Yoga Anatomy Recap

We had a great turnout for today’s Yoga Anatomy: Neck & Shoulders workshop – 32 participants in all!

In a workshop like this one, so much of the success hinges on the participants. And really we had a very engaging team today. That made everything go well.

Basically the aim today was to present a comprehensive view of the shoulder & neck by employing the alignment principles of classical yoga and the anatomical precision of physical therapy. Shawn (Dr. Shawn O’Neill) did an excellent job of giving us insight into our poses as well as offering strength and conditioning exercises to prepare us for our practice and managing life.

Along the way we covered a number of topics including seated posture, alignment of the cervical spine, neck exercises, thoracic extension, the ins and outs of the rotator cuff, compression and impingement, range of motion, how to maximize shoulder strength and much, much more.

Plus it was all filmed – now the trick is to figure out how to best present this workshop in a video format. That is the next step as we now have two filmed Yoga Anatomy seminars.

Really – thanks so much to all for coming out and thanks so much to Shawn for his wealth of information and practical knowledge. And yes, the videography team did an A+ job as usual.

Here are some of the comments we received from the attendees in reply to the query, “The best part of the seminar was…”:

– “learning how I can combine this information about yoga anatomy with my yoga poses, so I can keep my shoulders strong and healthy.”

– “the professional knowledge and making it easy to apply to your own situation.”

– “explanations of problem/issue with suggestions for resolving, i.e. “this is why it hurts, this exercise will help that”.”

– “the neck demo and why the neck hurts due to poor posture.”

– “relating therapy to yoga positions.”

– “having both presenters speak to the same pose.”

– “learning to feel the strength center at the base of the shoulder blades.”

Here are further comments we received:

– “I tend to think of my ‘shoulder’ as just the actual joint where the arm meets the collarbone, and it was very helpful today to be reminded of focusing on the muscles near the shoulder blade instead…also to be told that the shoulder is an unstable joint, and to be very aware of setting those shoulder blades before doing any weight bearing actions. I hope I can remember to apply this to plank type poses.”

– “Thank you so much, I would love for you to do another one on other parts of the body [such as] the knees, and the back and hip again.”

Once again, thanks so much to everyone for coming out and making this a dynamic afternoon.