Downdog: Heels Almost To Ground!
I hate my hamstrings. Oh, I know, I should love all those parts of my body that frustrate me, but I can’t find much love for my very very tight hamstrings. There is hope though…after years of hard work, I can finally see that a day might exist sometime in the future (perhaps far, but still a possible future!) where my heels might actually hit the floor in downward facing dog.
They are actually almost there. Just an inch, maybe even less. But they have been kind of stuck in this netherworld for a few weeks now. Teasing me. Saying: Yes, you do have the possibility of touching the floor, but we’re not going to give it to you…just yet. Almost! But not quite! I can even kind of hit the floor if I do one foot at a time!
I’m hoping they’ll just pop soon and go PLUNK down on the ground! Wow! A miracle! A yoga miracle!
Patience, Grasshopper, I know!
Hi Namasteph!
I stumbled across your blog and I like it! I am going to link it to my yoga blog if that is okay!
Ooo hamstrings are easy to become impatient with. I’ve been practicing yoga for years and rarely bring my heels all the way to the ground. Even though I CAN bring heels to the ground when I’m warmed up enough, I prefer concentrating on shoulder opening in downdog and feel that for me, the opening in the shoulders is compromised when I become preoccupied with bringing my heels to the ground.
Paul Greeley has a great DVD: Anatomy of Yoga, have you seen it? He explains structural constraints within poses and compares muscular tension and structural compression in the limitations we feel in poses (meaning that with muscular tension, we can keep working. But with structural compression, we have a limit usually set by our skeletal structure). This is a really helpful DVD for these topics, because through impatience in poses we may injure ourselves! Many of us yogis gaze upon pictures of BKS Iyengar in his amazing poses and think we should be able to do that too. I tore my rotator cuff several years ago trying to get my head all the way to the ground in downdog so now I don’t try so hard to look like the picture but just try to work within my strengths and challenges and find a nice balance.
Good luck!
Namaste,
Megan