When in position (facing right)

Hello ‘realpro53’

Da da daaaah! HotYogaDoc to the rescue. OK, that was dramatic, but I am going to give you a guaranteed never-to-be-ever-mistaken-again solution. To be clear, your question is interesting because it doesn’t tell me if you’re confused about which hip comes forward when you’re standing in set-up or when you’re entering or in the pose. And therein lies your problem. And it’s not your fault! 🙂

I can bet you go to a studio that recites the class to you (or at least the major proportion of it). The problem with scripted instruction is that people get stuck on the words and saying them according to the script instead of making the words fit the outcome of the pose.

The key to this pose is hip alignment. If your alignment is off in set-up, you’ll be struggling to fix it for the rest of the pose. As you’ve experienced, you find yourself upside down wondering how to move one hip forward instead of the other. There are also some instructions that are technically misleading about weight shifting.

When you turn to the right the teachers tell you to turn the hips to the right 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 times. A mystery why you have to have this little ritual, but so be it.

INSTEAD, turn to the right. Square your hips to the wall that you’re facing right now. Not many times, just the one time. Easy.***see below for important waiver, but for now let’s continue.

Inhale stretch up, shoulders down to keep your neck relaxed, tuck the chin. When your chin is tucked you can do a visual check on your hips. Adjust them right now if they’re not square to the edge of your mat (or wall or reference point).

As you exhale and curl down, your job is to maintain your hips in square. Your hips will tend to go out of alignment because of certain reflexes in the body to do with walking and other function, so to counter that, as you’re descending think these words “back hip forward”. For the right side of this pose your left leg is behind. The left hip would naturally (yes, naturally because of those reflexes) want to move backward, so just kind of ‘cement’ the hips in place and keep the “back hip forward” to prevent it going back. Your chin is down so you can watch what you’re doing. Easy.

Now here’s your ***WAIVER. When you step out to the right and turn on your heels you really must make sure your heels are in alignment both laterally and in the distance you have them apart.

If you have stepped out too widely you will NOT be able to keep your hips square not matter how hard you try. My recommendation for you assuming you’re of regular height is to step out just slightly wider than your mat. NOT 3 feet, as for most people it tends to be just a little bit too wide. For example my left foot will be just to the left of my mat, I start the pose with my right foot right next to it and it’s just on the edge of the mat. Then I step out the right foot to land just to the right of the mat.

There are more things I can say, but we’ll just go with the basics.

You asked about the right side. Now for the left: Easy. Keep the “back hip forward”.

Please come back and tell me how you go. There may be a couple of other things at play here. (Perhaps not!) I would love to hear what happens.

Namaste
Gabrielle 🙂

If it helps you at all to see pictures of everything then take a look at the Pose Gallery on this website or in step-by-step photos for the poses (with descriptions) in Hot Yoga MasterClass. For those that have the book the technique is on pages 157-159 with pages 160-163 illustrating mistakes and showing you how to fix them. For anyone who’s interested here’s the link: Hot Yoga MasterClass manual