Feet Together Versus Feet Apart in Bow Pose: Here’s What Changes

Transcript of: Feet together versus feet apart in bow pose

Hey everybody, welcome to this month’s question of the month. We’re doing a redux. This month we’re revisiting lifting up with the feet together versus the feet apart in bow pose.

The Question:

Last month, Kat Ford sent in a question. She was asking about why she can’t lift up and keep the feet together in dhanurasana, or bow pose. This month, she sent a follow-up video so we can further explore why she might be experiencing what she described in her previous question.

The Answer:

My answer to Kat’s question last month about the feet together in bow pose came back to the hip flexors. Now, the reason it always comes back to the hip flexors for me is because of the main patterns—and this is how I wrote Functional Anatomy of Yoga, this thing. In the back of that book I go through the repeating patterns. There are always exceptions; there’s always mixtures of them, whatever, but one of those main patterns is backbending.

Backbending shares common patterns

What is similar between all backbends? You could ask that in terms of it occurring, how to do them, or you could ask that in terms of what often restricts it. The other way of looking at it is when you see all of the compensations that we see, or lack of movement in one place versus another along the long chain of a backbend, like the feet turn out, the knees go wide. All of these little compensations often have their roots in a single place, for backbends anyway. And again, there are always exceptions.

Rectus femoris, first source of restriction in backbends

That place where compensations have their root is the hip flexors, and one in particular, rectus femoris, is my operating theory. So it doesn’t mean you don’t pay attention to all those little things that are going on. It just means that they’re more of an expression of the underlying cause than they are a cause by themselves. A lot of teachers treat them as problems by themselves without seeing the larger picture. But the way I teach is through seeing these common patterns. I just finished an advanced training. That’s exactly what we talked about. How do you get back to seeing what really matters or the why behind all of these little things?

What happens with feet together in bow pose?

So what we’re going to do is we’re going to watch Kat do her first dhanurasana, bow pose, and this one is with feet together. And as she starts to lift up, what I want you to notice is, as her feet and knees are closer together, there’s not a lot of movement at the hip joint itself. I mean, her back bends a little bit, right? But at the end of the day, what’s happening here is—when the hip flexors are tight, they block the movement at the hip joint from going into a backbend.

So let’s look at it in terms of purely posterior chain and anterior chain working against each other. So that’s here in shalabhasana. So if you look at shalabhasana, you know, it’s harder to tell. Nobody’s hip—well, I shouldn’t say that—some people have legs that will lift high at the hip joint. But if you look at Kat’s hip joint, it’s relatively flat there. It almost looks like there’s a bit of an anterior tilt there. Okay? So that is pure posterior chain versus anterior chain.

What happens with feet wide in bow pose?

But let’s look and see what happens when she puts her feet wide. So watch what happens now. So here she is doing bow pose with her feet apart, knees apart, and you can see automatically there’s a little bit more room in the front of the hip joint. So the femurs lift higher because they’re not blocked by the hip flexors in the front.

And what you also see is that allows for more leverage from the feet pressing into the hands—which is part of the dynamics of a pose like dhanurasana, or bow pose—that then lifts the pose. And then you can see that the hip flexors were also kind of blocking the movement from coming into her lumbar spine. In her body—and I don’t mean this as a bad thing or a negative thing; it’s just how she’s put together and how her body patterns are—she has a tendency to rely more on her lumbar spine than on her hip flexors.

Going forward, open the hip flexors

In general, we know that what we’d like to do with any type of backbending pose is distribute the bend as far and wide in the entire chain as possible. And so, if I were going to suggest anything to Kat—it’s not that anything needs to be fixed per se—but I’d suggest more time spent on opening the hip flexors. It is the way to go to start balancing this out so that her knees and feet come closer together in bow pose, if that’s something she really wants to do.

It’s still going to allow for more movement at the front of that hip joint. All right? And ideally, it will also take some of the movement out of her lumbar and distribute it through the hip joint as well. All right? Thank you, Kat, for sending in follow-up videos. It’s so meaningful to me and hopefully everybody else to get to see what it is I was actually talking about in theory.

All right. If you’ve got a question, you know what to do. Go to yogaanatomy.com/myquestion.