How To Have Good Posture In Hatha Yoga Video

Hatha yoga can help you realign your posture even after years of bad habits. Learn how to have good posture in Hatha yoga in this fitness video.

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Realign using Mountain Pose
Keep feet hip-width apart
Stretch to feel taller

About this Author

Cindy Mastry has practiced yoga since the age of eight, and also has a background in Jazz and Ballet. Active in the fitness industry for nearly twenty years, she teaches aerobics, kickboxing, and yoga at many fitness centers in the Tampa Bay area. Cindy trained with 84 year-old Master Yogi Monk, Baba Hari Dass at the Mt. Madonna Center in California and owns/operates "Yoga Etc Studio" in St. Petersburg, Florida. Cindy teaches yoga to people of all ages and experience levels and at very competitive rates.

CINDY MASTRY: Namaste. Proper posture is so important in any style of yoga. We spent so much of our days hunched over a computer, rounded over a steering wheel, rounded over something we're working on that we end up walking around like this and what happens we start having back trouble, all kinds of stuff. So we need to realign and find proper posture. So Faith is going to demonstrate mountain pose which is really the way in yoga that we align before we come into other postures. So first starting with the feet, we're going to make sure that our feet are hip width's distance apart. A good way to do that is you can take two fists together and place them in between your feet and then snug your feet up against those fists. Yup that gives you just about hip width apart. You're going to internally rotate your thighs, that means you squeeze the muscles into the bone and internally rotate them just a little bit. Good. Widen out the sacrum. Draw your bellybutton in. Lengthen up through your side bodies. Lift through your heart, roll the shoulders slightly down, and you want to bring those shoulders down in a "V". So it feels like they're pushing together down in the bottom of that "V". You're going to lift through the back of the head just slightly, and lengthen right up to the crown of the head. So you're finding length, you're actually becoming taller. Good. So you find you might grow an inch if you just stand properly rather than rounding forward. You needed to listen to your mother and stand up nice and tall. But it's never too late, we can work on this. So if you are aware of your postural alignment, know if you've got some sort of body imbalance, maybe you play a lot of tennis, maybe you play a lot of golf, that's going to throw your body out of balance, so realign yourself. And then, as you work through your poses, see if you can find the mountain pose with your shoulder girdle right over your hip girdle, the hip girdle right over your knees, your knees right over your ankles. In any pose that you do, that's the alignment you're looking for, for proper posture.

How to Have Good Posture in Hatha Yoga Video

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