Monica Villalobos
Movement is essential to perform any daily activity. Your ability to move efficiently requires control of the body’s postural alignment. In other words, you need strong balance to move efficiently. Without balance, everyday tasks like lifting a bag of groceries, climbing stairs, or standing and sitting would be extremely challenging. For endurance athletes, balance helps you run harder, bike longer, and swim stronger. In order to improve your balance, it’s important to understand the types of balance and incorporate balance exercises into your workouts.
In order to improve your balance, it’s important to understand the types of balance and incorporate exercises into your workouts.
Dancer pose
Monica Villalobos
Dancer pose is a beautiful marriage of strength, flexibility, balance, and meditation. It’s like the Asana jackpot, in my mind. It tones and strengthens the leg muscles, stretches and opens the shoulders and chest, improves balance, and focuses the mind.
From building strength and balance while working on the foundation phase to a delicious backbend. After a few sun salutations to build heat, move into a couple of hip openers. When you’re ready and open give it a go with the following five tips in mind:
1. From Tadasana, focus internally and bring your awareness to the four corners of your feet. Find your drishti (one non-moving point you can fix your gaze on).
-Bend your left knee and clasp your left hand around the left ankle.
-Let’s be clear, you don’t have to kick right away. It’s all about balance first. Not flexibility.
-You can stay holding your ankle for 5 deep breaths.
2. Engage the right arm and extend it toward the horizon. (Or keep your arm up, maybe extended if your balance is good enough to hold it, or perhaps keep your hand down holding your knee) Any variation is ok.
3.Kick, kick, and kick some more.
-The stability in this posture comes from the strength of the kick. The harder you kick the more stable you’ll be.
4. Square the hips.
-Try to square the hips and keep your left knee in line with your body. Rather than opening out to the left side.
5. Protect the standing knee.
-It’s easy to hyperextend the standing knee in this posture. Hyper extension occurs when the knee bends past its usual range of motion when straight.
-To prevent this and protect that standing leg, engage the quad and then micro bend the knee on the standing leg.
Dancer pose is a challenging pose, so if you fall out, get back into it. Enjoy it! And as your strength, flexibility, and balance improve, you can start to try different modifications for this gorgeous and graceful posture.
