Your leg may not get up super high but that’s ok.
Flex your left foot so that your toes point straight down at the floor. To come into the split while keeping the hips in a closed (sometimes also called squared) position, lift your left leg straight up and back without changing the position of the hip points/pelvis at all. Both hip points face forward in Downward Facing Dog, just like in Mountain Pose. For most people, it’s in the range of three to seven inches of space between the inside edges of the feet.Ī Down Dog Split is a great pose in which to feel the difference between closed and open hips. Where it’s not is with the feet touching or with the feet as wide as the mat. There is some approximation involved since you can’t see the joint itself from the outside, but you can develop a sense of where it is. It can be a tricky cue, however, given the lack of clarity around the whole issue of where the hips are.įor the purposes of yoga, what we’re trying to do with this instruction is situate each foot directly under the place where the femur inserts into the pelvis because this is the position of greatest stability. It’s a good cue in some ways because it allows for each person to use their own body as a measuring device rather than more generic terms like ‘six inches’ that wouldn’t work for all people. But first this very important message: Hip-Distance ApartĪ bit of confusion often arises when the instruction is given to place your feet hip-distance apart. So we’ll take a look at a few different scenarios. As you might imagine, all this can get a little more complicated when the legs are doing different things. Thus the hips can be opened to either the right or the left side. If you go the opposite way and rotate the pelvis to the right, the left hip point comes forward and the right one goes back.
This is the simplest form of what we call an open hip position. The right hip point has come forward and the left one has gone back. If you swing your right elbow forward and your left elbow back as you rotate your pelvis to the left, both hips points are no longer pointing forward. When both hip points are facing forward, this is a closed hip position. The positions of these hip points is a very important guide because you can actually touch them to make sure that your hips are doing what you want them to do. We call these your hip points (anatomical name: the anterior superior iliac spines). Reach your fingers down on both sides and touch the bony, protruding part of the front of your pelvis. Stand with your arms akimbo and feel that your two sides are facing forward, level, and even. As we reach early adulthood, the joints between these bones become fused so that the entire pelvis moves as a single unit.Ĭome to Mountain Pose at the front of your mat with your feet parallel. Let’s start with the pelvis, which is actually made up of three bones: the ilium, the ischium, and the pubis. We needn’t banish this word from our instructions but it is extremely useful to stop and define precisely what the terms we use actually mean.
(Hip-replacement surgery is the replacement of this ball (top of the femur) and socket (part of the pelvis) joint.) Yet for the purpose of yoga, we do often talk about the hips. What is often called the hip joint is actually where the femurs meet the pelvis. That’s because what we commonly call the hips is actually comprised of the pelvis, lower spine, and upper leg bones (femurs) as well as all the muscles and connective tissues that hold them together. If you look at an anatomical drawing of the lower body, you won’t find anything labelled ‘the hips’. We’re going in deep here, starting with a closer look at the anatomy and vocabulary involved. Understanding the difference and implementing it appropriately is an essential but often neglected building block for good alignment in each pose. In yoga’s standing poses, there are two basic hip positions: closed hips and open hips.
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