Anatomical Breakdown Of Laghu Vajrasana

Laghu vajrasana, or lightning thunderbolt pose, is an interesting and somewhat unusual pose. It’s atypical for many yoga postures in the way we use our body, anatomically. Most often, this pose is known from the Ashtanga intermediate series, however, vinyasa and hatha yoga classes sometimes incorporate this challenging pose as well. In this article, we’ll take a closer look at what’s happening anatomically in laghu vajrasana. We’ll also explore some techniques for breaking this complex posture into more accessible stages.

Aspects of laghu vajrasana

In laghu vajrasana, we set up in a kneeling position on the mat and connect our hands to either our ankles or somewhere on our legs. We then lower ourselves down with control until our head touches the ground and hold there for a few breaths. Finally, we lift back up again without collapsing and without changing our hand position. At first glance, you might want to put laghu vajrasana in the backbending category. Perhaps surprisingly, and despite how it might look, laghu vajrasana is not really a backbend. I consider the primary aspect or pattern we develop in laghu vajrasana to be resisting gravity.

I want to acknowledge that it is possible to make this pose into a backbend. The specific impacts of the pose depend partially on which version of the pose you choose to do. However, I think you gain more from working this pose with the hands on the ankles and cultivating the strength to lower, hold, and lift with control. It encourages us to work with our body in a different way than we work in many other postures, and the strength we gain by working with this pose can support us when we do deeper backbending. The kind of engagement that we train in laghu vajrasana can create a foundation for and balance out the deeper lengthening we do in a deep backbend like the Ashtanga version of kapotasana.

Anatomy of laghu vajrasana

In this pose, the knee joints are flexed, and the hip joints are extended. The action of lowering into the pose is as if you were trying to extend the knee joints against the resistance of the floor. The quadriceps eccentrically contract to lower you to the ground. Remember, eccentric contraction means that the quadriceps are contracting while lengthening. We don’t often use the quadriceps in this way, which is why your quadriceps are probably burning when you resist gravity’s pull to lower yourself to the ground. Isometric contraction occurs when in the state of the pose. To come up, concentric contraction of the quadriceps will extend the knee joint.

In the upper body, the arms are hyperextended at the shoulder joints to reach behind you and grasp your ankles or somewhere along your legs. Remember, when we use the word hyperextension to describe a position, anatomically, it refers to extension at the joint past neutral in anatomical position. It doesn’t refer to the condition of hyperextension, which is something different.

Techniques

Initially, because this is a new way to use our body, laghu vajrasana can be quite challenging for many people. If you can access and maintain the full expression of the pose right away, then you can start there. However, what often happens when we start learning laghu vajrasana is that we drop back, touch our head, then get stuck there and can’t lift back up. It usually takes some time to develop the strength to both hold the pose and lift back up. For that reason, many people can benefit from practicing several variations of the pose and working on it in different ways until they can maintain the full expression of the posture.

There is a benefit to dropping all the way down to touch the head, holding for a few breaths, getting stuck, and then just sitting down and using your hands to push back up. Periodically doing that will tell you how close you are to being able to maintain the full expression of laghu vajrasana. You can alternate that version with a couple of other variations.

Variations

In one variation, you can drop only partway to the ground, stopping where you can still engage your legs and lift back up after a few breaths. You can also place one or more blocks under where your head will touch and drop down only to where you can still hold the pose, and then pop back up. If, for some reason, you believe pausing at the bottom of any of these variations is the issue, you could also do repetitions of lowering and raising yourself while synchronizing that with the breath (exhale down and inhale up).

Working all of these variations can help train the patterns of movement and muscle engagement you need in order to do this pose. If you work with the variations consistently and patiently, over time, you’ll gain the strength to lower all the way to the ground, hold there for a few breaths, and then pop back up without feeling gravity take over.

Deciding where to place the hands

There are also variations of laghu vajrasana that include grasping from behind the knee joint rather than connecting the hands to the ankles. While these versions of the pose are all called laghu vajrasana, the intentions and actions of the pose are a little different. If you grab from behind the knee joint, it will have the effect of keeping your pelvis more forward and closer to your knees. This version is more of a backbend. If you are very bendy in a backbending direction, you can avoid the strength work needed to lift up from the other version by moving the hands to the knees and keeping the pelvis forward. While this version isn’t wrong, it doesn’t train the same actions as the version with hands grasping ankles.

Cautions

If you have knee issues, pay attention to what kind of sensations you experience in your knees in laghu vajrasana. Because the knees are flexed almost to the point of completely closing the knee joints, and you’re strongly engaging the quadriceps, this can create a pull on the knees. If there is an imbalance between the strength of your medial and lateral quadriceps or if you laterally rotate at the hip joints, there can also be more pull on one side of the knee joints than the other. It’s possible for that to put some strain on the knee joints. If you know you experience knee pain or strain sometimes, pay attention in this pose and be cautious as you go in and come out. You can also try placing blocks under where your head will land to reduce the depth of the posture and reduce knee strain.