| right. it's sort of an 'advancement' of the posture.
i have a separate question that folk's may want to weigh in on. it's about "alignment families."
now, in my "alignment family" (krishnamacharya), we keep the knees hip distance apart, the inner thighs moving inward and back (rotating thus), and then we lift up and back.
what i commonly see from the other family (gosh, sivananda, classical, whatever ya want to call it), is that the knees can come apart as far as one wants and it doesn't matter.
now, with sri dharma mittra (sivananda), there are a lot of backbends where the knees are purposefully moving apart, and where the alignment seems to be more like krishnamacharya but then he might say "oh, let that go a bit and see what happens!" and then when i ask him about it after class he says "new directions sometimes help with old alignment." essentially, i see the idea being that by focusing so hard on that alignment, i might have gotten "stuck" so i loosen it a bit (letting knees come apart for example), and then i can get into a part of my back that i might not have before, and then i can get to that point and try to align the knees back to the right place.
does that make any sense?
anyway, that's the way i see it, and to an extent the way i teach it (with my experienced students, not newbies), but i was wondering if the alignment in camel, cobra, bridge upward bow, and related where the knees are generally kept in hip-distance apart alignment, is the same for "your" family, or if it's less relevant, more like dharma, or if the alignment is just different?
anyway yeah. camel is so good. my back is finally opening up again. feels so great! |
| Hey Zoe! So your question is basically about the width of the knees in our backbends? I think we're pretty similar to you guys. For camel, the knees start about 6 to 8 inches apart (i.e. hip width distance). For the second set, we can open them up a little wider to get into a "deeper" backbend, though that really just lets you use your hips more to go back farther. Personally, since I have a bendy lower back already, I keep my knees at 6 inches maximum in camel so that I can get into my upper back more. For bow (which I guess is the one that you call upward bow?), knees are definitely supposed to stay hip width distance apart, but most people's knees (including mine... sadly...) end up spreading out a bit more because it gets you more height. (Tsk tsk.) |
Camel Correction
