Because of my focus on Iyengar Yoga practice during the 80's and early 90's, I previously attended several workshops with
Roger Cole. He may not be as well known outside the Iyengar Yoga tradition as some of the other faculty for the Teachers' Program, but, he is highly respected within the Iyengar Yoga community. I love his way of breaking down the poses in ways that pretty much anyone can understand.
Although the general focus was on teaching all arm balances, this workshop led up to the teaching of Bakasana in particular. The first part of the workshop was both a warm-up for our bodies to do Bakasana and a training in how to assess your students' readiness to do the pose. Basically, you have to do a few preparatory poses as warm ups anyway. So, you assess the student's readiness while they are doing the preparatory poses. The things you are looking for are:
- Adequate shoulder, forearm, and abdominal strength
- Adequate flexibility of the wrists, shoulders, hips, and trunk
Roger covered both some recommended preparatory asanas and what to look for when assessing student readiness for arm balances during the practice of these asanas. Roger also provided an excellent 4 page handout covering this in detail. I won't share all the details here. If you are interested, I highly recommend attending one of Roger's workshops on arm balances yourself sometime.
I will share two things I learned from this workshop. First, Roger spent some time at the start discussing the
balance aspect of balancing poses. To demonstrate it simply, he had us all stand in tree pose (Vrksasana). The instruction was to shift the weight to the outside edge of the foot of the standing leg. You then shift your weight slowly towards the inside edge of the foot of the standing leg. If you go slowly, you should be able to sense a point where the pose suddenly feels
light. That is the balance point of the pose.
Without digressing into a Physics discussion (Roger briefly did during the workshop), this balance point exists in every balancing pose. On the surface, this is an obvious statement. He was emphasizing this because in the more advanced poses many students have problems not because they lack the adequate strength and/or flexibility to do the pose. Rather, they don't have a good understanding and/or feeling in their own bodies for the balancing point in the poses. So, they struggle mightily never positioned properly over the balance point of the pose. Even many of the more advanced balancing poses should feel
light just like tree pose does when you have found the balance point. In fact, he indicated that getting into and out of certain advanced balance poses was actually the hard part. Holding them once the body has moved to the balance point is much easier than it looks.
With respect to technique, Roger explained one
trick that helps when going into Bakasana. I believe he credited
John Schumaker for this. Or at least, he indicated that John was the first person to describe this technique as
scrubbing the arms. The basic idea is that the upper arms are less likely to slip off the shins when you go up in Bakasana when the flesh of the upper arm is externally rotated. The problem is that both hands are fully occupied at all times in this pose (:-)). The arm scrubbing motion against the shin is what does this. Before going up into the pose, you place the upper arm flesh as far down towards the ankle as it can go against your shin. You then scrub the arm up the shin. This scrubbing motion will externally rotate the flesh of the upper arms.
Namasté
