Featured Pose: Side Plank Pose (Vasithasana), Classic Version

by Baxter

Side Plank pose (Vasisthasana) is a challenging pose on many levels so it provides a large number of benefits. Because the pose is an arm balance, it creates strength and stability in your arms and shoulders. And because you need to keep your body from sagging toward the earth, the core muscles of the midsection of your body become strong and stable, too. Although the classic pose requires some initial strength and endurance, if you're not ready for the full pose, you can start by practicing the standing version.

This pose also challenges your balance because you are balancing on one hand and, for most of us, the edge of the bottom foot. So it's another balancing pose that you can add to your repertoire to help vary your practice (see The Great Balance Pose of the Week Program).

I prescribe this pose for:

• Building upper body strength
• Building core strength
• Weight-bearing exercise for the wrists in those with OP
• Strengthening the sides of the body/sides of the waist
• Improving balance

Cautions

• Those with wrist pain, tendonitis or carpel tunnel syndrome should approach this pose cautiously, perhaps starting with the forearm version.
• Those with shoulder pain, tendonitis, rotator cuff syndrome or a history of easy dislocation of the shoulder joint should work with on the variation with the wall (see below) until they ready to try the full version.
• Those with untreated hypertension should consider starting with the standing variation, and only holding pose for a few breaths.

Classic Version

1. Start in Downward-Facing Dog pose.

2. Come forward into a modified Plank pose (what I like to call ¾ Plank), with your shoulders just behind the line of your hands so your hips are a bit up in the air.

3. From Plank pose, shift your weight onto your right arm as you tip both your heels to the right until the edges of your feet touch the floor. Bring your left hand onto your left hip. Your hips and chest should turn to face the left side of your practice room.

4. Stack the inner edge of your left foot on top of the outer edge of your right foot.

5. Align your legs, hips, torso and head in one long diagonal line, avoiding the tendency to let your hips sag towards the floor.

6. Bring your left arm up directly above your left shoulder so it aligns with your right arm.

7. At this point, you can either look forward in the direction your heart is pointing to or down at your bottom hand. Although some teachers have you look up at the top hand, I feel this can compromise the upper neck bones, C1 and C2, so I no longer recommend this for most practitioners.

8. Stay in the pose for a few breaths initially, working your way up to 30 to 60 seconds. But save enough energy to come out smoothly in the same sequence of poses you did to come in. 

9. To come out, separate your stacked feet and move into the modified Plank pose you did on the way in. Move from Plank into Downward-Facing Dog pose and then drop into Child’s pose to rest and release your right wrist and hand, which will likely feel tired and taxed. Then repeat on the left side. 

First Variation: Separated Feet 

This variation is identical to the full version except that you do not stack your feet, but keep them both on the floor. This version is easier to balance in then the full version, so it is a good one to try if balance is difficult for you.

1. To come into the pose, cross your lower top leg in front of your lower bottom leg and rest the inner edge of your top leg’s foot on the floor directly in line with your bottom foot. (Some people with more flexible feet and ankles can bring the sole of the front foot or even both feet in this pose.)

2. Stay in the pose for a few breaths initially, working your way up to 30 to 60 seconds. But save enough energy to come out smoothly in the same sequence of poses you did to come in.  

Second Variation: Forearm Side Plank 

In this variation instead of balancing on your hand, you place your entire forearm on the floor. Forearm Plank is great version for any one with wrist or hand issues, as it allows you to reduce the weight being borne by those areas.

1. Start by doing Downward-Facing Dog with your forearms on the floor (see Downward-Facing Dog Variations).

2. To come into Forearm Plank, shift both feet to your right and bring your right forearm 90 degrees to the left, so it is perpendicular to your body. Align your hips, chest, and head as in the full version, bringing your left hand to your left hip.

3. You can either stack the feet as in the classic version or keep them separated as in the first variation above.

4. Press down firmly with your entire right forearm to evenly distribute the work of your forearm rather than dropping entirely onto your joint. Reach your top arm up and position your head as in the classic pose.

5. Stay in the pose for a few breaths initially, working your way up to 30 to 60 seconds. But save enough energy to come out smoothly in the same sequence of poses you did to come in.

6. To come out, separate your stacked feet and smoothly swivel your forearms parallel to come into Forearm Plank pose. Move from Plank into Forearm Downward-Facing Dog pose and then drop into Child’s pose to rest. Then repeat on the left side.

Third Variation: Standing 

Because you stand on the floor in this version, you bear much less weight on your arm, so you can gradually build up the strength needed for the floor version. It also makes the pose accessible to people who can’t get up and down from the floor or people who are recovering from a shoulder injury and need to take things gradually. For those who do practice the floor version, this is actually a nice warm-up for the classic pose. 

See Featured Pose: Side Plank Pose, Standing Version for detailed instructions on how to do this version of the pose.

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Featured Pose: Side Plank Pose, Standing Version

by Nina

We’ve mentioned the “wall version” of Side Plank pose (Vasithasana) several times on this blog (see Featured Sequence: Upper Body Strength), and although we tried to describe the pose as clearly as possible, many people requested photos of the pose because they had a hard time imagining it because they had never seen it before. Now I’m excited to tell you that we finally do have photos of this pose, including two variations.

This version of Side Plank pose is wonderful for starting your journey toward the classic version. Because you stand on the floor, you bear much less weight on your arm, so you can gradually build up the strength needed for the floor version. It also makes the pose accessible to people who can’t get up and down from the floor or people who are recovering from a shoulder injury and need to take things gradually. Finally, Donald Moyer, my teacher, often uses this pose as a warm-up for the classic version.

Instructions:

1. Start by standing with your right side to the wall, close enough so you will be able to easily place the palm of your right hand on the wall.

2. Reach your right arm out to your side, parallel with the floor, and place your palm flat on the wall with your fingers pointing up. Engage your right shoulder blade into your chest wall and down slightly towards your waist. 

3. Step both feet out away from the wall until your right foot is positioned directly under your left shoulder, with your left foot next to your right foot. Don’t be timid about taking this stance—you should be standing at an angle at this point, with some of your weight now being supported by your hand on the wall. Since this is an unusual position to take, use your eyes to check that you really do have your right foot under your left shoulder.

4. Bring your left arm out to the side. This is the first phase of the pose, and if this is strenuous enough for you, you can stop here. Stay for six breaths and work up to longer holds.

5. If your balance is good and you want to try a variation where you bear a little more weight on your hand, bend your left knee and bringing your left foot into Tree pose position.

6. Then bring your left arm up, overhead, and alongside your ear, like the top arm in Extended Side Angle pose. Then reach your left arm and shoulder blade strongly towards the wall. Stay for six breaths and work up to longer holds.

To repeat the pose on the second side, turn around so your left side is facing the wall.

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More on Side Plank Pose and Scoliosis: Double Curves, Explanations, Cautions

by Baxter

Standing Female Nude Seen from the Back by Vincent van Gogh

Since I wrote about the new study on using Side Plank pose (Vasishtansana) to improve scoliosis in my post Friday Q&A: How to Practice Side Plank Pose for Scoliosis, Nina has launched the Side Plank Pose Challenge, encouraging those with simple, one-sided scoliosis to join her in doing Side Plank pose every day, twice on the convex side of the curve (for example, if the scoliosis bows out to the right side, convex is to the right) and once on the concave side (left side, in this example). I’d remind folks that in the study just completed, the variation of the pose done on the convex side includes bowing the convex side of the body up towards the ceiling, away from the floor. Here is what I recommended last Friday:

1. First, do the convex side of Side Plank pose with the hip/side-body arch used in the study.
2. Do the pose on other side, but without the lift, focusing on keeping the two sides of your chest as parallel as possible.
3. Repeat the first side again, with the lift variation used in the study.

Let’s go into a little more detail today to help clear up any confusion you might have on how to approach this at home. The muscles on this convex side of the ribs and waist are lengthened and typically weaker then the concave side, so you will be employing concentric or isotonic muscle contraction to get into the pose. This means that the muscles that are located on the convex side of the torso and abdomen grossly shorten and tighten while you move into the pose, the idea being to strengthen these muscle while affecting the amount of the curve in your spine. Once you are in the pose and holding it for as long as you can (the average in the study was around 1.5 minutes), those muscles are then maintaining your position via muscle contraction known as isometric contraction, meaning the muscle is still actively contracting, but not grossly changing length. This can also contribute to strengthening those weaker, longer muscles on that convex side.

When you are doing the concave side, those side body muscles are already stronger and somewhat shortened compared with the convex side muscles. So we don’t want to encourage them to shorten any more with full concentric contraction as you did on the first side. I suggested above that you come into the more classic alignment of keeping the sides of your torso and waist parallel, which is really mimicking where you would like to see the spinal alignment end up over time. Going even further, I suppose one could argue that allowing the left side of the torso and waist to slightly bow toward the floor, then engaging the left side body muscles in isometric contraction to maintain that position might further the goal of gradually changing the curves of the scoliotic spine. I’d caution those that try this last idea out to make sure to keep the concave-side shoulder and shoulder blade areas strong and avoid sagging around the shoulder area.

If scoliosis—or life itself—were only so simple! As it turns out, some people with scoliosis will have a “double curve,” pictured as the variation on the far right of the illustration Nina shared last week (although the lower curve to the left is kind of subtle). 

In this situation, there will be a primary curve (typically on the right), and a secondary curve, often below the primary curve (typically on the left). Sometimes (could not find data on how often) this second curve is considered “compensatory,” meaning it is the spine and brain’s way of trying to balance out the top curve through the entire length of the spine. The obvious question arises, and several readers asked this: how should I approach the Side Plank pose practice if I have a double curve?

First off, since this condition has not been studied using Side Plank, anything I say about applying this particular pose to double curves is merely conjecture on my part. So keep that in mind! And it would be helpful for you to be evaluated or re-evaluated by your doctor or health care provider to document where your curvature is at the start of any experimentation you might undertake (even those of you joining Nina for her Side Plank Pose Challenge!). (When her chiropractor reviewed her old X-rays this week, Nina learned that what she thought was a right-sided curve was actually a low lumbar, left-sided curve!) And then you could return to have the angle of curve rechecked after some reasonable amount of time practicing Side Plank Pose.

Here are two possible ways to address the double curve:

• Since the secondary, lower curve may be compensatory, focusing on the primary, larger curve could positively affect both curves, bringing the double curve closer to vertical alignment. So you might just do what those with single curve to one side are doing.
• It could also be argued that when doing the Side Plank Pose on the convex side of the primary upper curve, you would accentuate the lift in the mid-ribcage area, and when doing it on the convex side of the lower curve, you would bow at the side-waist area.

Obviously, since no one has yet studied the double curve scientifically, you are on your own here. So go slow, make sure that you get good guidance on doing the pose correctly as to your arm and wrist positions, your bottom shoulder joint activity and the positioning of your feet. From there, make sure that if your double curve was causing pain prior to starting the Side Plank pose practice, that your practicing of the pose does not increase your baseline pain levels. That is an obvious indication to re-evaluate the safety of the pose for your unique scoliosis.

One of our readers and a student of mine, a graduate of the Piedmont Yoga Teacher Training, went so far as to email the author of the scoliosis study, Dr. Fishman, and received quite helpful information back. He acknowledged to her that double curves are more complicated to apply the Side Plank pose prescription to. And he actually offered to send her a yoga Rx if she ever has another spinal X-ray done and can send it to him. Wonderfully generous!

If those of you out there with a double curve decide to give this pose a try to see if it improves the curve of your scoliosis, please report your findings back to us—who knows, you might end up planting the seed for a new study on yoga for scoliosis!

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Take the Side Plank Pose for Scoliosis Challenge!

by Nina

After reading Baxter’s post on Friday (see Friday Q&A: How to Practice Side Plank Pose for Scoliosis?) and talking with my chiropractor, who is also a yoga teacher, I decided to practice Side Plank pose (Vasithasana) every day for six or more weeks. My chiropractor strongly agreed with Baxter that for the long term, practicing Side Plank pose on just one side was not a good idea and said that to maintain the benefits, a person would need to practice indefinitely. So I’ll be doing it exactly as Baxter suggested in his post, twice on my convex side (the left side for me) and once on my concave side (my right side). And I’m hoping that some of you will join me in taking this challenge, and will report back.

Because I was assessed by my chiropractor on Friday, she’ll be able to see what happens to my curve (and the rest of my spine) when I go back in a month, and in the visits that following after that (if I decide to continue the practice). I’ll report back to you with her observations as well as my own. If you want to join me in the challenge and don’t have someone assessing your curve, you could simply report in on any reduction in pain you are experiencing or any other differences you are noticing—or not—on a week-by-week basis.

Obviously since I’m writing this, I have scoliosis. I briefly mentioned it in my post Late-Onset Scoliosis is Common in Older Adults because I had myself had developed late-onset scoliosis. But I didn’t say much more than that. (By the way, if you haven’t read that post and are having back problems—or even hip or leg problems—and have never been tested for scoliosis, please do read it because there is a possibility you might have the condition.) So I’d like to take a few moments to tell you more about it, so you’ll understand why I’m motivated to take on this challenge, and also why I see a chiropractor regularly.

Although my scoliosis is fairly mild and doesn’t cause me back pain (it is a levoscoliosis, in my lumbar spine, rotating to the left), it does cause my right hip to be higher than my left and also causes that hip to rotate in more than the left hip. The result is my legs are imbalanced, with one leg being shorter than the other. If left untreated, I develop leg pain, outer knee pain, and eventually a limp. I have also developed mild arthritis in my right hip as a result of imbalance, which has limited my mobility in my right hip joint (see Goodbye, Lotus Pose).

Although I cannot reverse the scoliosis or my arthritis, I do work on strategies for maintaining my physical health. I keep exercising all my joints through their range of motion to keep them as healthy as possible (I’d like to delay as long as possible the need for a hip replacement). Yoga has been an immense help to me in this because it is so multi-dimensional in the way you are able to move your body in the asanas (see Range of Motion: Yoga's Got it Covered!). I also get regular chiropractic adjustments from a chiropractor who is also a yoga teacher. After an adjustment, my legs are the same length, my leg pain is gone, and I can walk well. The adjustment is only temporary, as the scoliosis is still there and my hip returns to its original imbalanced position over time, but regular adjustments keep me walking well and pain free.

So it was in this context that my chiropractor and I decided together that it would be a great idea for me to practice Side Plank pose, twice on the convex side and one on the concave side, to see what would happen. We’re so curious and excited! Will this practice help reduce my curve and keep my leg and hip in a healthier alignment? And it’s wonderful for me to be able to do this experiment with a health professional I trust—and who also knows a lot about yoga—assessing me through the process, Dr. Claire-Marie Holman. 

So who wants to join me? If you’re interested, please leave a comment on this post stating your intention to practice. Or, you can leave a comment over on our Facebook page  on the post there that links to this one. See Friday Q&A: How to Practice Side Plank Pose for Scoliosis? for details about how to practice the pose. Although I won’t post weekly on the blog about my experiment, I will post and update in another four weeks after my first assessment. However, I will post weekly on Facebook to report in that I have practiced, so if you join me on Facebook, you can report in there weekly as well, and we can all chat in the comments about how the experiment is going. (And, of course, if you do start practicing regularly and Side Plank Pose causes you pain or any bad side effects, please do stop.)

I look forward to hearing from you!

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Side Plank Pose (Vastithasana) Could Reduce Spinal Curves in People with Scoliosis!

by Nina

Side Plank Pose (photo "borrowed" from Wall Street Journal)

I’ve been hearing for some time that a single yoga pose, Side Plank pose (Vasithasana), is particularly beneficial for people with scoliosis (see Friday Q&A: Scoliosis). In my post Late-Onset Scoliosis is Common in Older Adults, I wrote about a New York Times article that said that late-onset scoliosis, a condition I have myself, is actually more prevalent in adults than it is in adolescents. The author of that article, Jane Brody, is not a regular yoga practitioner, but she described a “yoga exercise” that was recommended to her after she found out about her late-onset scoliosis.

"Determined to minimize further shrinkage and to avoid pain and nerve damage, I consulted a physiatrist who, after reviewing X-rays of my misshapen spine, said the muscles on my right side, where the spinal protrusion is, were overdeveloped relative to the left. He prescribed a yoga exercise — a side plank — to strengthen the muscles on the left and exert enough of a tug on my spine to keep it from protruding farther to the right. He suggested that the exercise might even straighten the curve somewhat. And I myself had the same pose, Side Plank pose (Vasithasana) recommended to me by my chiropractor (yes, I have a chiropractor for my scoliosis—I don’t believe that yoga is the answer to everything), so I have incorporated this wonderful strengthening pose into my regular yoga practice."

Now a recent scientific study, which was reported in the Wall Street Journal article Study: Doing the Side Plank Reduced Spinal Curving in Scoliosis Patients, found that for a small group of patients with scoliosis (21 women and four men ages 14 to 85) practicing this one pose resulted in a curve reduction of almost 50 percent among teenage practitioners and 38 percent for adults. Yes, they studied just this single yoga pose!

"In this study, we assess the possible benefits of asymmetrical strengthening of truncal muscles on the convex side of the scoliotic curve through a single yoga pose, the side plank pose, in idiopathic and degenerative scoliosis."

For this particular study, they advised the participants to do the pose on one side only, "with the convexity downward." For information on the original study, see Serial Case Reporting Yoga for Idiopathic and Degenerative Scoliosis.

While this study of Side Plank pose is, like so many other scientific studies of yoga, limited by the small number of participants being studied and the lack of control group, there is no question in our minds that this is an excellent strengthening pose. In his post Friday Q&A: Yoga for Surgically Repaired Scoliosis, Baxter mentioned Side Plank pose as one of the strengthening poses that he recommended for strengthening the muscles at the front, back, and sides of your body. Shari says the pose strengthens the serratus anterior, the obliques, the latisimus, quadratus the lumborum, the gluteus muscles, the fasciae latae, hamstrings, scapula stabilizers, teres minor and major, and then all the paraspinal muscle stabilizers. Wow that’s a lot of muscles! That's why we recommend this pose for anyone who wants to build upper body strength. And I’m betting that strengthening those paraspinal muscles (the muscles all along the spine) is particular beneficial for people with scoliosis.

So today seems like a good day to review our instructions for how to practice this pose. For people who don’t yet have the strength to do the pose on the floor, we provide the option of doing the pose with one hand on the wall. You can practice the wall version regularly until you build up the strength to do the floor version.

Side Plank Pose on the Floor

1. Start by taking Downward-Facing Dog (Adho Mukha Svanasana) pose.

1. From Downward-Facing Dog, swing your shoulders forward almost into Plank position while keeping your hips lifted.

3. Make your right arm stronger by contracting the muscles of the arm to the bone, and tip your heels to the right, bringing the outer edge of your right foot and the inner edge of your left foot to the floor, with your feet slightly apart.

4. Turn your chest away from the floor and bring your left hand onto your left hip. Since this takes a lot of strength, stay just few breaths at first, and gradually add more time with more practice.

5. To come out, swing back into Downward-Facing Dog pose

6.  Unless you are practicing on one side only as in the study, repeat the pose on the second side. Afterward, rest in Child’s pose a few breaths.

Side Plank Pose on the Wall 

1. Start with your right side to the wall. 

2. Reach your right arm out to your side, parallel with the floor, and place your palm on the wall with your fingers pointing up. Engage your right shoulder blade into your chest wall and down slightly towards your right waist.

3. Step both feet out away from the wall, until your right foot is positioned directly under your left shoulder.

4. If your balance is good, try bending your left knee and bringing your left foot into Tree pose (Vrksasana).

5. Take your left arm up and overhead, reaching strongly towards the wall with your left arm and shoulder blade, aligning it like the top arm in Extended Side Angle pose (Utthita Parsvakonasna). 

6. Unless you are practicing on one side only as in the study, repeat on the second side. 

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