MODERN YOGA: RETHINKING OUTDATED CUES

My latest article for Shut Up and Yoga is now live! You can check out my article, Modern Yoga: Rethinking Outdated Cues here!

Here’s a sneak peek:

“Yoga teachers and practitioners know that great alignment cues can make all the difference in our practice. Unfortunately, some common cues undermine the body’s natural intelligence by interfering with the brain’s natural ability to direct movement patterns.

One prime example of this has been written about ad nauseum: the glute softening cue. Specifically, many yogis have long been told to relax their glute muscles in backbends such as locust or bridge. But your glutes are actually responsible for extending your hips in those poses. So relaxing them during hip extension is absurdly counterproductive.

While this oft-used cue takes the cake, today we will look at two other examples of verbal cues in yoga that interfere with our body’s natural intelligence and should be dropped from our cue tool belts.”

 

Thanks to Jaimee Hoefert for her edits and Ksenia Sapunkova for her beautiful artwork.