Yoga, Health, and Wellness Articles + Recipes

If your hips aren’t happy, odds are you won’t be happy either. In order to stay pain and injury free, you need to keep your hips open and stable. Yoga Sutra 2.46, Sthira Sukham asanam states that the posture should be stable and comfortable. Often, this principle is described as seeking the balance between strength and softness or effort and ease.

These are, hands down, my favorite 15 poses for opening the hips. Creating a balanced, effective hip-opening sequence is simple if you know how the hip muscles are laid out. When you don’t have for a map for their hips, you’re at a higher risk for overstretching your hamstrings and external rotators compared to your hip flexors and adductors. Teachers make this mistake in their sequencing regularly and, as a result, hamstring insertion injuries are one of the most prevalent injuries in modern yoga

For more than a decade, I’ve quivered at the thought of attending a hip-opening workshop. Having played ice hockey and been a skateboarder for more 15 years, my hips were molten lead that no amount of Pigeon Pose could crack open. Now, 20 years in, I’ve chipped away and breathed steadily enough to be halfway comfortable and mobile in these joints.

Yoga has made me curious about my body for more than 20 years. When I feel restriction in my outer hips during Pigeon Pose, I wonder what exactly is holding me back—is it my gluteus maximus, my piriformis and external rotators, my posterior capsule… or my questionable karma? Hey, I’m a Virgo, I don’t like surprises, and teaching yoga is my passion, so I like to understand these things. That’s fair, right?

In this last installment of the Fast & the Flexible series, we have reached the part of the body that brings the majority of people to yoga class, the hips and low back. We will address the glutes as well, but I rarely get a new client who openly complains that their butt hurts, at least not right away.