TheHotYogaDoctor

Hi Gabrielle!! Long time, no yoga!!! I’m on day two of my second attempt at a thirty day challenge. Anyway, had a six month lapse, and have started again, to find, that one of my less challenging poses now hurts me!! In floor bow, I can bend my legs back fine, with the knees together, but then when going into the lift, I get a really sharp pain on the outside of my right knee…when I seperate the knees, it’s not so bad, but still quite uncomfortable. I’ve had an arthroscopy on this knee, and it generally doesn’t give me any grief, and if it does, it doesn’t feel like that anyway. That’s about it, it’s quite a sharp pain, and feels like it’s right in the middle of all the ligaments and bones, right on the edge of the knee. You look like you’ve been awfully busy around here, so any ideas or help will be trully appreciated….I have an uktasana problem too, but I’ll go over into there with that one….I’m really quite dreading that pose….know I shouldn’t have any form of feeling for it, but awkward really is an approapriate common name for it!

Namaste

Hey Peta

Nice to have you back!

I think that for starters I would like you to try to remove the twisting element from the pose. Rather than separating the knees I would like you to try ‘dropping’ the knees back into parallel alignment which means also paying some attention to the hips. When you kick see if you can really break it down so that you kick backward with the bottom half of the leg (from the knee to the toes) and kick upward with the thighs. Breaking down the kick and thinking about it in components may help you to keep you on track. You will more fully understand what is exacerbating the problem. You will also have an idea of how symmetrical your arms are behaving in relation to the leg movement.

And then get back to me and tell me if that works

Namaste
Gabrielle

Hi Peta and Gabrielle, I also have been experiencing pain in my right knee at the “kick up and back”.  I thought that maybe I was putting too much force on my knee.  It seems to me that I am relying on my knee to drive this pose and lift my body off the floor.(I have thin legs and week knees.) So, I decided to try lifting and kicking from my hips and buttocks and lifting with my back and with half of the kick.  I was able to achieve the same result in the pose, but without the pain in my knee and I was able to relax my arms and shoulders.  Am I focusing on the wrong set of muscles and therefore missing out on the benefit of this pose?
Jeanne

Hi Jeanne

The idea in this version of Dhanurasana is that with the legs provide all the energy so that you can let go of your shoulders and allow your upper body to be pulled off the floor.

It is great that you have found a way to take the pressure off your knees and not engage your shoulders and arms. So I would say continue on that route. You can see what it’s like if you can drive your upper legs upward (using quadriceps). It is possible that you are already doing that and you have just changed your focus and used different words to describe the same action.

Make stepwise changes to your technique so you can work out what will keep your knees from hurting. Another movement to add in is the pushing backward of your feet rather than focusing on them going up.

Namaste
Gabrielle

Hi Gabrielle, I also discovered that my feet were not straight which caused my wrists to curve, and a twist in my knees.  (My toes were in and my heels were out.)  By straightening my feet, I was able to alleviate the twist in my knees and the pain subsided. Thank you for your encouragement to go back to the basic set up for the pose, to do it with correct alignment, and more importantly, to be patient.
Jeanne