How can you Improve Your Posture with Gentle Yoga?

The Mountain Pose or Tadasana

Mountain Pose or Tadasana is one of the great foundation postures to be found in all yoga practices and it serves mainly as a tool to set you up for all the subsequent postures and also to improve your posture. It works to align your skeleton and to bring it back to a neutral stance.  It is a particularly valuable resource to those who spend a lot of time each day in front of a computer screen or behind a steering wheel.

In addition to improving your posture, Mountain Pose also strengthens your thighs, knees and ankles, it firms the abdomen and the buttocks, it relieves sciatica and it reduces flat feet. The great thing about Tadasana is that you can practice it anywhere, anytime. At the bus stop, in the office, whenever you are waiting in a queue – only you will know you are doing it. Breathe, relax and enjoy!

To learn more about how Gentle Yoga can also help to Relieve Stress, click to our Blog Here

 

Method of Tadasana

1. Stand with the bases of your big toes touching, heels slightly apart (so that your second toes are parallel). Lift and spread your toes and the balls of your feet, then lay them softly down on the floor. Concentrate on spreading the weight of your body evenly across the four corners of your feet.

2. Firm your thigh muscles and lift the knee caps slightly, without hardening your lower belly. Lift the inner ankles to strengthen the inner arches, then imagine a line of energy all the way up along your inner thighs to your groins, and from there through the core of your torso, neck, and head, and out through the crown of your head. Turn the upper thighs slightly inward. Lengthen your tailbone toward the floor and lift the pubis toward the navel.

3. Press your shoulder blades into your back, then widen them across and release them down your back. Without pushing your lower front ribs forward, lift the top of your sternum straight toward the ceiling. Widen your collarbones. Hang your arms beside the torso.

4. Balance the crown of your head directly over the center of your pelvis, with the underside of your chin parallel to the floor, throat soft. Soften your eyes. Hold the posture for five nice long elongated breaths in and out through your nose.