front part of the core, which would be the abdominals or it could be the back body, right? But basically from this example and what I just talked about, I want us to understand that warming up can be two different things. We can be stretching tissue, stretching, muscle, stretching, fascia, creating, space lengthening, or we can be activating, engaging, using, contracting. This involves shortening

10:23 muscles. This involves recruiting muscle fibers to actually hold position and provide stability. So those are two completely different types of warmups. Now, depending on the poses that we're going to be using, often times we'll either need to do one or the other, or sometimes a combination of both, depending on the demand of the more challenging posture or the peak pose.

10:48 Now, we're not going to go through every single yoga pose that exists. Know that on the Going Pro platform though, we do have this listed out for you. So if you do want to check that out, you can go and you know, subscribe for free for seven days and have a look, right?

11:00 You'll literally find an advanced posture and it'll tell you, you need to warm up these parts of the body. These things need to be stretched, these things need to be activated. And then you can do that. And once you do that, the body will be ready or mostly be ready or better prepared, I should say, for that advanced asana.

11:18 So if you don't want to kind of dive into that, just kind of think about it yourself, like what are areas of a particular pose that requires activation or stretching? So let's look at another example. We say something like standing splits.

11:31 I think I mentioned that one. So standing splits, first of all, what's the primary purpose of this pose? I would say it's, you know, it's probably stretching the hamstrings to the back of the body now, because standing splits can be intense of a stretch of the hamstrings.

11:46 I would say that in order to prepare or to make this pose easier, it would probably be wiser to do some sort of hamstring stretch as a warm up that's a little less intense in preparation for the actual standing splits, right?

12:02 Not everybody is going to need this, but let's just assume that we're working with a modern body that is not as flexible as, you know, every single listener on this podcast who is super flexible. No, not actually, but the modern body, right? Someone who does typically have tight hamstrings, they're not going to love standing splits.

12:19 It's going to be really challenging. So if we can offer some sort of pose where we can kind of warm up the hamstrings beforehand, maybe it's laying on the back, you know, grabbing the back of your thigh or maybe a strap on your foot just to kind of pull and gently kind of give a hamstring stretch before going into standing splits, that'll help to support the preparation of that pose.

12:40 OK. So that's one an example of how we can warm up for standing splits and that involves stretching. So then the question is, is what is there something that we should do or is something that would be beneficial to start activating in order to support a standing split? So if you think about it, in case you're not sure what a standing split is, standing with one leg on the ground folding forward and the other leg is up in the air. So the other leg that's up in

13:05 the air, that requires a lot of muscle engagement to support that, right? So interestingly, with this example, the the leg that is lifted, you're going to be using a lot of your hamstring muscles to actually activate and to have that lift, right? You could say the legs in general need to be activated and you know, somewhat engaged, but it's mostly the hamstring that's going to help to lift that leg up, which we call extension, right?

13:32 Your glutes might be contributing to that as well. So this pose, standing splits is actually an example of, well, how do we warm up for this one? We would actually probably want to stretch the hamstrings first and then also engage the hamstrings or engage the legs at a minimum so that when we go into standing splits, it feels more supportive.

13:52 Now, the only other thing I'd add for a pose like that would be, you know, the core engagement as well. So core activation. But again, just to clarify, when we talk about core, the core is also not just the front of the body. We're not talking about sit ups and plank and all that stuff. We're talking about the back of the body. So because standing splits is more of a forward fold over the leg, the back part of the core, which mean your lower back, which is what I would call your

14:19 core as well, would be intelligent to try to activate or engage in order to support the standing splits as well. So, you know, you can activate those in in many different ways, like locust pose or low cobra or something like this sunbird post. But basically we want to have some sort of activation around the core or at least the backside of the core. OK, so those are two examples about warming up the body in preparation for more advanced postures, right? We can go down through the list

14:47 and it would take forever. But otherwise, start to think about it for yourself, right? What would be helpful? Not necessarily just in your body, right? It's difficult to think outside of our own bodies, but just think what would be helpful to prepare or warm up for a more challenging posture. And then think of in two different categories, what would require to be stretched their lengthened and what would be supportive to activate or stabilize or bring strength to in order to support that

15:16 posture, right? I can guarantee that most advanced postures you'll come up with at least two, maybe 3 right now, what is an advanced posture? Maybe we can define that. And I mean, at least in my world, an advanced posture is something that someone has difficult doing at the beginning of class because their body doesn't feel ready for it. And so like, you wake up first thing in the morning and like, you're kind of cold.

15:40 It's like what? What types of poses would not be suitable at the beginning of the yoga class? To me, those I would consider like advanced postures or level 2, Level 3 postures right now, I know that a lot of people have different body types and some people can kind of get in these poses more easily than others. But if you're coming at it from a I'm a teacher perspective, then you want to think what it would be like to not be in your body, especially if you're

16:03 extremely flexible and think about like, you know, what would what would be beneficial for someone who is, let's say my boyfriend or maybe my girlfriend who's got a tighter body, or maybe my mom or my dad or my, my sister or my brother or something like this, right? My friends, right, look at their body and be like, maybe they would actually require a little bit of a warm up, stretching this first before we get into something like that. So start to think that way.

16:28 That's going to be really beneficial not only for your awareness of other people's body types, but then also it's going to help with your sequencing so that you know which poses are going to be suitable to prepare the body for, like I said, more advanced awesomeness. So that's the first thing that I think is important to talk about when it comes to stretching and activating, warming up and actually getting our tissues, particular muscles in this case, ready for yoga right now.

16:58 The body's response when we actually stretch is when the tissues are actually creating space, right? You could argue that, you know, there is a little bit of, I don't want to say muscle tearing, like micro tears or micro space being created, right?

17:14 So when we stretch intensely or even if we contract or we engage intensely, the small tissues, the muscle fibers are actually kind of like they're almost like little micro tears, right? In a healthy way, right? It's it's similar thing if you're like going to the gym and you're lifting weights, right?

17:32 Your muscles are kind of reorganizing themselves or remodeling themselves to be able to adapt to that type of stress. Now, in yoga, we are putting the body through stress, but we need to understand that stress is actually not a bad thing, right?

17:49 Stress is a good thing. Stress can be a bad thing if it's beyond our body's ability to manage that stress. Which means if we have a certain threshold where we can handle a certain amount or we know how to, or our body had knows how to kind of like meet that stress, some sort of physical demand, then we would consider that a healthy stretch, right?

18:13 How do we know if we can meet that demand? Typically we use the breath as a guide, right? Your nervous system is the ultimate guide. But like, how do you know where your nervous system at is at? That's a little bit more of an advanced kind of sensation.

18:27 But if you check in with your breath, like is your breath still fluid, still flowing, still consistent, right? If it's not, chances are you're, you're, you're being challenged physically. And if we are able to maintain or at least return to the breath while we're in a in a physical state of stress, our body will learn to adapt and reorganize itself. The tissues, in particular muscles and stuff like this fascia as well to be able to accommodate those stresses, whether it be the the tension,

18:58 the stretching or pop, perhaps the contracting or the engagement of the muscles. So when it comes to the changes in the body, we want to think a little bit about that, right? We want to think about how the body's actually responding to the changes and how is our body actually like handling it?

19:19 So responding isn't like what is the feedback? We always say these things, but you know, check in with yourself, you know, only go as far as you feel comfortable. Don't push yourself beyond your limits. Like these are all like, you know, statements that we've made before, but what does it actually mean?

19:35 It usually means like check in with yourself, like how's your breath and these types of things. So pushing people to the challenge of that stress or to to the challenge of the physical demand is actually a healthy way of building stress into the body.

19:50 If we go too far beyond and we start to lose connection with the breath and we start to, let's say, hold our breath, or possibly our breath comes shallow and short. That usually is going to spike part of our nervous system or sympathetic fight or flight response, which is going to react in our bodies actually contracting, right.

20:10 So let's say we're trying to actually stretch, right? We're, we're, we're holding a stretch, but the stretch is so intense and we're not necessarily engaging muscles to support it because maybe we didn't adequately warm up the body. And now all of a sudden the body doesn't feel safe, right? Your heart rate starts to rise, your nervous system starts to feel like uncomfortable because this challenge is not easily being met, right?

20:34 The breath is being lost. So then all of a sudden, now your body is going to physically contract. You may not actually feel the contraction. I'm not talking like a spasm, but you're going to have this internal resistance within your system that's actually going to be fighting against itself. So even though you're actually trying to stretch something or you're trying to lengthen or expand a certain part of your body, if you are not noticing or paying attention to the way that your body is responding to this

20:59 physical challenge, it might actually be resisting it in such a way that you're kind of, I don't want to say wasting your time, but you're kind of wasting your time, right? So it would be better to actually do less, generally speaking, and TuneIn, to see how you feel with regards to how's the breath and stuff like that. And then try to approach more of a physical barrier or more of a physical challenge and then notice how your breath changes, notice how that affects your

21:28 system. And then kind of hover around that zone, that tolerance or that threshold, right? And you can push a little bit beyond it and so on. But we don't want to go too far beyond it because then we're going into a state of what we call distress, right?

21:43 So this is ways in which we can think about how the tissues in our body are going to respond to the things that we do in a yoga class and how it all connects back to your nervous system in your breath. When we talk about the misconception of, let's say, stretching being bad for you, we're more so talking about when we go into deep stretches where we're not actually engaging or using muscles to support that stretch. And then we go so far into a particular stretch and we're not really connected to our breath

22:16 that our bodies might actually be fighting against that, that lengthening that we're trying to create. And then eventually it's possible that something might actually snap, right? Because we're going so much into a passive stretch, we're trying to push ourselves, push ourselves in the in the other way, but not actually supporting that stretching, right? So that's something to kind of like feel into a little bit. But one of the most common injuries in yoga is over stretching or pulling a

22:44 hamstring muscle, usually in forward folds or some sort of hamstring stretch, call it standing splits or something like this, maybe a full frontal splits, right? Something where we're actually trying to stretch the hamstrings and it's too much and then all of a sudden something pulls, right? So the idea again is to come back to that active stretching and to provide some stability there. So ultimately stretching is not bad for you, right? What we want to do is we want to

23:10 have a healthy combination between engaging some passive stretching and then also some active engagement at the same time, right? So usually when we're doing this, if we're trying to stretch one muscle, we want to be activating the opposite muscle or what we call the antagonistic muscle. So if we were to use an example of this, you know, if we go into a lunge, right?

23:31 So low lunge and we are stretching the front of the thigh, right? In order to make this more of an active stretch, right? Instead of just completely sinking into gravity and completely dropping our knee forward and just our hips kind of sink, right?

23:48 That would be almost completely passive. We'd want to actually create some sort of stability, some sort of control in order to support the stretch that we're actually creating in the front of the hips. And that involves usually engaging either the thighs or the legs to support. Or you could think of the the glutes or the the stability around the pelvis, right?

24:08 That in itself is going to support the stretch of the front of the hips. So then that turns it into an active stretch, which actually makes it more, let's say under the safe category. Now, before I go into a little bit more advanced types of stretching, I just want to say that, you know, there's nothing wrong with passive stretching, right? But we need to understand that passive stretching in and itself, if we're not actually activating muscles during that period, is resulting in an

24:34 increase in range of motion, but it's not resulting in an increase in strength and stability because it's passive, right? So by activating muscles around or particularly in opposition to the muscle that you're stretching. So you need to understand muscle pairs. Every muscle has a pair and every muscle has an opposite. So if we think of the front of the hips, there's also the back of the hips.

24:59 The front of the hips is the hip flexors. The back of the hips would be the glutes, right? So if we're stretching the front of the hips, ideally we're activating the glutes. If we're stretching the glutes, ideally we're engaging the hip flexors, which would be more of like a, let's say, happy baby, for example, right?

25:16 You're getting a deep hip, sorry, hip flexion or we're stretching the glutes, but actually drawing the hips in, using your muscles, not just your hands on your feet is actually going to create more of a active stretch versus a passive stretch. So we can go more into that.

25:35 Actually, I already have an an episode where you talk about mobility, flexibility, passive and active. So I don't want to go too much more than that. But what I do want to do is I want to advance into what we call pales and rails. Now pales and rails is, I don't want to say it's complicated. It's basically talking about what we've already been talking about.

25:51 But it's ways in which you can you can combine the passive stretching while also creating active engagement to not only strengthen the tissues near the end range of motion, which improves overall mobility, but it also is going to help enhance the amount of stretch and enhance the amount of length that you might be able to get in some of these tissues.

26:15 And there's some neurological like changes that are happening when you're doing this. So let me see if I can walk through it with you with maybe an example, See if I can pull one up here real quick. So actually, you know what, let's use, let's use a lunge. A lunge is probably a pretty good example. So for in a lunch on Jenny Asana, right low lunge, we're going to do a bit of a passive stretch. So in order to do the pales and Rails combination. So first of all, actually if you

26:42 want to know what Pales and Rails is, I can, I can say the name, but you might not necessarily entirely remember what it actually stands for. Pales stands for progressive angular isometric loading. So you're progressively isometrically loading a muscle and then Rails is regressive angular isometric loading. So it's basically saying you're doing the opposite now. So Long story short, with pales and rails, you're basically trying to activate one side of

27:16 the the antagonistic pair, one side of the pair of muscle. And then after that you're you're going to be engaging the opposite side, right? And you kind of do this in a progressive loading kind of way. And this is going to help to not only, like I said, enhance your range of motion, build stability and strength, but it's also going to help your neurological system adjust to the physical changes in your body.

27:40 So let's go back to the low lunge example, right? So if we're in a low lunge, we're going to start by actually holding the stretch, right to allow the tissues to create some space, right? So we're just going to relax into a low lunge knees on the ground and maybe hold it for like a minute or something like this.

27:56 Create some space, start to warm up the tissues by creating space, not necessarily activating yet, but we're warming up the tissues, right? So we're going to keep our up our torso upright where might engage our core a little bit to avoid any excessive arching in the lower back.

28:10 But ultimately we're going to be stretching the front of the hips. So after a period about let's say a minute or so, and then we're going to start to engage the muscles in which we were just stretching. This is the pales part, right? Progressive isometric loading.

28:26 So you're going to start to, if you're in a low lunge, you're going to start to actually push the top of your foot, maybe your shin in the, in your knee into the ground as though you're trying to drag them forward, right?

28:38 This is going to activate your hip flexors, possibly even your quadriceps, right? So this is more of the front of the body that you're activating. Keeping in mind when you were stretching the low lunge before you were actually stretching the front of the body, right? So after you stretched it, now you're actually engaging it. So you would slowly start to do this by engaging. It's going to feel a little uncomfortable at first. So if you want to try it, I

29:02 suggest trying it. Now, getting to that low lunge, do a stretch and then try to push the top of your feet and your knee as though you're sliding it forward. Now the idea behind doing this contraction after a stretch is you want to gradually increase the, the, the tension from about let's say 20% or so and then gradually increase it up to your maximum, right and hold it for maybe like 10 to 15 seconds.

29:31 So you don't just go like full, you know, 100% pushing your foot into the ground. You want to slowly start to allow the tissues to adapt to the changes by increasing and progressively. So this P stands for progressively increasing that, that push into the floor.

29:49 Great. And then once you kind of get to the maximum where you feel like you're at your Max, then you hold that for like 10/15/20 seconds, something like this. So that's the, that's the second part, right? The third part is what we call the rails contraction.

30:01 So this is the the regressive isometric contraction. And this is where you actually start to contract the opposite side. So we just engaged the front of the hip. Actually, what we did first as we stretched the front of the hip, then we engaged the front of the hip. Now we're going to activate the opposite of what we just activated, which would be the back of the hip. So in this case, we're talking about the glutes, the hamstrings and things like this.

30:29 So how do we actually do this? You would probably imagine like you're, you're going to pull your knee back or you're going to almost like lift it up off the ground and almost lift your leg up off the ground. So your glutes are going to engage, your hamstrings are going to engage.

30:45 The idea is that it's not actually going to move, right? It's an isometric contraction, meaning no movements actually happening. And that also applies for the pales, in case I didn't mention it, right, You're not actually trying to slide your knee forward, you're just trying to activate the muscles that would. So the same thing applies to the rails contraction. You're not actually going to lift your knee off the ground. It'd be very difficult to do

31:07 that anyway, I think. But you're trying to do that, right? And if you are actually doing it in this moment, it is difficult because your neurological connections from your brain to that area of the body is kind of like trying to figure out how to do it.

31:21 So it's difficult at first. So again, we want to slowly try to build up that contraction, you know, going from whatever, 10 percent, 20%, working your way up, 5080, maybe 100% of your whatever maximum effort is, and then trying to hold that for about 10/15/20 seconds, right? So the idea behind this is actually going to be creating a combination of not only passive stretching, combining it with active stretching, but then also you're playing with the neurological connection between

31:52 these two muscles, which actually complement each other because they do opposite movements. Now in yoga, we talk about counter movements and all these things like that and counter poses, right? So by incorporating a little bit of this stuff into your classes or into your practice, maybe you don't want to teach it because it's a bit complicated at first. But using pails and rails in your own practice can really enhance not only your flexibility but also your mobility, right?

32:17 And you'll notice significant changes not only because the tissues themselves are going to adapt to the changes, but also because your neurological connections are going to allow those tissues to actually be released versus them feeling unsafe and contracting against your desire to stretch or lengthen them. So I'm going to give you one more example, and then we're going to wrap this up just so that we can kind of keep this relatively short and then maybe

32:43 we'll talk about it in another episode. So the other examples is I'm going to call 9090 position or you can consider like deer pose, right, where you're basically sitting on the ground. One of your legs is externally rotated, the front leg and then your back leg is going to be in an internal rotation, right? And ideally we're sitting nice and tall and aligned and your front leg is, you know, relatively relaxed on the ground.

33:10 So you again, like we did with the low lunge, you want to hold this for, you know, a minute or two just to kind of allow your hips to relax, allow some stretch and some space to be created. Call that the passive stretch, right? Tissues are lengthening.

33:23 We're just connecting with the breath, trying to relax. And then after about that minute or two, then we're going to start to move into that pales contraction. So the pales contraction again is a progressive isometric loading of the tissues. So we were just stretching, let's say the front of the hip doing that external rotation.

33:41 So now we want to activate the same muscles that we were just stretching so that external rotation. So now we would start to actually push our front leg, our ankle and our knee into the ground as if we're trying to rotate the hip externally even more, right?

33:56 You're actually moving it into external rotation. Now again, you want to gradually increase this tension from like, you know, 10 percent, 20% and so on over the span of like 10 to 20 seconds. And then eventually when you get to the maximum, whatever that is for you, you hold that for 10/15/20 seconds. And then once you're done there, now you're going to do the opposite contraction.

34:19 So what is the opposite contraction of that? The opposite contraction of that is trying to immediately basically lift your ankle and your foot off the ground while your knee is still on the ground, right? So this is actually going to create more of an internal rotation of the hip. You're going to engage the muscles and that internal rotation is going to be the opposite of what you were just doing with the external rotation, right? Similar idea.

34:44 You gradually build up that resistance and then eventually hold it at its maximum. And then after we're done with the rails contraction, then you just kind of relax, you know, maybe sink a little bit deeper into the the stretch.

35:04 I didn't say this on the first example of low lunge, but you could actually sink into it and just kind of do another passive stretch after that, maintaining some sort of control, but mostly just experiencing and noticing the difference from doing the the pales and rails contraction. So those are two examples, low lunge and 9090 pose where you're playing with the idea of using this stretching and this activating, which is going to warm up the body in two different ways.

35:31 And you're also playing with your neurological connections in your body to be able to adapt to the changes that are occurring in your tissues, particularly in the muscles in this case. So try around with that and see if that you know how that plays for you. You can also go on YouTube and like check out, you know, pails and rails, different exercises, different yoga poses. I'm assuming there's some stuff out there, right? There's lots of stuff on the

35:53 Internet. So go check it out, try it out, see how it feels. Start slow. And then maybe if you want to, you can start to incorporate it a little bit into your yoga classes, right? Maybe your practice at first, then eventually if you want to teach it, then you can start to teach it.

36:09 So that's what we're going to start with. And then maybe we're going to do another episode where we talk a little bit more about some of the other changes that we happen that happened with stretching. But for now, I feel like I feel pretty complete, right? The other thing we can talk about is what we call cars, which is controlled articular rotations. But to be honest, there's not much to say about that. If you can Google it and look up YouTube, you can probably find more about it and you can

36:31 incorporate those into your classes as well. Basically, it's kind of doing rotations with your shoulders and your hip near the end range of motion as well, but using that activation to support those rotations just to simplify it.

36:45 Otherwise, thank you so much for listening. It's been a pleasure to talk into your ear for the last 30 minutes. I hope you learned something and it's sunk in and you can apply it into your practice and into your teaching style. Otherwise, if you have any questions, you can reach out to us at Podcast that Going Pro Yoga. Otherwise, have a beautiful day and we'll speak to you next week.

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37:26 So I definitely suggest. Checking it out, going proyoga.com right now. You can. Try it out for free for seven days.