Yoga tips: Should we pull up knee cap or not?

In many Yoga classes I was asked to pull-up my knee cap (also called locking the knees), during most of the asanas particularly in standing asanas. Pulling up of knee caps involves strengthening inner quadriceps muscles so that knee caps move towards hips. This is considered to be very good to protect knees. If it is supposed to be very good when why are we questioning whether we should do it or not? I have explained how our whole body is connected in my earlier blog Misunderstanding the pain. Keep this concept in mind as we proceed further. 

Well, it may be true that it is good to pull up knee caps but whenever I tried to do it my entire awareness was in and around my knees. My whole focus was on keeping that pulled-up position intact. When Yoga is all about developing complete body awareness then how can we localize most of the awareness to one area? Is this the right area to focus on? Instead I tried to focus on stretching the toes of my feet and pushing heel down. What this does is it creates more feeling of connectedness with the ground. Due to which it aligns all the bones and in the process will automatically pull up knee caps just to the extent it is healthy for knees without hyper-extending it. By pushing the heals down we will start working from our core and this will spread the awareness without localizing at one point. Try this but you may need to sensitize your feet and toes for that. For most of us because of constant usage of shoes it becomes really difficult to control the movement of our toes. Try activating them by touching, rubbing, etc.

So stretch your toes, spread your feet in order to ground yourself more in to your heels. This process will pull up the knee caps without you putting any extra effort. But is it always required to pull the knee caps up? What if we don’t do? Well remember that there is no one rule in Yoga. I would like to recollect some parts of famous philosopher, J Krishnamurthi’s statement in this context “I maintain that Truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect.  Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or to coerce people along any particular path. The moment you follow someone you cease to follow Truth.” Yoga is all about going in search of truth/nature/reality. So don’t get biased by any conditions/rules/guidelines/instructions in Yoga practice. Feel free to explore and enjoy the journey. 

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Previous related blog

Misunderstanding the pain

It's all about journey and not the destination

Yoga teacher pushes...Good or bad? 

Reciprocal Inhibition...Secret to improve our flexibility

I have seen many students come to Yoga class with primary focus on improving flexibility. In fact, even I started with the same intention but later moved on. I used to push myself, or get pushed to become more flexible. I went to an extent, to find some magical herbs which could make me flexible J Least did I know the nature of human body. In this blog let us discuss one of the nature’s secrets to improve flexibility. In medical terminology it is called- Reciprocal Inhibition. Let us not get into too much of details about this medical nomenclature.  

Polarity is nature’s nature. positive-negative, day-night, ascending-descending, active-passive and let us not forget male-female :) etc. These forces are apparently contradictory, but essentially they go hand in hand and are harmonious. This is why I feel equality is myth, harmony is natural. Even in our body there are such contradictory forces, but at one given point of time, only one manifests over the other. There are forces that energize our body and that calms us down and that is how activity and rest is perfectly harmonised. Even to move a limb these forces act in a perticular way that some muscles contract and some muscles expand, to allow a smooth movement. For example- To bend our elbow joint, biceps contract and triceps expand. To bend knee joint, hamstring contracts and quadriceps expand.

Sounds very simple and logical, right? Exactly! This is so simple, that this action happens so fast and reflexively without involving our mind. If we contract some muscles (Agonists) to move a joint then there are always opposite set of muscles (Antagonists) which relax or expand, reflexively. The more we contract one set of muscles; the opposite set of muscles expand more . This is called reciprocal inhibition in medical terminology. So, the more we want to stretch a muscle the more we need to consciously contract the opposite muscle (In medical terminology it is called Agonist-Antagonist pair). This is the secret to improve flexibility. We can use this logic consciously in our Yoga practice. In our practice, we need to be attentive of our breathing as well, to make optimum benefit of this concept. We need to breathe in a controlled manner, and contract our muscles during exhalations. 

A few Yoga asanas where we can apply this concept -

•          Paschimottanasana, Janu Sirsasana, Uttanasana, Adho mukha svanasana or any forward bending: Consciously contract quadriceps to extend hamstring to improve forward bending. This is the reason why in Iyengar yoga traditional classes we are asked to pull our kneecaps up when we bend forward. I have explained the need and how to pull up the knee caps in my blog "Yoga tips: Should we pull up knee caps or not?"
•          Bhujangasana, urdhva mukha svanasana: We contract buttock muscles, calf muscles to stretch your front body.

We cannot hasten the process of stretching, but, we can apply this method slowly, steadily, breath by breath, every minute. Although it appears simple, wrong application can cause complex injuries. It is advisable to practice this under the supervision of an experienced Yoga teacher. Let us discuss more about enhancing our flexibility in upcoming blogs. Having said this, it is vital to make our mind flexible to comprehend that Yoga is not mere body flexibility.

I thank my good friend, sports physiotherapist, Dr. Gladson Johnson (www.attitudeprime.com) under whom I learnt wealth of techniques related to human anatomy and its application to Yoga. 

After all, an ounce of practice is always better than thousands of theories! This concept is applicable across asana practice and I would be eager to hear more from your practice J

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References:

[1] “Anatomy of Hatha Yoga” by H. David Coulter

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reciprocal_inhibition

What is Thyaga? The concept of letting go

There are many instances where I have heard people say “you need to let go to be happy”. What should I let go? How will I know that? Does letting go mean I should sacrifice everything and run to Himalayas? Should I give money/food to needy? No one answered these questions convincingly and I realized that many use such statements very lightly. Probe a little they will be as clueless as you are :) Finally I got the answer to my question. Let us understand the concept of letting go or “Thyaga” in this blog. Before we start, try to introspect the questions I have raised. Remember, we learn only through enquiry.

Indian thought system says that we need to let go all the obstacles in our life and hold on to those that are essential. Hmm..If we think deeper, this sounds like a very subjective statement. What is essential to me may not be essential to others and what is my obstacle can be some one’s boon. For example- Some can argue that eating food 6 times a day is essential to them, or wearing an expensive jewellery is essential to them. So we should define words “essential” and “obstacle” in order to understand this concept.

Indian thought system clarifies this point by saying that essential and obstacles are those that act or doesn't act as means to ultimate realisation ("Nirvana", also called, “Samadhi” is a Yogic term). This ultimate realisation is everyone’s goal of life. (What is this ultimate realisation is out of this blog's scope. Read blog: “What is God? Let us understand scientifically…” to get an idea of God). For now imagine realisation to be a stage where we have complete control of our energy. Figuratively, we can play with our energy!!! This is the state we are talking here. Anything which acts as a means to our goal is essential, otherwise it is not. Obstacles are an end in itself and will not take us anywhere. We go to temple or worship God/Guru daily because we think temple/God/Guru to be a means to our realisation but if we think going to temple or worshiping God itself is an end then even this act becomes an obstacle. Now the question is, How do we know whether something is a means to my end goal or not?

Experience…We experience a state of happiness/bliss when we do something which is essential. Now, we may question, drinking alcohol daily gives me happiness, smoking gives me happiness etc etc. But lets ask ourself whether that is taking us anywhere closer to our goal. These experiences are deteriorating our health both mentally and physically. Thoughts, feelings, desires, relationships, possessions and the sense of me culminates in to obstacles in life in the path of realisation. Right experience of happiness is the one that uplifts us towards our goal, the one that gives us fulfillment and doesn't make us regret about it anytime. These are the kinds of experiences which we should value.

So to summarise, “let go the obstacles in life which are not acting as a means towards our end goal and learn from our experiences as to what is essential. Essentials will give us happiness/bliss and will uplift us towards our goal”

I hope you understood the concept. On behalf of you all, I would express my sincere thanks to my good friend, my philosophy teacher, Research scholar - Swaroop Sharma, for answering my questions related to Thyaga.

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Constipation Vs Backpain, Physical Vs Physiological connection

In my earlier blog, Misunderstanding the pain, I explained how pain in any part of the body doesn’t mean that only that part of the body is disturbed. You are just getting indication from the weakest link. In this blog I will explain the relation between physical and physiological body from a unique problem I went through. Apart from this I got an insight in to how modern medicine and Ayurveda looks at the same problem.

One day after an intense Yoga practice I got a severe back pain. This was around a year back and I was ignorantly  testing limits everyday. Pain had become part of my life and I had learnt to live with the pain. But this time the pain was something unusual. I ignored it for a day but it started becoming worst. Most of the stretch pain will subside with sufficient rest but this was increasing (I explained about pains during Yoga practice in my earlier blog, Yoga teacher pushes...Good or bad?). On day two I rushed immediately to an allopathic doctor. He said that my muscles have gone for spasm and I need to take rest for a week. Bed rest is the first few words modern medicine speaks when they hear back pain. So, next time you visit allopathic doctor only after taking sufficient bed rest so that you can rule out the obvious response :)

After two days my problem worsened and on top of that I started developing severe constipation^[1] problems. Slight constipation was there even before but it was not causing any problem. This time as pain never subsided I went to an Ayurvedic doctor. Somehow I believe in Ayurveda for treating such common and chronic problems. Ayurvedic doctor said because of constipation I have developed back pain. He said when bowel movement becomes difficult it starts putting extra load on the surrounding muscles which was the cause of back pain. This was a thought provoking explanation and made me think. I started analyzing my problem in greater detail.

After much research and self study I understood the problem. When we overstretch a muscle it causes muscle spasm^[2]. Spasm means sudden contraction of muscle fibers to avoid being overstretched. This is more like a natural defense mechanism of our body. When back muscles goes for spasm they lose their flexibility or their rhythm. Back muscle rhythm is important to cause movement inside your intestine. Back muscle contraction and relaxation which happens even during walking, running etc creates rhythmic contraction and relaxation in our intestine. This movement is essential to move food inside our intestine. When this rhythm is affected it leads to constipation. Constipation will put load on back muscles which are already compressed due to spasm thus further increasing the pain. This cycle goes on and pain shoots up exponentially.

Constipation has many causes and what I experienced is one of the causes which gave me this understanding. This example clearly shows how our physical body is connected with our physiological functions. When we work on our physical body in Yoga practice we are working to release tension or contraction in our muscles which is influencing our physiological organs and its function. Wondering what I did? I thought of targeting the problem from both sides and I took both medicine :)

In my future blogs I would logically explain how Yoga practice will influence you at a much deeper levels such as mental, intellectual and energetic. I hope you enjoyed reading it.  

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References

[1] http://www.webmd.com/digestive-disorders/digestive-diseases-constipation
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spasm 

Previous related blogs
Misunderstanding the pain

Yoga teacher pushes...Good or bad?

Yoga teacher pushes...Good or Bad?

It is common that many Yoga teacher pushes you in to your posture in order to make you stretch beyond your normal capabilities. They do it with the intention to make you do all advance asanas soon. Question has always been raised about this method. Is it a healthy way to do Yoga? Does it cause any harm? etc etc. In this blog I am going to talk about this in detail from my studies and experience.

Let us first understand the nature of human body. Pain is a natural feedback mechanism to protect your body from injuries. It is the warning indicator to tell you that you about to cross your limits. It is nature’s way of telling “Boss, you are doing too much, be careful!!”.  Limitation can be from any part of your body:  muscles, joints, ligaments etc, you first feel the pain. As I explained in my earlier blog: Misunderstanding the pain, pain in any part of the body doesn’t mean that only that part of the body has limitations. You are just getting indication from the weakest link.

When you push beyond your limits too fast, your muscles goes for spasm^[1] (sudden, involuntary contraction of muscles) in order to prevent you from stretching/overloading further. Although most of the spasm relaxes in a few days, it can even be permanent. Your muscle remembers these spasms and next time it will occur soon unless you have trained rightly after the first occurrence. All these are natural defense mechanisms to protect our body.  Finally, postural muscles (prevents you from collapsing in the field of gravity) act like spring in the field of gravity^[2][3] and with gentle force you can keep them in completely stretched position. Let us move ahead with these concepts in mind.

Many Yoga students and teachers ignore the pain and try hard to work through the pain resulting in injuries.  They say "Go beyond pain to achieve and improve in your abilities” , “Pain is merely physical, a material thing. Go beyond material world by ignoring the pain”, “I am not pushing, I am just trying to correct you”. They all tend to push you hard to get results quickly. All these statements are true but conditions apply!!.  

Let us do an experiment. Sit in stretched leg position and bend forward till you feel stretch pain. When you hold that position for some time you will notice that pain will disappear and you can go a little forward to feel pain again. This initial pain is the body’s way to warn you “Boss, hold on, you are doing something new today. Let me get used to it”. This concept can be explained from medical world but it is beyond the scope of this blog. Point at which you feel this initial pain varies on daily basis. When teacher says “Go beyond pain”, this is the kind of pain there are talking about. The initial pain which you experience when you body is not ready. You can go deeper in to the posture slowly by holding the posture for long time till you reach your maximum at which point you should stop. In this approach you are being the master and trying to acknowledge the natural responses of your body. Take it slowly and steadily by having patience to hold for longer duration. I have seen many students who are so disturbed to hold the posture longer to experience all this!

Yoga teachers are not linked to your feedback mechanism and they have no clue about what you are feeling. Without the knowledge of your feedback mechanism they push you and their by increasing the chances of injuries.  Many teachers even ignore your scream thinking that either you are acting or you are lazy to do more!! This may be true but it can be serious to ignore your scream. In this approach you are making your teacher the master of your body without being aware of the natural feedback responses of your body. So, being pushed by your teacher is always a strict ‘NO’. They may say “You did more last week, so why not today. Let me push you”. Keep in mind that it is not just your physical body but even your emotional pattern decides what you can do on a particular day. As I said, your body is not the same every day. Respect it.

How about teacher correcting your posture? Corrections are done to make you feel the right stretch or to release unnecessary tensions in certain parts. You feel good after the correction. After correction if pain increases, then step back and move forward in the right direction slowly by acknowledging the pain. Having said this there are some teachers who are aware of all this and try to work only with the spring action of your postural muscles. This is perfectly fine but there is a better way to do this. Yoga props used in Iyengar Yoga will enable you to be the master and work to get right maximum stretch.

One of the Yama (self-restraints) of Ashtanga Yoga is “Ahimsa”(Non-Violence).  Ahimsa doesn’t just mean doing good to society and others. Follow in even in your practice by not doing violence by yourself or by someone on you. Apart from this many times it is your ego to show off because of which you push yourself or allow someone to push you. Ego is not Yoga. Understand that by getting pushed you are being detrimental to your own progress. Yoga is not a competition but a lifelong process. Go beyond you stretch pain slowly and steadily by staying in the posture for longer duration.

Do I practice this? Honestly, I used to push my students at the beginning but then I experienced the pain by being pushed. This triggered me to do self-study. Slowly I refined my method of teaching to give precise instructions to feel the right and optimum stretch without using much force. I still try to bring the lost awareness by gently tapping at the places where there is no awareness. I do this to deal with passive mind of the studentsJ. This is still work in progress!! English author Edward Bulwer-Lytton in 1839 coined the metonymic adage “The Pen is mightier than the sword” and now I say “Words are mightier than the force in Yoga training!!”

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References:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spasm

http://nau.edu/Research/Feature-Stories/Spring-like-Protein-Key-to-Muscle-Behavior/

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1456055/

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Concept of God. Let us understand scientifically…

During early childhood days my father made me worship God regularly, but gradually this strict discipline faded away in my life when I started questioning the reason for worship. I slowly became totally against idol worship.  I remember having a heated debate with my high school class teacher where he was trying to convince me to believe in such concepts. Although many tried, I never believed that some stone should be worshiped as God, but deep within I was wondering what people are doing. People say “God is all powerful, you need to surrender to him, you need to worship him daily, you need to do pooja, visit temples” etc etc, but no one were able to provide proper and logical explanation for what they are doing. The question: “What is God?”, always remained.

When I started understanding it in detail, I could make striking similarities between concept of God and the concepts had read in my physics text book during my school days. We all know the famous Newton’s law of conservation of energy which states “Energy can neither be created nor be destroyed; it simply changes from one form to another”. Wondering where is Newton talking about God here? Basically, what is called God is nothing but a generic name given to Energy and some people call it as consciousness. You are so and so but your generic name is human being, also exists animal being, plant being and so on. Similarly the highest idea of generalization is called ‘God’ or in scientific word ‘Energy’. Let me elaborate this concept little more.

Science is doing constant experiment to find the smallest particle. During my school days I was taught that it was atom and then during college I was told it was neutrons, and then it became quarks so on and so forth till it came to the recent ‘God-Particle’. From Einstein’s famous relation E=mc2 we know that for every mass there is energy. So every smallest particle has energy associated with it. Science is interested in this energy and trying to understand how to control this energy so that they can get more control on the matter. Through this control anything is possible. You can change the property of matter, make matter transform in to something totally different (what science calls ‘alchemy’), transfer matter from one place to another (what science calls ‘teleportation’) etc. This is exactly what our Vedas talk about but just that they called this energy as Prana and through realizing this Prana i.e nothing but complete understanding and controlling, we can realize God.

Because of the same concept there is nothing called non-living thing in our ancient science. Every non-living thing has energy but just that it is manifested in different ways. Just like energy comes in different forms-Kinetic, potential or electrical, chemical etc. Like every living being even non-living things die, just that its life span cannot be experienced fully in our life term. Think of all basic science lessons on erosion of stones, friction between materials leading to its destruction, rusting or oxidization of metal,  etc all these concepts give us just a glimpse of the life cycle of non living things. Ultimately even they disintegrate and go to the earth. When we say it disintegrates and goes to the earth we are saying matter is transformed or energy is transformed from one form to another.

Energy is everywhere, and similarly Prana/God is everywhere. Energy cannot be seen but just be experienced/felt, just like God. Now we know why many people say, rather very lightly “God is within you”. All that they are referring is Prana/Energy which is there in everyone. Some people know how to get good control on it where as many people doesn't  If you can completely control the energy within you, you can control any energy because eventually everything in the world is made up of tiny matter and by controlling energy you are controlling the tiny matter. People whom we call ‘Yogis’ are nothing but the Vedic name for our modern day scientists.

Day-by-day what science is explaining is the concept of Prana or God in our ancient texts. Finally science community realized it recently and aptly named the latest discovery as ‘God Particle’. Whether this is the end? Frankly even they don’t know. On a positive note, through this, people are getting some insight and understanding of our ancient texts. What Newton and Einstein explained is nothing but the age old concept recorded in Vedas around 5000+ year back. Just that they used right terms to explain modern community. Similarly this blog is my attempt to explain “What is God?” using right terms for modern community J.

I hope you enjoyed reading it. I would like to thank my good friend, my philosophy teacher, Research scholar - Swaroop Sharma, for giving me this concept of “God as Energy or consciousness”, through which I could relate back to science to understand it better.

Still, why do people go to temple? Why they do idol worship when they have God within them? This is a topic for another blog J. Again I will try to bring out scientific reasons for this to the best of my knowledge.

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Related Blog post
What is Thyaga? The Concept of letting go

Misunderstanding the Pain

One of my good friends in Intel approached me to get some Yoga tips for his back pain. He was undergoing severe back pain on the left side of his body and as always I asked him to practice Yoga without focusing just on his back. He was looking for just a point solution for his back and Yoga which I asked him to practice for his entire body did not sound like a solution for him. I have seen that most people don’t understand the anatomy and bio mechanics of our body well and end up in looking for point solutions without much success. So why should we practice Yoga for whole body to get relief from back pain? Let me explain in laymen terms.

To understand this let’s go to some basic physics. Imagine the scene of a train accident (Photo graph of which you normally see in newspaper). When two trains collide head on you might have noticed that sometimes the bogies in the front will be intact whereas bogies at the back will be ripped off from the chain.  The force produced will move among all the bogies of the train and the weakest link will be ripped off. This same law of nature will hold good even in our body. So everything in our body is connected and always the weakest link is affected most. This whole science of applying mechanical physics concepts to our body movements is called Bio-Mechanics.

Does it mean that our back is the weakest? Can we just make this weakest link strong? How did it become weak? What are the forces we are talking about here? Gravity is the main force. Our whole body is supported and works within the field of gravity. At any point of time there is a force and counterforce acting on any body part. Even when you stand straight there are different parts in your body which will work against the gravity to make to stay in the position. Think of it as a mechanical device made of shafts, levers, nuts, bolts etc. and is working in a field of gravity. Any mechanical device to work smoothly should be in a good condition. Any device which is not used or not well used for a long time will cease to work after sometime. Similarly our body has to be used and used well to work properly. Any form of exercise is built around the basic concept of using our body well.

Am I not simplifying too much by comparing such a complex living being to a mechanical device? In fact, I am. Our body is intelligent enough to remodel itself constantly depending on the usage. Body will even spend time and energy to strengthen any part which is not used well. Why spend energy on something useless? This is an automatic process and is called body intelligence. For example if you are slouching on your desk at an angle to read this blog, only one side of your body is bearing all the weight and is getting worked. That means only some muscles (main building block which causes movement by controlling the joints. They will be on the bone connecting two joints) are getting compressed and stressed to balance your weight in the field of gravity. When any muscle is constantly compressed your body is intelligent enough to make it short as there is no need to keep it long. Compressed muscle means restricted range of motion and less flexibility. So our habit will influence our body parts which will change constantly and can potentially restrict the range of motion.

Remember our body is a chain and is always in motion. When a compressed muscle during motion receives the load which it cannot handle it will transfer the load to the next muscle in next locomotive chain. For example/- when muscles in your hips become stiff to accommodate the range of motion it will transfer the weight to muscle controlling knee joint which will take some load and rest is transferred to the muscle in next joint. So our body is taking a different form to accommodate the range of motion required for an activity.

How so? Let us understand this with the help of lego blocks. In the pictures below, let us assume Red blocks is your trunk, Blue blocks is your thigh bone and yellow blocks is your lower leg bone, Red joins blue at hip joint, blue joins yellow at knee joint. Muscles are not shown here but imagine them to be present at every joint connected to bones on either side. If all the muscles are in full range of motion when you stand straight, then each muscle will move to take a position which will not stress any joints. That means your joins will exactly overlap on each other as show in first diagram. Let us assume muscle on your hip joint is compressed or tight and cannot move to its full range. So it will pull thigh bone to an angle. This in turn will make your lower leg bone to move in opposite direction to balance you on the center of gravity (as shown in second diagram). This mechanism as I mentioned will be controlled by your body intelligence. This will put undue stress on your joints which are not designed to take extra load constantly. Although body intelligence will make you feel comfortable through some correction but the undue stress will degenerate your body quickly and they give up one day. First indication of this is through pain.

That means when you have pain in your back, you have disturbed somewhere in the chain. Similarly any pain in any part of the body doesn’t mean that only that part of the body is disturbed. You are just getting indication from the weakest link. This is where Yoga comes in to picture. Yoga, through various asana will give you the range of motion required for your body and gradually you will be aware of postural disturbances that you can correct.

Posture detection and correction is one of the main benefits of Yoga. With this explanation I was able to convince my friend. I hope I was able to convince you as wellJ.

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Related other blogs:
Yoga teacher pushes...Good or Bad?