Your Body, Your Yoga: Learn Alignment Cues That Are Skillful, Safe, and Best Suited To You
Yoga is big business today, and teacher training programs are booming. Yoga teachers have a thirst for anatomy training, but all books on yoga anatomy focus solely on the muscles. Your Body, Your Yoga goes beyond any prior yoga anatomy book available. It looks not only at the body’s unique anatomical structures and what this means to everyone’s individual range of motion, but also examines the physiological sources of restrictions to movement. Two volumes are provided in this book: Volume 1 raises a new mantra to be used in every yoga posture: What Stops Me? The answers presented run through a spectrum, beginning with a variety of tensile resistance to three kinds of compressive resistance. Examined is the nature of muscles, fascia, tendons, ligaments, joint capsules, bones and our extracellular matrix and their contribution to mobility. The shape of these structures also defines our individual, ultimate range of movement, which means that not every body can do every yoga posture. The reader will discover where his or her limits lie, which dictates which alignment cues will work best, and which ones should be abandoned. Volume 2 will take these principles and apply them to the lower body, examining the hip joint, the knee, ankle and foot, and will present how your unique variations in these joints will show up in your yoga practice.
Your Body, Your Yoga has over 500 illustrations and photographs. For the technically astute, extensive endnotes are provided, along with a exhaustive index. Technical sidebars (labeled “It’s Complicated) allow a non-technical reader to skip the heavier, more detailed discussions and stick to high-level explanations of the concepts. For yoga teachers, sidebars (labeled “To the Teacher”) are offered to help them bring the concepts into their classes. Other interesting discussions that could disrupt the normal narrative flow are also put into sidebars (labeled “It’s Important), which everyone is invited to read.
This juxtaposition of hard anatomic facts and a "trust your sensations" approach may appear contradictory, but it actually makes full sense. For me personally, it made my attitude towards my yoga a little more relaxed (without taking away a "healthy" ambition). Highly recommended!
It is a more study type of book. But dont be turned off of that, because it breaks every information down, very easy and understandable. Highly recommend.
also for deepening your own practise and also get new ways to see thinks for others, to help guieding them better.
nevertheless, I love this book, it should be read by EVERY teacher, to understand that we can't force someone to do an asana on a UNIQUE way. Every body is different and this book explains it in a magnific way!
Highly recommand it!
Very important for regular practitioners and teachers to understand more what is a good yoga practice ( not just looks good)and also safe for your own body!
Trust me, you need this book!
And you also need “Your Spine Your Yoga”.
Bernie’s books are required reading in many of my Yoga Training Prograns, and we are all truly lucky to have this resource!!!
I cannot recommend this book enough!
In the wake of this understanding, a new paradigm of Functional Alignment has emerged, soon - hopefully - to obviate the pernicious legacy of Aesthetic Alignment. Functional Alignment is based on the principle of aligning the body in a way that is functionally optimal to the unique conditions of the individual. Aesthetic Alignment is based on the principle of organizing the body in ways that are aesthetically pleasing to the eye (right angles, parallel lines).
Bernie Clark's book, "Your Body, Your Yoga," is the proverbial Bible of this new movement, and the full-throated culmination of Grilley's pioneering work. Clark details in systematic exactitude how and why physical variation will influence how somebody will be able to do or NOT do a particular asana in a given way.
But yogis be warned: inevitably, learning and applying the information contained within this book will require you to question and, likely, unlearn much of what you were taught during your previous yoga training. This will not be comfortable. The struggle to integrate the insights of this book will not be easy. Cherished teaching cues will be exposed for the imperfect approximations that they are. But the rewards are equally rich.
Once integrated, you will be able to practice and teach in a significantly more sophisticated and nuanced way. And as a teacher you will become less an authority on what the student should LOOK LIKE while doing yoga and more of a collaborative facilitator, coaching your students to make wiser choices for themselves with regards to what alignment considerations make most sense.
In my Yin Yoga teacher trainings, "Your Body, Your Yoga" is the core text for unlocking the complexity of human variation. Thank you, Bernie Clark, for your work and the brilliant clarity by which you convey it.
While Bernie does a fantastic job of keeping the material readable, it's very dense. I think this book would be a bit over the head of a lot of average yoga practitioners who don't already have an inner body geek. But that shouldn't stop anyone serious about practicing for life to give it a go. I can't wait until the other volumes arrive.
Lisa Jang, Yin Yoga Practitioner and Teacher Faculty at The Yoga Company, San Ramon, CA and Just Breathe {Yoga} Rivermark, Santa Clara, CA
Bernie Clark has a way of describing the facts of anatomy, which are rarely cut and dry, without inventing a host of new vocabulary that prevents the reader from cross-referencing or additional reading. He draws together many different traditions and has quite clearly outlined what I think is most essential for new teachers and practitioners to understand about their bodies. I highly recommend any yogi and every yoga instructor read this book.
Daniel Clement - Director of Training, Open Source Yoga.