What Knife-Hand Strike Can Tell Us About Hand/Wrist Alignment?

One of the things that we are concerned with in yoga is creating space: space in the flesh body, space in the mind body, space in the emotional body, space for being... It is also taken as a given that the more space, the better.

I am certainly a space enthusiast. I love to spread my toes, for example, and have found that the more I am able to do funny things with my toes, the more ease I find in my hips. The same attitude is largely applied to our hands, regardless of whether we weight-bear on them--as in down dog, handstands, or arm balances--or not, as in warrior 1 or 2 and related poses. We hear over and over again: spread the fingers!

And that's fine, but up to a point. As with anything, yoga is about striking a balance--neither underdoing, nor overdoing. And I think that the finger spreading tends towards the overdoing, especially on the pinky finger side of the hand. What do I mean by that?

Overspreading the pinky/little finger actually creates compression in the outer wrist and enough repetition (i.e. regular yoga practice) can lead to injury in the TFCC (triangular fibrocartilage complex). Say w-hat? Said simply, the wrist is a complex structure, as delicate and exquisite as it can be lethal depending on how you choose to use it. The wrist joint is actually a collection of many bones and joints. Here is a nice visual of the TFCC:

TFCC from the excellent http://classes.kumc.edu/sah/resources/handkines/ligaments/wvsartgroup.htm, showing the major structures in the wrist that can be affected by overspreading the pinky. This is palmar perspective: as if you are looking at someone's palm. The thumb is to the left of the screen, the pinky to the right.

Here is a visual of what I mean by overspreading:

This is my hand. It's as the image above, but the palm is turned down. If I flipped my palm up to face you, the thumb side will be to the left, the little finger to the right.

To me, I've overspread my pinky finger, when it is not lined up with my 5th metacarpal (the outer fleshy part of my hand, also known as the knife edge). So, when I spread my little finger in the this manner, I am actually taking space away from the outer wrist and causing pinching around the articular disc, meniscus homolog, and ulnar collateral ligament; in a sense, the ulna (the forearm bone on the little finger side of the hand) rubs against the triquetrum carpal bone. Here another image to help you locate the triquetrum, where it is labeled:

Triquetrum, shaded in blue from http://classes.kumc.edu/sah/resources/handkines/bone/triquetrum.html. This is palmar perspective: as if you are looking at someone's palm. The thumb is to the left of the screen, the pinky to the right.

How can you know whether you are overspreading the pinky? To me, it's all about awareness and paying attention. With your hand in the air, spread your pinky as much to the side as you can and pay attention to what you feel in your outer wrist but also in the back of your neck and top of the shoulder blade. Do you feel less space in your outer wrist and a tightening in your upper back/neck (I think that would be your levator scapula muscle, quite the villain if you ask me). Also, if your outer wrist is too bunchy and wrinkled in comparison to the rest of your hand/wrist, you are probably overspreading the pinky.

So, what is an optimal spread of the pinky? This is where the knife-hand strike comes in, or more commonly known as the karate chop. (As a caveat, here is an article on why the karate chop is a useful tool to have in your bag of tricks.) In a karate chop hand, the knife edge of the hand and the pinky are lined up in a straight line (as far as anything in the human body is straight), which creates stability along the back line of the arm. We've all seen bricks being shattered with a knife-hand strike.

The pinky is associated with the Deep Back Arm Line, which includes your triceps and rotator cuff muscles. The rotator cuff muscles do contribute to movement of the arm bone, but they have the important function to stabilize the head of the armbone in the shallow socket of the shoulder blade while the armbone is in motion. You can feel this stability simply by taking your arms out to the side but still in the front plane of the body (with the palms facing forward and the hands slightly above shoulder level; the latter helps with releasing your upper traps), so that the knife edge of your hand and your outer forearm are pointing down toward the floor. Experiment with overspreading the pinky towards the floor (so that your outer wrist bends or kinks if you wish) and lining up the pinky with the knife edge of your palm, so that the outer wrist is stable and smooth. Although overspreading the pinky does create engagement, it feels more like gripping and muscles along the arms either overwork or underwork. It's kind of like creating a kink in a hose, the energy stops flowing smoothly. When the pinky lines up with the knife edge of the hand, there is space, but there is also stability, and you can pulse the energy along the deep back arm line: drawing from the pinky through the triceps and into the rotator cuff muscles, as you extend out from the shoulder blades through the pinkies. Further, when the pinky overspreads to the side, it's more likely that the mound of the index finger will have trouble connecting with the floor, which by definition will put pressure on the outer wrist.

Let me know what you think and share your experience. Thanks for reading!

Here are a couple of photos of what is an optimal spread of the pinky for me. Do you notice the difference with the image above? The little finger and the fleshy outer part of my palm are on a nice continuous line.

 

How Are Your Groins Connected to Your Humanity?

"The groins are of great importance for humans because their full extension creates the upright posture unique to our species. In a sense, when we are not balanced and stable through the groins, we're not fully human."

-Arthur Kilmurray

The groins are fascinating territory in the human body. Not technically an anatomical term, the groins are broadly the area in the body where the legs and the torso meet or fold into each other, a juncture where we like to keep our junk. It's an area of great hoarding, a veritable junkyard, a treasure basement to rummage through with glee and fascination.

Anatomically speaking, the groins are broadly described to include the 5 adductor or inner thigh muscles (lower inner groin); the iliopsoas complex (upper inner groin); and the part of the quads (rectus femoris) that acts on the knee (as in straightening it) and the hip (as in flexing it) as well as the sartorius and the tensor fascia latae. To me, the groins can be broadened to include any myofascial structure involved in the articulation or interaction between the leg bones and the pelvis, and therefore, by proxy, the sacrum and the spine. So, for example, the hamstrings can be thought of as the back groin--they cross and act upon the hip and the knee joints and are the antagonists to the quads mentioned above.I would include the glutes and the piriformis too.

Opening and balancing the groins is a lifelong practice, which requires utmost patience, gentle dedication, thoughtful awareness, less teeth grinding, less sitting (or should I say slouching), a willingness to do exactly the opposite of what you think you know or should do, an explorer's mind, to name but a few qualities. I am sure you can add to the list based on your experience. 

What does it mean to have open or balanced groins? According to Kilmurray, a body is open when it allows bodily fluids and energy to flow freely through, in, and out of it. This means that the bones must be centered in relation to each other, so that they can channel the energy of gravity and allow the various bodily systems to function efficiently in conjunction with the force of gravity. This also means that muscles will work optimally without unnecessary tension and the organ body will be supported rather than encumbered or collapsed.

What does this mean in practice? The short answer to this question is that to cultivate balanced and spacious groins we must do the work of separating the legs from the pelvis and differentiating these areas on a psychosomatic level, so that we can quite literally allow for the free flow of information between the legs (our connection to the earth: a fundamental and non-negotiable connection) and the rest of the body; in other words, so that we can be grounded, which is what allows freedom in movement and in self. 

Groins often feel anything but open. They feel bunched up, gummed up, glued, stuck, tight, gripping, sore, bulging, thick, dense, insert appropriate groin descriptor here.

But what does this concretely mean in practice? Below are a few examples of ideas that you can work with in a variety of poses:

• In any pose, think of allowing the very top of the thigh bone, where it feeds into the hip, to settle into the back of the leg/hamstrings. If you try to this muscularly, you will achieve the opposite effect. Think of your hamstrings broadening, like a hammock receiving the thigh bone. It's more about becoming aware of that area and realizing if you are holding any (residual) gripping (for example in the gluteal fold, where the hammies and buttocks meet; also affectionately known as the butthigh or thass area), which might prevent you from releasing the thigh bone into the back of the hip socket. It's not about pressing with the front of the thigh into the back of the thigh, it's about mindful direction. You can do this in constructive rest position (see image below), in lunge (for both legs!), any of the warrior poses, etc.

Constructive Rest Position from http://alexandertechnique.com/constructiverest/

• Partial "supported" squat: You can do this with a chair without arm rests (such as a folding chair). Sit at the edge of the chair, with the thigh bones forming a comfortable V shape: not too wide, not too close together. Track your toes and knees in the trajectory of your thigh bones (and subsequently adjust if there is any discomfort in the knees), have your shins vertical with the floor. From there, take your hands behind you on the chair and lift the pelvis away from the thigh bones, as you let them drop away from the frontal surface of the thighs (see bullet point above). See if you can maintain this sense of separation as you sit back on the chair. From there, with the hands holding the edges of the chair seat and supporting you, you can take the pelvis away from the edge of the chair and slowly and repeatedly squat down towards the floor, becoming aware of the tops of the thighs descending and the pelvis ascending, imagining and feeling tremendous space between the surface of the hip crease and the thigh bone. If you get into it, it can be quite profound. It will also make you realize why "regular" sitting (excuse me, slouching) is so detrimental to our health and well-being: it literally cuts off communication between the lower and upper body.
• In poses like baddha konasana (bound angle) and supta bada konasana (supine bound angle), please stop thinking of your knees getting to the floor. Rather, think (again) of letting the thigh bones move into the backs of the legs in addition to moving them away from each other laterally (you can also think of the inner surface of the pelvic bones—the ilia—expanding and broadening).
• In poses like parsvottonasana (pyramid), parivrtta trikonasana (revolved triangle) and urdhva prasarita ekapadasana (UPEP or standing splits) the inner thighs tend to collapse onto each other. What I find very helpful here, especially in the back (or lifted) leg) is to create space between that side of the pubis and the upper inner thigh.
• This is a fun one and will help you with differentiating your thigh bone from your hip point in any number of poses (for example, vrksasana or tree pose, padangustasana B or extended hand to foot pose, baddha konasana, and the like): from standing, take your hands on your hips, then lift one foot off of the floor and look at the bottom of this foot as if to see if you stepped on gum, while keeping that hip point facing straight ahead and taking care not to hike it up.
• Sitting on tennis balls: the possibilities here are beyond the scope of this post. Everything I learned about tennis balls and how to use them for myofascial release and space creation I learned from the fabulous Megan Davis and Jenny Otto. 

The above just scratches the surface of how you can begin to have a meaningful relationship with your groins. There are a myriad of ways to do that. If you have a specific question, feel free to drop me a line. If you have a tip, I would love to hear it. If this was helpful, spread the word. If you are interested in a topic and would like me to write about it, I would love to hear from you. 

Groinfully yours,

Anna

Downward-Facing Dog Exploratorium

Downward-facing dog is one of those ubiquitous yoga poses, spanning styles, methods, disciplines, and approaches. It is a defining (visual) symbol of contemporary yoga. I am a bit tempted to go on a bit here and talk about down dog as a concept deserving its rightful place in yoga's ever-evolving polysemic lexicon (meaning a vocabulary of words which have many and different meanings depending on the context, courtesy of the always thoughtful and thought provoking Matthew Remski), but I'll confine myself to what usually fascinates me in my practice and that is the alignment of the human flesh in this pose--a pose that is as basic as it is wildly advanced.

In particular, the front end of the pose is where it gets especially interesting: the arms and the hands. Practicing down dog in particular and asana in general requires using your hands and arms and weight-bearing on them. This coupled with contemporary lifestyle habits and patterns is often a recipe for sore wrists, misused shoulders, and jammed necks, to name but a few abominations.

Tom Myers puts it very well when he says that "the arms have to control the finest instrument the world has ever known—the human hand—at one end, and are anchored into the head, neck, upper spine, ribs, low back, hips, sacrum, and even arguably the femurs at their other end." (Myers 2012). In other words, a lot is at stake when we practice down dog or any other pose that derives from it (plank, low pushup, handstand, arm balances, side plank...). Further, "the arms are highly complicated bits of machinery, very handy accoutrements to our body’s repertoire, and amenable to the poetry of bird’s wings and nonverbal haiku" (Ibid.). Whereas the legs lead us to the world and into our environment, our arms and hands bring the world to us.

Tom Myers identifies 4 arm lines, presented very schematically below:

• Deep Front Arm Line connecting pec minor (tight chest, anyone?)-biceps-supinators (radius bone rotators)-thumb muscles
• Superficial Front Arm Line connecting pec major-latissimus-teres major-hand/wrist flexors (undersides of forearm in down dog)-palm surface of the fingers
• Deep Back Arm Line connecting rhomboids-levator (pesky villain)-rotator cuff muscles-triceps-pinky finger muscles
• Superficial Back Arm Line: traps-deltoid-hand/wrist extensors (tops of forearm in down dog)-back/top of the hand

Myers further compares the arms lines as the four aspects of a bird's wing, with the superficial and deep front arm lines being the bottom of the wing and the superficial and deep back arm lines being the top of the wing. In this cute video on How Wings Work, we are told that extending the wing fully creates a smooth surface for flying. We are also told that the bird's first finger allows it to fly slow speed without falling out of the air.

Where am I going with this? What I am trying to say is that the arm lines (especially the front arm lines vs. the back arm lines) need to be balanced for down dog to be an integrated pose rather than overusing the back arm lines at the expense of the front arm lines. The underside of the wrist—where a lot of us collapse in down dog—is called the volar surface of the wrist, which means the hollow of the hand and it is etymologically rooted in the Latin for "fly."

In terms of the lines above, my take is this:

• The Superficial Back Arm Line is the line that tends to overwork and grip in down dog, starting with the upper traps, the deltoids, the tops of the forearms and hands. The one part of this line that is often asleep and needs to be nudged is the mid and lower fibers of the trapezius muscles which have the wonderful function to take the inner edges of your shoulder blades down your back and thus create a lot of freedom at the base of the neck/tops of the shoulders. But we'll get to that in a moment.
• The Superficial Front Arm Line is your flying line: if the undersides of the forearms and palmar surface of the hands engage isometrically (you think of the action but you are not actually doing it), this will keep the tunnel in your carpal tunnel, will give space for the ligaments that maintain the arch of the hand to do their work and also begin to take the outer edge of your shoulder blades up (away from the floor), like bird wings spreading and getting ready to fly (with the help of the lats and the teres major).
  (This is a good place for a caveat: in many yoga classes, students are instructed to take the outer edges of the shoulder blades toward the floor in down dog and wrap them towards the outer armpits with the idea of lifting the inner armpits; what I am describing here disagrees with this instruction. I feel that this "wrap" is what the wonderful Barbara Benagh calls "borrowing" without giving back: like shortening your bottom ribs in parsvokonasana (side angle pose) and bowing out the top to allow your hand to reach the floor or like using the mobile T12-L1 juncture in your spine and pretend that your top chest is open. Further, if you take your blades off your back in this way, how can you then take them down your back?)

As I said above, my take is that the Superficial Back Arm Line tends to overwork in down dog due to tight/overused extensors (the tops of the forearms, i.e. the hairy part of your forearm; these are the muscles that help you gesture stop with your arm and hand, which is the same position as in down dog but in a different spatial orientation if you think about it).

Further, modern humans tend to have weak/underused hand/wrist flexors (the underside of the forearm; these are the muscles that help you make a fist).

To add to all this, very often when we go to yoga class, we are told to take the chest down towards the floor or towards the thighs and to aim to touch the floor with our forehead. (I know, I am maybe exaggerating a bit, but I sometimes think that to make a point, it is sometimes helpful to exaggerate, and no, I am not saying that the chest should not be open in down dog.) This, however, tends to disengage the front arm lines and collapses the whole endeavor towards the floor and you are quite literally subsumed by gravity and stuck to the floor with any number of unpleasantries such as achy wrists or elbows, a pinch in your shoulders around the tops of the deltoids, and a neck that feels heavy and hard like lead. Further, if we go with the bird wing metaphor, you have to lift from below (the front arm lines or bottom of wing) in order to be able to fly.

What about the other two lines:

• The Deep Front Arm Line is your stabilizing/weight-bearing line in the front, in the sense that the thumb connects to the radius (that's the forearm bone on your thumb side), which in turn connects to the humerus (upper arm bone), which connects to the ribcage in the front via the pec minor. The front needs to engage and draw up so that you don't fall.

• The Deep Back Arm Line is your stabilizing line in the back, in the sense that the pinky finger connects to the humerus (via the ulna—that's the forearm bone on your pinky side), which connects to the shoulder blade via the rotator cuff, which connects to the spine and neck via the rhomboids and the levator scapula respectively. 

Further, for your down dog to "fly" out of gravity's lovingly smothering embrace, your wings need to be fully extended and lined up as per the bird wing video above. In a human, lining up your joints helps muscles to work optimally with/against gravity, decreases drag and inefficiency along the myofascial lines of the body, and facilitates the flow of energy between the joints (not to be confused with hyper-extension at the elbow joints though: locking your elbows stops the conversation between your hands and your shoulders for example in the same way that locked knees destabilize your hips because they have no feedback from the feet and the earth beneath them).

How does this all work in asana? Please read this first, reflect on it, and then try it in action.

Have a block handy. Start on hands and knees. Come down onto your forearms and place the block wide-side between your elbows on the floor. Then, position your forearms in such a way that you are not holding the block with the fleshy part of your forearms but really with the bony protrusion at the elbow (which is really the inner rounded end of your upper arm bone, the humerus). If you do this well, your forearms will be parallel with each other, rather than narrower at the wrists. Hips will be over your knees (or a bit behind to keep the torso long), low belly lifting towards the spine, torso long, fingers spread, head/neck neutral so that the back of your neck is not shortened. Press down through your palms to lift your elbows and the block just a couple of inches off of the floor (leave the knees on the floor for the first round and then experiment with lifting the knees off of the floor and pressing back through the hips like you would in down dog). Now, the arm lines, which are cumulative (in the sense that the actions build on each other and don't cancel each other out). 

• First, press down through the thumb pad and index finger knuckles and draw energy up along the inner forearms, the biceps and right where the biceps disappear under the deltoids to create a lift in the inner armpit and stability in your pose. (Deep Front Arm Line for establishing your base and stability from the front/bottom)
• Second, draw up from the entire palmar surface of your hands: the more you spread this action, the better; hopefully, you will feel the undersides of the forearms begin to engage and the arches of the hands begin to emerge and create an energetic lift away from the floor. Remember, the knuckles of the fingers--where what we perceive as fingers meet the palm--are rooted to the floor. The more you direct the weight into the front of the palm, the more space and lift you will create in the bottom of the wrist/carpal tunnel. Now, think of taking the outer edges of your shoulder blades away from the floor and onto your back (Superficial Front Arm Line, or lifting your wings)
• Third, draw energy up into your triceps from the fleshy part of your pinky "finger" (5th metacarpal) while keeping it firmly grounded, and think of plugging/connecting your triceps into/with the muscles connecting your shoulder blade and your arm bone (the rotator cuff). Hopefully, you will feel the bottom tips of the blades start telling you things as a result :). (Deep Back Arm Line for establishing stability from the back/top)
• Finally, think of length and space in the Superficial Back Arm Line (or spreading your wings). Lift your collarbones away from the floor to free the upper traps, then lengthen from the deltoids through the tops of the forearms and fingers, like you are exhaling from under your finger nails. At the same time, think of the inner edges of the blades sliding down your back (or up towards your hips if you are a spatial person) to awaken the mid-low traps. You are still doing 1-3 and holding the block, right? :)

Come down and rest and repeat a couple of more times, progressively straightening the arms in the process, without ever locking your elbows (yes, it can be done even with the block). Can you feel how this is creating more balance between the undersides and the tops of the forearms? One way to gauge if you are on the right track is to bring your attention to your elbows and create an energetic balance between the elbow crease and the elbow point, so that the crease is not overstretched and the point is not digging in. Keep space between the teeth and your tongue relaxed. Then, of course, try this in full down dog, plank, handstand, your choice :).

Questions? Feel free to drop me a line or leave a comment!