TheHotYogaDoctor

I have only been doing Moksha Hot Yoga for 2 weeks now, and I am ABSOLUTELY loving everything about it - but I am wondering about my hips…  Is it possibly that my hips are just not capable of becoming as flexible as necessary to do certain poses?  I’m particularly thinking of tree pose - my hips are so tight - I can place the sole of my foot on my calf but that’s as far as I can go, and I’ve seen really no improvement over the last few weeks - I’ve tried pressing my knee out so that my hips will loosen, but it just doesn’t work…  I have a lot of tightness in my glute (on the right especially), and in my lower back area, and I see a physiotherapist who has given me exercices to work on my core and pernium, but is it possible that I’m just never going to have the kind of flexibility I want in my hips?  P.S. I have been doing hot yoga 4 times per week…

Hi Tani-Sue

I believe that you have the potential to be much more flexible. Robert (husband and webmaster!) used to offer this analogy. The frequency of your yoga practice is like spreading butter from the fridge. The more often you take the butter from the fridge the more spreadable it becomes, the less time it spends in the cold getting hard again. So going to yoga as often as you can, can only make you more supple and flexible. You get that grease and oil change that makes your movements more easy, more open.

There are specific poses that are great hip openers. Your teachers MAY know some that you can use. I have suggested in a number of posts to many readers to practice some long duration poses where you enter and stay in poses for a number of minutes at a time. After a Hot Yoga class is the best time to practice these because your body is already so warm and surrenders more, resists less. If you have the opportunity to stay after class for 10 or so minutes and just simply choose a couple hip openers for each side and stay in the 2-3 minutes each then this can make a difference to you. Maybe (like a lot of Hot Yoga studios) your studio offers yin yoga classes or specific hip opening classes.

Namaste
Gabrielle