What Muscles Are Working In Warrior Two?

Transcript of: What muscles are working in warrior two

Your hamstrings are burning in warrior two, and you think something’s wrong. It’s not. Vanessa asked me this month about the muscles working in warrior two. She’s a former dancer with stronger quads, and she’s feeling the burn in her hamstrings instead of her quads in warrior two. She even wondered if reverse triangle was designed to release the hamstrings after all that work. Anyway, she wanted to know, is something off? Should she be fixing this in some way?

Strength versus leverage

So first, let me clarify something. Vanessa referenced my book and said, there’s a lot of strength required from your quads in warrior two. I’m adding emphasis. I appreciate the paraphrase, but the words matter in anatomy. What I actually wrote is that most people feel the quadriceps muscles working hard in the front leg of warrior two, not that the quads require a lot of strength.

Feeling the work and requiring strength are two different things anatomically. And, the reason you feel the quads so much is leverage. When your knee is bent deeply in warrior two, the quadriceps are in a shortened, mechanically disadvantaged kind of position when they cross the knee. Less leverage means the muscles are working harder in warrior two to do the same job. That’s why the quads scream first, or talk to people first, at least for most people. It’s not because they’re doing more work than everything else. It’s because they’re doing their work from a worse position. But here’s what people skip over.

Other muscles working in warrior two

I also wrote in that same section that if you stayed in any warrior pose for about 10 minutes, not only would your quadriceps fatigue, but so would your glutes, and so would your hamstrings. They are also working. Your hamstrings are helping to stabilize that bent knee. Your glutes are involved in holding that hip position.

Why do you feel the quads in warrior two?

You just don’t usually feel them first because the quads hit their threshold earlier, at least for most people. And that’s the key for most people. Vanessa isn’t most people in this case. She has years of dance training, and she brought up a really smart possibility that her quads might be more developed than average. Could that be the case? Absolutely.

Your converging history

This is what I call your converging histories. It’s a concept earlier in the book, that your body type, your training, your background, you know, old injuries, strength patterns, and weakness patterns, all of that converges into the body that you bring to the mat on any given day. All of that shapes where you feel the muscles working in warrior two. If your quads are handling the load more efficiently because of years of dance, they may not hit their fatigue threshold as quickly. That means the hamstrings—which are also working, right—they were always working. Those are the ones that reached their limit first. That’s not dysfunction. That’s just your particular body doing what it does.

So here’s what I told Vanessa and what I’d tell you if you’re experiencing the same thing or a similar scenario. Anyway, trust your experience. You feel it where you feel it. Don’t assume something is wrong just because it’s different from what you expected or what someone else feels. Unless something else shows up, like pain, instability, or something that tells you this is a real problem, you’re fine. Stop looking for something to fix. That’s not specific to you, Vanessa. Sometimes the answer is just that you’re being you, and that’s okay.

Now remember, if you’ve got a question you want me to answer, go to yoganatomy.com/myquestion.