A yoga strap sold as “6 foot” is 183 cm long and usually 38 mm wide, in cotton webbing, with a metal D-ring or plastic cinch at one end. A bath towel out of your airing cupboard is around 70 × 140 cm. Folded lengthwise into a band, that towel gives you roughly 140 cm […]
The hip drifts forward. That’s the error, and it accounts for most of the complaints about quad stretches — the pinch at the front of the knee, the feeling that nothing much is happening, the suspicion that your thighs simply…
The knock of a kneecap on oak. Then the slow creep — hands walking forward a centimetre at a time in downward dog until the mat has travelled and the front edge is a hand’s width from where it started. Hard floors are honest. They tell you exactly what your mat isn’t doing. Most of […]
Short answer first: neither is better, because they’re not competing for the same job. Holding a position for 45 seconds and rolling pressure along a muscle for 45 seconds feel similar from the outside and do different things to how your body responds. The question gets asked constantly: is foam rolling or stretching better, is […]
Most people rounding forward in a seated figure-four are reaching with the wrong part of the body. The chest drops, the lower back curves, the head gets closer to the shin — and the glute, the thing this was supposed…
In or out as you fold forward. That’s the question almost everyone actually has, and the answer is short: out as you go deeper, in while you hold, and through your nose for both. Everything after this is detail. The trouble is that the detail has been oversold. Somewhere between a studio cue and a […]
Hands on knees at the end of the road, breath coming in big ragged pulls, legs doing that faint hum they do when you stop moving suddenly. That’s the moment the stretching is supposed to happen. It almost never does….
A wall is load-bearing. That’s the entire argument for using one. Everything you do on the floor asks your body to produce the shape and hold it at the same time. A wall takes over the holding. It gives you a flat, immovable plane to press into, hang off, or rest your legs against, so […]
Pigeon first is the mistake. It’s the pose people recognise, the one that looks like it’s doing something, and it’s the one that asks the most of a hip joint that’s been folded into a chair since nine in the…
The notebook wasn’t the problem. Three entries: Monday, Tuesday, a Thursday with a question mark beside it. Then forty blank pages, and the ribbon marker still sitting on page four. Discipline wasn’t the problem either. The entries recorded nothing useful. “Did stretches, 15 min, felt good” tells you nothing on the day you read it […]
