Yoga Poses: Warrior

Let me introduce you warrior pose in yoga. In Sanskrit, it is called virabhadrasana.

Sometimes teachers like to shorten this and just say vira, virabhadrasana, the warrior.

How wide should your legs be when your legs are apart in this pose? We have two poses Warrior One the Warrior Two.

There are always variations in yoga. If you're standing this way, and you take your arms to the sides, level of your shoulders. Now, imagine a straight line from your wrists, all the way down to the floor. That's roughly where you want your ankles to be.

Warrior One:

Let's do Warrior One. Together, facing the front, hands to your heart center, inhale your right leg up, and exhale, take a giant step to the back. The right foot is at 45 degrees, hips facing the front. Bend your left knee and lift my arms up.

Try to tuck your tailbone down facing down towards the floor. breathing in, breathing out. And after five long breaths, hands to the heart center, and step back to the front. That's warrior one.

Warrior two:

Now warrior two, you come from warrior one. And it's almost the same thing. Inhale, exhale, and step to the back. Now the only difference is that you open your hips out to the side. Now, straight line from your heel to the middle of the back foot. Now the foot here doesn't have to be at 45 degrees because your hips are facing the side now to place it at 90 degrees.

Okay, so what you don't want to do is turn towards the toe edge, you press two-foot, it's really flat

down on the floor, almost pressure on the outside edge of the foot. Bend your left knee so that roughly the thigh is parallel to the floor.

Lift arms to the sides, look to the left, and breathe. After five breaths you can come back and step to the front or two steps.

let's do some instructions. This time, just a little bit of instruction as if you are teaching the class. Inhale your right knee up. Exhale, step all the way to the back and open your hips out to the sides. Lift your arms up by the level of your shoulders, and look through your left fingertips. Keep your core strong spine tall and long and breathe. hands together turn to the front to your toes and step to the front.

Alright, so let's do some notes for warrior one, and warrior two. Now it's a bit tricky sometimes. Especially if you have your heel in line with the middle of the back foot to then turn your hip to the front, it starts to now activate some ligaments on the knee.

So to avoid that issue, because as you know, most of the issues in yoga would be knees and lower back. You can instead make the alignment of the heel, front heel to back heel. So move a bit to the side and turn. And again the back for 45 degrees. And now your hip can face front and don't stick your tailbone out. Point your tailbone down to the floor with the left knee. Here's your warrior one. You can even do evil arms and can bend back. You can place your hands and trap your elbows. That's really good for opening the shoulders. You can also do Namaskar mudra behind your back.

You can interlace your fingers press the palms together, bend back, exhale, and fold forward. Coming up, you can come out of here through into downward dog, as well.

Here is another thing that you can do. And that simply is to lift the back heel. And that gives you even more leverage to keep your hips facing the front side. To strengthen the thigh muscle, and you're not twisting the knee at all, this sometimes is a little bit more unbalanced for others, because the whole foot is not down. Keep the leg straight, As if you're pressing that back heel, towards the back of the room.

So you've got some variations there. For Warrior One. The first one is to have the heel in like the front heel and, the back here.

The next variation is to actually lift the heel, So I want to show you something about the hip and the knees in order to position them. So this time, I've got my mat facing you, with my right leg up, step into the back, and open my hip out to the side.

So ideally, you want your hip not to find in the back, not tucked in, just the tailbone pointing down towards the floor. So enough so that you can feel your core muscles working. But enough that you can breathe as well.

Now, the knee is pointing out to the side. So in this case, It's parallel to the length of the mat. Some students do it wrong like their knee is pointing in. And then if you come and try to move the knee out to the side, what happens is the hip starts to face almost to the front or diagonal. Now, what that means is, sometimes there's not enough opening on the hips. So to check, let's see, if you're sitting down and you do the butterfly posture, sometimes you see students doing this, so they're not very open yet on this region.

That could be because of not enough yoga practice, so they can still improve on it. But sometimes even after a long time of year with practice one year, two years, they're still at this position, which might mean that it's bones that are now stopping them from opening up to this capacity. So when you can open your hips up, then naturally, you can also take the knee up to the side, parallel to the side of the map, without having to take the hip with it.

So there's no right or wrong. Everybody does yoga postures in different ways because we have different anatomical structures, the same variations with the arms work.

For warrior two, you can have Eagle arms. You can also this section yet different poses to reach to the back. When you're doing that. Don't press down with your right hand just leave it just gracefully down. It's to avoid injuring the knee. So I hope you enjoy your warrior one and your Warrior Two congratulations on learning it.