10 Tips for Headstand – Part 4
10 Tips for Headstand – Part 1, part 2 and part 3.
There was the briefest moment at the start of writing these articles where I felt I would be hard pressed to come up with 10 quality tips for headstand, but I was willing to give it a go, now at the last two tips I find myself needing to decide which ones will need to go into a follow up article.
The next tip that I have chosen is the one that has the greatest impact to stability and lift in the pose:
Tip No. 9 – Inward Activation.
Inward activation refers to a priniciple of practice; one that my teacher calls scissoring. This is where you draw parts of the body actively and energetically toward each other.
You hear it a lot in yoga classes these days: activate your core muscles. For the majority of people they interpret this as tightening their abdominal muscles and lifting their pelvic floor muscles. These areas are the primary seat of core muscles yet we can support them more thoroughly with the process of scissoring or inward activation.
Once you are finally up in your headstand, maintaining activation in your lower abdominals and pelvic floor muscles will help to keep you relatively stable, yet there are powerful muscles in the legs and buttocks, chest and shoulders that can make the job of maintaining your balance so much easier.
In my classes you will often hear me tell the students to press their inner thighs together. These muscles are often neglected in yoga instructions and yet they are absolutely vital when we get to more advanced postures such as headstand. When we activate the legs inward firmly against each other it has the automatic effect of increasing and magnifying the stabilising effect of the core muscles. In fact when we press the legs firmly against each other as though we are trying to merge the two legs to create one leg, it has the resultant effect of firming the entire body. Try it once you get up into your heastand, really press those legs against each other.
Another issue that arises during headstand is that as we become tired the arms begin to slide away from each other, this results in a loss of height in the pose putting more pressure on the vertebra of the neck. When the arms begin to slide out from under the shoulders then the shoulders also begin to drop toward the ears, eventually no matter how much you tell yourself to lift your shoulders nothing will happen as the arms have become too wide apart to effectively access the action necessary.
So in your headstand you must continue to activate the elbows inward toward each other.
The best place to learn this action for the arms is when you are developing your foundation with the Dolphin Pose Series. If you can scissor the elbows in and maintain them inward during dolphin poses you will find it so much easier to scissor the elbows during your headstand.
This is from the Principles of Practice in the Knoff Yoga System:
Scissoring is an inward (medial) muscular activation to create more strength, stability, support, and lightness. This principle is used in all yoga postures to bring two body parts energetically towards each other … The key focus is the drawing together of the body in the yoga pose to make it energetically lighter and stronger … Scissoring or inward activation is related to Grounding and Rebounding, Co-contraction and the Bandhas in that it helps to lift and stabilize the postures.
As I walk past classes I often see people working with slack legs that are not quite touching and as a result they are very unstable in the pose and more likely to fall. Inward activation of the legs and the arms in headstand will make a profound difference to your stability once you are up in the headstand and therefore make it easier for you to stay in the pose longer with less effort.
Tip No. 10 – Remove doubt and fear.
Perhaps there are valid reasons why you should not be doing headstand. Certainly there are times when headstand is inadvisable, and it is essential that you do your own research in this area. All of these tips have been written with the assumption that it is okay for you to do a headstand, that you are fit and healthy and that you already have a well established yoga practice.
The joy and numerous benefits of headstand should not be missed out, so remove any doubt and fear that is holding you back. Remember also, that being courageous is a far different animal to being foolish.
A swedish proverb says:
Worry gives a small thing a big shadow.
And so it is with headstand; build your strength, do your preparation work, follow these tips and the instructions of your experienced teacher, then the shadow of fear that you may hurt yourself during a headstand will simply disappear. As you practice headstand, your confidence will build until you realise that even though there is risk in the journey what you gain through the practice is far more valuable than what you would have received by staying in the shadows.
Don’t be afraid to go out on a limb. That’s where the fruit is.
~ H. Jackson Browne ~
