Chaturanga For Beginners

hi friends Kathy Madeo here back with another video this one a request from one of you on how to build strength for chaturanga I'm going to go over five of the top ways that you can use props and ways to modify to progressively build up to that chaturanga if you have a tendency to collapse your hips down in chaturanga when you bend your arms or perhaps your shoulders roll forward when you bend your arms into that chaturanga or maybe you're rolling to the pinky side of the finger and those Knuckles are lifting up you might be experiencing some wrist or shoulder or low back pain when any of those things happen so if any of those look or sound like you then this video is for you let's get started first let's just cover the alignment of the pose we usually come into this posture from a plank pose so I'm in a plank pose here I want to shift all the way to the tips of my toes so that when I bend my arms my elbows stack over my wrists and I'd only been so far as my shoulders are in alignment with my elbows now if you're having a tendency to collapse your hips down in that transition might look something like this what's happening is we're losing the engagement of the core muscles one of the functions of the core is actually to stabilize your pelvis so when we're leading with our pelvis in this transition that's signaling that we've lost that core engagement and for many people that can cause some compression in the low back so you might even feel that in your low back but another issue with that is that because we're not using those core muscles we're not getting the most out of this pose right one of the purposes of this pose is to build strength in the core and the arms and the shoulder joint the muscles around the shoulder joint right so that's one of the situations that happen let's look at what happens when the shoulders dip forward so I also see this again it's kind of like collapsing down we lose the weight of our head and everything comes down and that's basically could signal to just a lack of PEC strength that if those pecs aren't strong we're going to have a tendency to just kind of collapse down there and then lastly the issue with coming and lifting the knuckles up and bringing the weight onto the pinky side of the finger is that's potentially causing compression there in the wrist joint and we have these two bones in our forearm the the ulna and the radius and the ulna wasn't really designed to Bear weed it's a smaller bone but the radius was and so that's the why of why you really want to bring your weight to more of the knuckle side and thumb side of the hand to redistribute the weight now listen all that is easier said than done right like if you can't do it if you can't do chaturanga you can't do chaturanga right so what I want to offer you in this video is ways to modify so that you can maintain that healthy alignment and actually start to build up the strength to do a chaturanga and even push back up so I'm going to go through the five different ways that I would recommend building strength into this pose we will be using different props and so what I recommend is finding where you are at in the progression where you're able to do it but it is a little bit challenging and then working with them in sets and repetitions so meaning doing like eight or ten chaturanga push-ups taking a 30 second break and then doing two more sets and I would recommend doing this about three times a week it won't take you longer than like 10 minutes at a time tops right and this is what I did to build strength in this pose and this is what I recommend students that come to me wanting to build strength in this pose and I can tell you for sure you will get results if you can stick to this kind of discipline and it really won't take up too much of your time so let's get started so the first thing we'll do is we'll take anything elevated quite high so a chair would work a stool would work even the wall would work the problem with the wall is that you can't get the shift forward in order to stack the elbows over the wrist so I would recommend something like this and so we'll basically take a plank here in this position and we'll Rock to the tips of our toes and begin to bend your arms so we're taking that chaturanga push-up here and if you find you lose your form at any point going down that's your stopping point right so there's nothing injurious or harmful about not bending all the way down and bending down and holding yourself here and then pushing back up will help you build strength so this is you know your body your practice just be wherever you're going to be and we're focusing on maintaining good form and Alignment so shifting forward bend your arms and then push back up and then we can even make this a little bit more challenging by doing a slow lower count so we'll count to three two one hold three two one I'm starting to shake and then push up and then you're going down three two one hold three two one and then push up now if that's too much doing those slow lowers you're just going down and back up and down and back up so again working in about building up to eight to ten repetitions three sets about three times a week the next thing we'll do is we'll take two blocks and we'll use the blocks and this would also work with a cushion if you don't have two blocks we'll use the blocks to help we're going to rest our torso on there so one of the blocks will go with your sternum the Bony breastplate and on in your chest and the other one will go around your pubic bone which is also that bony part below your navel so we'll be here and here again a cushion or a long pillow would also work or a bolster and then we want to find that alignment where the wrists are right underneath the elbows and the arm bones are in line with the elbows as well and so if your shoulders are kind of just going forward like this I want you to hug the elbows in and engage the muscles in between your shoulder blades those are your rhomboids and you'll feel your shoulder blades go onto the rib cage now start to fire up your core muscles you can bring your navel a little bit into your spine and we'll take the knees down here so now we don't have to shift forward because we're already in alignment right now so from here what we're going to try to do is lift off of the blocks and if you can only just like barely push yourself up that's fine that's your push-up there and you'll come down and you'll go up and down and then over time your buildings strength to be able to push all the way off the blocks and come back down and these would be your reps so again building up to being able to do eight to ten of these maintaining that alignment keeping the pelvis even though our back is at a diagonal shape and the pelvis is a little bit lower we're still keeping that nice straight line okay let's move on to our third way now I've got what's called an Infinity strap here it's a great yoga strap I'll leave a link in the