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Greetings,

Welcome to the newest addition to the Hot Yoga Naperville website. We are offering 200 Hour Yoga Teacher training starting this weekend and to kick things off we are publishing short instructional videos each week! We are excited to introduce educational videos, taught by our teachers here. Have you ever wondered how to get into side crow, or do a head stand? Or, what you should do to prepare for backbends, or what you can do for tight hamstrings? Those are just some of the videos we have for you this month. If you have certain poses or areas you would like shared, please e-mail your comments or ideas, we would love to hear what you have to say.

Thanks for watching!

 

“VIDEO TRANSCRIPT”

Hi I’m Julie, and we’re going to work into an arm balance called side crow. It requires an amount of strength. You need to have a good solid chaturanga. So make sure that that’s in your tool belt before you begin. It also requires a deep twist. So we’re going to warm up with a twist. Coming on to your knees, tuck your toes under. And lift your knees up off the floor. Pulling your knees together to the midline. And then bring your hands to your heart. And see if you can lean your shoulders here right on top of the hips. Engaging your low belly in. Stretching your right hand off to the right side. Lining your fingertips up with your right hip. Reach your left arm up and stretch all the way out through your left hand. Let your left hip drop a little bit lower down to the floor  and open up really big through the left side. And now with the space that we’ve created, we’re going to sweep the left arm across the outside of the right thigh. Try to keep your knees side by side.

left knee is going to want to shift forward. We want to keep the knees together. Press the palms together here. Prayer twist. So if this feels really difficult, you just want to continue to work on your twist. To work at opening up the body deep enough to come into the arm balance. If you feel ok here, we can plant the left palm down right to the outside of the knee. Bring your right palm right to the outside of the right hip. Keep squeezing the thighs in towards one another as you lean forward. Resting your outer right leg on your arm. So you’re using both arms like a shelf here. Look forward. Start to bend your elbows straight back. Think of chaturanga here with your arms.

As you move forward your feet might lift up and you’re going to squeeze the belly in. Pull your big toes together. You want to think of making one leg out of two. It makes you feel lighter. Lowering back down on to the floor. Variation two of how you can work into this pose requires less of a twist, more strength. So we’re going to come in the exact same way. Making that space here. Stretching out through the left arm and coming again into the prayer twist. We’ll wrap the left upper arm to the outside of the right thigh. Palms together. Left knee back. And now left palm is going to come down. This time the fingertips will face the same direction as the toes. Planting your right arm. Shoulder width distance apart. Away from the left. Okay so now we’re facing forward towards the left edge of our mat. We’re going to lift the hips a little bit higher bend the elbows straight back. Just balancing on the left arm. So this right elbow is completely free. Hug your elbows towards one another and back. Lift the feet up. Pull the legs together. Make one leg. Keep the heart forward. So you’re not tipping down. You want to lift up and forward. Feet come back down on to the floor. And then go ahead and take a break. Just release the knees.

I always like to stretch out a little bit. Interlace the fingers and just open up through your heart. Okay and then we’ll repeat the same thing on the other side. So step one is just to get comfortable with chaturanga. Step two is to work into that twist. When you’re deep enough in the twist we combine them both together to work into side crow.

Thanks for watching.

Namaste.