The Great Balance Pose of the Week Program

by Baxter

For those of you who haven’t already heard, last week I launched a new weekly video series entitled “Baxter’s Weekly Yoga Balance Pose,” which I am very excited about. (To stay in touch with me and my yoga adventures, like Baxter Bell Yoga  on Facebook.) This project got started around the end of December, when I found myself “inventing” new balance poses for myself in my home practice. I was so enjoying the challenge of these new poses that I immediately started sharing them with my local classes. Then, right after the first of the year, I surprisingly made a promise to myself and my students: I would create a new balance pose for each week of the coming year! Say, what?! Did I really hear myself just say that out loud? Indeed, I had! My enthusiasm only grew after making the proclamation, and soon I was dreaming of sharing these new shapes and practices with a larger audience. So, with my trusty smart phone which I had never seriously videoed anything other than little snippets of travel scenery, I set up a little space in my house and started recording the first couple variations that I had come up with. And, last week, after sharing a little intro video the week before, I posted my first pose, coined The Heisman, on youtube:

And I intend to post a new video of a new balance pose every week for the rest of the year. We will be posting the balance pose of the week every Saturday on this blog and will add the videos one by one to our Balance Pose of the Week page. Alternatively, you subscribe directly to my Baxter Bell Yoga youtube channel or, if you  follow Baxter Bell Yoga on Facebook, you can find a link to the new video there each Wednesday.

But why, you might ask, the sudden interest in “new” balancing poses? After all, doesn’t the modern yoga tradition have a whole bevy of perfectly fine and challenging balancing poses already such as Tree, Warrior 3, and Half Moon, not to mention the arm balances and classic inversions like Headstand? Of course it does. And those are great to work on and master. However, recent scientific reports recommend that you may need to do more than repeat the same static balance poses in order to maintain or improve your balance. And I suppose the idea for these new poses grew out of the recent webinar I did for Yoga U Online LINK on Core Integrity and Balance back in December of 2014. In the course of my research, I came across some intriguing new recommendations from the National Academy of Sports Medicine (NASM) from a 2008 paper Integrated Balance Training.

Before I get to that, I want to at least try to define what I mean by “balance.” We’ve written about balance here many times before and balance in one of the four core skills that YFHA promotes. Balance is a highly integrated and dynamic process that involves multiple neurological pathways to the brain, and requires constant feedback from specialized nerves cells called “mechanoreceptors” to the brain. In yoga, balance is required for both stationary positions, like Tree pose, as well as dynamic movements, such as Sun Salutations. 

Proprioception (something we have talked about before on YFHA) is the cumulative neural input to the central nervous system from all mechanoreceptors that sense position and limb movement. It turns out that a proprioceptively enriched environment is fundamental to optimum performance and balance. And the getting into, staying in, and exiting from yoga poses, can constitute part of an “enriched” environment. But it may not be enough, especially if it is always done the same way. One of the training techniques the NASM recommended is moving from stable to unstable poses or surfaces (ever try Tree outside in a field?), or from familiar movement patterns to unfamiliar, novel, and new patterns of static held positions and dynamic positions. This idea comes from something called “controlled instability.” According to NASM: 

“the main goal of balance training is to continually increase your client’s awareness of his or her balance threshold or limits of stability by creating controlled instability.” 

and

“Integrated (balance) training should constantly stress an individual’s limits of stability (balance threshold). An individual’s limits of stability are the distance outside of his or her base of support he or she can go without losing control of the center of gravity.” 

I translate that technical definition to mean that you need to change things up regularly in a thoughtful way when it comes to your balance poses. This controlled instability might come in the form of changing one aspect of a familiar balance pose, like an upcoming variation of Tree pose I am calling Cypress pose, or creating a new pose that mimics real life activities, such as Heisman pose from last week. 

With that background info in mind, I hope you will tune in each week to see what I have cooked up and give the new poses a try. Always feel free to set up near a wall when a pose looks challenging to you, so you can use the wall to assist in playing with your balance. 

Note on video quality: I am on a steep learning curve, and will be getting better with each week, so hang in there if the picture or audio is not quite up to your standards.

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