Three Ways To Lock In The Benefits of Hot Yoga

"Lock your arms! Lock your leg! Lock your knee or the pose hasn't even started!"

You hear the word "lock" a lot in hot yoga. Here are the many variations you may have heard for 90 minutes straight:

"Squeeze your biceps behind your ears like they're holding your head onto your neck."

"Lock your thigh muscle; pull it up off your kneecap. Look for the dimple above your knee in the mirror."

"Make your standing leg like a tree-trunk, a lamppost. Lock your knee!"

Here's why you will hear that over and over again: 

The lock is the key to getting all the benefits of hot yoga.

I know, it seems illogical; locking sounds hard. It seems like it would take more effort to lock than to relax.

In truth, locking the arms, the legs, squeezing and holding tight on other parts of your body is what puts you into alignment. And when you are aligned, you can hold a yoga pose...forever.

Try it.

Next time you're in Ardha Chandrasana, raise your arms overhead, press your palms together, pull upward from the pointer fingers and squeeze the arms against your ears and yes, get the bend out of the elbows. Both of them!

As you go into the side bend, continue to press your palms - no space at all between them - and keep your arms locked, locked, locked.

Do this the entire pose through Backbend and Pada Hastasana. When the pose is over and you lower your arms, let them go limp and notice if they feel...lighter.

That's the blood rushing evenly through your arms.

Then feel that hot yoga lightness in your chest. Your face. Your entire body.

The blood flow is normalized and you are relaxed. Think of the implications for high blood pressure and heart problems as you regulate your blood flow.

And all you need to do is listen, and lock.

In every hot yoga pose, you must listen for the instructions to lock. The arms, the leg, the knee; press the forehead to the knee, pull the shoulders way down from the ears, press the knee into the armpit.

All these moments of pressing, locking, squeezing - they are what makes or breaks your hot yoga pose.

Here are three main benefits of locking in hot yoga:

1. Locking the arms strenghens the veins.

It's obvious that stretching and locking the arms will strenghten the muscles. But when you lock and stretch the arms, you are also squeezing and compressing the veins; and this makes the circulatory system more effiicient. Flexible veins? Oh yes - even those can get healthier through hot yoga.

2. Locking the thigh muscle protects the knee.

To solidify the standing leg, you don't want to force the knee backwards; this will actually cause the leg to bow back. What you are actually dong, in addition to strengthening the quadricep, is to relieve stress on the delicate knee. So if you have weak knees, the stadning poses will not stress the knees - they help to build the quads and relieve the knee pressure.

3. Locking properly - as you're instructed -  creates the unique hot yoga tourniquet effect.

In hot yoga, holding still in the poses is a vital part of the practice. Why? When you get into the pose correctly (following the teachers instructions to the best of your ability, not pushing yourself into pain), and then hold that pose, you are damming up the blood flow in that area. When the pose is released (correctly), the floodgates are opened and all that healthy blood goes rushing through that area and - you guessed it - a healing results. The more you can lock, the more still your body can hold in the pose - and the greater the tourniquet effect.

Next time hot yoga class, lock and load! Hold still and feel all the benefits of hot yoga coursing through your veins.

Do you have trouble locking in a hot yoga pose? COMMENT HERE to ask for help and I'll teach you the trick to locking out every pose and sealing in the benefits.

Comments

[Rhonda Uretzky]

I get more dirty looks in class over this one instruction - LOCK the ARMS! - than any other LOL! I understand; til you actually do it, you just don't realize how much EASIER it makes the pose! Trust me on this one: the pose will skyrocket once you reach the the sky with your pointer fingers, pressing your palms like you're praying for the end of class...or for me to shut up already. And I WILL - once you lock up!