7 Secrets To Effective Weight Loss At Home

hi there kathy madeo back with a tutorial video on if you are feeling inflexible why you should stop blaming your hamstrings if your forward folds look something like this your legs are straight but your chest is really far away from your thighs this video is for you and i've got a lot of tips to help you unlock those hamstrings let's get started it's really normal to feel tight in our hips and our leg muscles especially with the sedentary lifestyle we have or maybe you're a runner and you know things are designed when you run to help protect your joints so those muscles and the fascia is going to get tight right but one of the myths is that it's only the hamstrings and if we think about any time we forward fold we're essentially compressing our belly or torso to our thighs and there's a whole chain of muscles and lines and fascia that goes along with needing to be stretched so oftentimes what we do is we target the hamstrings we blame the hamstrings and then we keep trying to stretch the hamstrings but there might be other things involved now with that being said oftentimes the hamstrings are tight and here's one big tip i want to give you it's a common thought to think that when you forward fold and your legs are straight that your hamstrings are stretching but in fact what's happening is you're not folding at the hip joint you're folding at the waist and your pelvis is going into what's called a posterior tilt that means it goes backwards it goes under but for forward folds we actually want an anterior tilt a forward tilt of the pelvis and here's why when we take that posterior tilt and we add on flexion so we bring the torso in towards the legs that actually is shortening your hamstrings the opposite direction that you want them to go in in order to stretch the hamstrings right so we want to prioritize taking the anterior tilt over having straight legs and folding like this because this is not getting you closer to being flexible in your legs this is getting you farther away so when we take the forward tilt what will happen is your knees will have to bend so the knees are going to bend take that forward tilt and you see now i'm folding at the hip joint my spine is actually straight i'm not folding from here folding at the hip joint and you'll see that my torso now is getting very close to my thighs and that my front core muscles are working now to compress my chest my torso to my thighs which is actually beginning to stretch and lengthen all the muscles in the back line of the body so not just the hamstrings but the glutes are getting stretched the low back the the mid-back region so once all of this area starts to stretch and lengthen it will begin to release the hamstrings so the hamstrings begin to stretch and lengthen as well and then what will happen over time if you begin to practice your forward folds like this what will happen is all of these muscles will start to lengthen and start to free up the hamstrings to be able to stretch now the great thing about this tip is that it goes across all forward folds so it's a principle of forward folding you always want your pelvis in an anterior tilt so if you need to modify by bending the knees so be it right and i promise you that over time working this way things are going to start to unlock and release and you'll finally find some freedom in those hamstrings i want to just demo here real quick if you're on the floor so again any forward fold we could take our john usher sauce and uh if you sit on the floor and you tend to be like this this is taking that exact posterior tilt i talked about and then try to stretch at your feet remember nothing is actually stretching here so if this looks like you on the floor i want you to prop yourself up with a blanket why because that will actually help your pelvis tilt forward watch what happens the second i sit up on something ah my pelvis has some freedom to be able to take that movement forward and then from there if you still can't reach your foot you'll just take a strap of any kind place it around the sole of your foot and remember we're prioritizing this anterior tilt over having a straight leg so you might be looking a little bit more like this this is what it might look like with straight legs and again this is across any type of forward fold in any of your yoga poses or stretching i hope this video is useful to you if it is give me a like let me know in the comments how it's working for you and of course if you haven't already i'd love for you to hit that subscribe button namaste