Knowing Anatomy Benefits Yoga Practice (or “context FTW in day to day life”)

published on LinkedIn on 2023-09-29 at https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/knowing-anatomy-benefits-yoga-practice-context-ftw-day-barrett-smith

content warning: this gets kind of warm-and-fuzzy, but I think you’ll see how it ties back to worklife by the end.

tl;dr for those averse to warm-and-fuzzy: it’s all about context

As a necessary bit of oversharing to set the stage here, I’ve pretty much never been able to touch my toes. As far back as highschool, my hamstrings have always been too tight to allow that much flexibility. So, some years ago, I was taking a yoga class and, as you can imagine, I groaned through every round of downward dog. I just hated that posture. And to make it worse, the instructor, a very nice, older, freakishly flexible woman, kept telling me to “lift [my] kneecaps” and “activate [my] quads.” That didn’t make a bit of sense to me and I just kind of respefully ignored her and focused on getting through until we could move on the next posture.

It took me several weeks before I connected the content of some old anatomy classes I had taken just after undergrad with the exercise we were doing. When I made the connection, though, the instructor’s guidance finally made sense: Muscles work in antagonist pairs. That is, for every group of muscles that moves a joint in one direction, there’s another group that moves it in the other direction. Those competing mucles groups can’t really both contract at the same time. So when one group contracts, it’s competing group must relax.

As shown in the image below (which I don’t control but I believe was taken from Yoga Anatomy by Leslie Kaminof), in downward dog, the hamstrings are stretched. The hamstrings’ antagonist group is the quadriceps. So by telling me to activate (i.e., constrict) my quads, the instructor was telling me how to trick my hamstrings into further loosening.

As a secondary benefit of making that connection, I found that, by being able to picture the muscles being stretched, I was better able to follow some of the mental tricks the instructor talked about, like “breathing into” the stretch.

What that connection gave me was context, or, as General Gus Perna described (discussed in a post I made yesterday), a way to “see” myself and have operational awareness of what my body was doing in that posture. Having that context and knowing the purpose of the stretch, I was then in a position (no pun intended) to be able to make informed decisions about how to respond to achieve the purpose which, in this case, meant making little changes to the position of my feet and things in order to make the stretch more effective (and tolerable) for me.

This understanding also leads me back to the worklife importance of context (and, as leaders, making sure our teams have context) to enable good decision making. It’s an intra-personal exhibition of the need which also exists in inter-personal life.