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When you ask almost anyone what plays a primary factor in coming into arm balance poses, most people will say that balancing on your hands comes with some emotional baggage. Namely, intimidation. Others will name the delicate and disciplined balancing act of finding just the right muscular engagement and body position to defy gravity.
Overcoming your fear and summoning the strength to try again and again are essential to attempting arm balance poses. But what many of us overlook is knowing how to keep your wrists safe despite the massive amount of pressure that results from placing all of your weight on them.
The Anatomy of Your Wrists
Your wrists comprise a small portion of your body but absorb an outsize amount of intensity in arm balancing poses. Despite their tremendous utility, the wrists softer tissues of the wrist comprise mostly ligaments and tendons and retinacula (fascia), not muscles, explains Richelle Ricard, a Portland, Oregon-based yoga teacher and author of The Yoga Engineer’s Manual: The Anatomy and Mechanics of a Sustainable Practice. These tiny networks keep your hand and forearm safely aligned as you go about your day.
Your wrists do share some muscles with your forearms. These allow for hand movements including flexion (down), extension (up), adduction (toward the body), and abduction (away from the body).
However, those muscles aren’t sufficient to support your body weight during arm balances. How that pressure is distributed among the other structures in your wrists is determined entirely by where you place and position your hands, wrists, and forearms and how you engage them. When you adjust their placement, the pressure on your wrists changes—as does your likelihood of strain and overuse injuries.
It’s not just about the placement of your hands but how you engage them. Those carpals that aren’t really well-suited for weight-bearing, so spreading your fingers an adequate amount is essential.
It’s also necessary to have a realistic awareness of your body’s capabilities. This means you may need to adapt the pose as well as your expectations for how you come into it.
How to Prep Your Wrists for Arm Balance Poses
Regularly stretching and strengthening your wrists can help ease your wrists handle the pressure of arm balances. So can following are some foundational practices to engage in as you practice arm balances.
When you take a studio or online yoga class, teachers emphasize incremental wrist strengthening and stretching by taking your wrists through a slow and safe warm-up before placing your full body weight on them in more challenging poses. Don’t underestimate or skip these when you’re practicing at home!
Start with coming to your hands and knees. You’ll commonly hear teachers recommend positioning your hands in different ways than usual to stretch your wrists.
Start by angling your fingers slightly away from the center of the mat, rather than straight ahead, and see how that feels. For a more intense stretch, continue to angle your fingers further outward or pull a 180 and turn them toward your knees. You can also modulate the amount of stretch not just by the angle of your wrists but by leaning back or forward slightly to bring more of your weight into your legs.
Other wrist warm-up poses include:
How to Practice 9 Common Arm Balance Poses and Not Wreck Your Wrists
Here are nine not-so-common arm-balancing poses and insights on how you can safely incorporate them into your practice. In each instance, you want to focus on alignment rather than force.
1. Scale Pose (Tolasana)
As you sit cross-legged or in Lotus Pose, your hands come alongside your sit bones and approximately underneath your shoulders rather than forward or behind them. Also, try to lift yourself straight up rather than lean your chest and upper arms forward.
How to keep your wrists safe: For newbies, it recommends placing yoga block on the lowest level beneath each hand to create some additional leeway between your body and the mat. Then it’s time to lift off. Try it with and without blocks and see what’s more comfortable for you.
With your ankles crossed, press the pinkie toe edges of your feet into the mat. Round the upper spine and lift the pelvic floor to raise your hips. Also, practice lifting one foot at a time first to prevent too much weight being placed on your wrists at once.
2. Firefly Pose (Titibasana)
In Firefly Pose, the foundation that you’re building on is everything, explains Ricard. And that starts not with your hands but your hips.
Before you attempt the arm balance pose, you need enough flexibility in the hips and the hamstrings so you can take your hands wide enough as you set up for Firefly. That sets your hands up for proper alignment, which in turn allows for safe and supportive wrist function.
How to keep your wrists safe: As you reach between your legs, your hands need to land wide enough, with your fingers pointing slightly outward.
When your hands are placed too close together, your elbows tend to jut out and your shoulders aren’t aligned, which means your chest muscles need to compensate as you attempt to support your body weight. Chances are you’ll struggle to find the necessary lift.
3. Shoulder-Pressing Pose (Bhujapidasana)
Much of your ability to come into Shoulder-Pressing Pose lies in your attention to your hand placement. If they’re too close to one another, Ricard explains, there can be pinch points along the thumbs.
You also want to watch out for wrist hyperextension, which happens when the back of your hand is forced toward your forearm at a sharp angle. This angle makes it impossible for your wrist flexors to safely sustain your bodyweight. Experiment a little and learn exactly what hand placement works for you.
How-to keep your wrists safe: Ricard suggests placing your hands so your wrist creases fall just slightly in front of your arms. That lets you derive the maximum amount of strength from your forearms while retaining your balance.
After you find that position, it’s a matter of knowing where else in your body to press to create the necessary muscular engagement.
4. Handstand (Adho Mukha Vrksasana)
Even as adults, we practice Handstand in a way that’s evocative of being a child by being a little more curious and a lot less fearful of failure and falling.
However, that doesn’t mean tossing caution out the window. You can bring a mature discernment to your Handstand practice by deconstructing the pose, being realistic about your limits, and teaching your body how to engage certain muscle groups in the way the pose demands before you flip everything upside-down.
How to keep your wrists safe: Of all the cues that can set your wrists up to be structurally sound in Handstand, Leal prefers telling students to focus on the crease on the front of your wrist when you place your hands on the ground.
But don’t forget about your wrists once they’re in place. It can be challenging when you’re upside down, but come back to what you already know and practice in Down Dog and Plank and press equally through all your fingers and knuckles. It’s basically about building awareness, connection, and strength in and around the wrists.
5. Peacock Pose (Mayurasana)
Ricard points out that in photographs of Peacock, practitioners are very rarely hyperextended in the wrist. Instead, the wrists and forearms form a right angle. The hand placement of the pose, in which your fingers point back toward your knees, helps with this.
For Peacock prep, Ricard recommends practicing Eagle Arms first to stretch the backside of the shoulders and mimic the needed engagement.
How to keep your wrists safe: Place both hands on the ground, fingertips pointing toward your toes. Press into your palms and lean forward, as you try to find your balance point through equal distribution of weight in your hands.
6. Side Crow (Parsva Bakasana)
When learning Side Crow, Ricard advises that when your hands are placed sufficiently wide, the pose will feel more natural and bring you more stability. The flexors of the forearms are at their longest in this position, which means they’re not contracting or at their strongest. What results is your skeletal system playing a larger role in holding you in place through its angles and alignment.
Ricard also suggests placing adequate energy in your palms to help keep your wrists light.
How to keep your wrists safe: Take your hands at least shoulder-distance apart. As you lean your torso forward and twist to the side, keep your elbows aligned over your wrists rather than leaning in front of them.
Similar to entering Firefly pose, it’s important to lean forward slowly and activate your core. The balance point is going to reveal itself if you move slowly, as opposed to attempting to hop your feet off the earth all at once,
7. Eight Angle Pose (Astavakrasana)
Learning this pose may take some time, as it’s a delicate dance between balancing arm and core strength, leaning forward and not face-planting, and knowing what your legs are doing without necessarily looking at them.
Think of Eight Angle Pose as an embellishment of Side Crow. Both are core-intensive poses in which your legs are off to the side in something akin to a twist as you bend your elbows and lower your torso like in Chaturanga. Squeezing your inner thighs around your arm can help engage muscles that will create stability and help with balance as you come into the pose, which can keep you from falling into habits that intensify the pressure on your wrists.
How to keep your wrists safe: Place blocks beneath your hands to create extra space as you lift off the ground. This can also keep your wrists from hyperextending. She also suggests bringing the inner knee of your top leg to the back of your shoulder, like you would in Shoulder-Pressing Pose, and clamp down for stability. When you lift your hips off the floor, find your balance without leaning so far forward that your forearms lean closer to your hands.
It takes some practice. What’s more important than lifting your legs off the floor is doing so with safe alignment that keeps your wrists at a 90-degree angle rather than allowing your forearms to learn forward, closer to your hands, in hyperextension.
8. Eka Pada Koundinyasana
This arm balance also builds on Chaturanga, or low push-up, similar to Side Crow and Eight Angle Pose. All the same safety precautions apply, including focusing on alignment and taking your hands sufficiently wide.
You can enter Koundinyasana from several different poses, although try practicing it from Lizard Pose so you can keep that same inner knee, outer shoulder engagement. This engages your core and helps you find your balance without needing to lean too far forward, which can strain the wrists.
How to keep your wrists safe: Start from Lizard Pose with your back knee lifted. Bring your right hand inside your right foot with your fingertips slightly in back of your heel. Work the same inner-knee, outer-shoulder relationship as Lizard, in which you’re pressing your knee into your shoulder and your shoulder into your knee.
As you bend your elbows and lower your hips, you can bring your right elbow under your front hip crease for additional support. This minimizes strain on the wrists. Over time, you can learn to hover without that.
Focus on finding your balance here. Keep your back foot on the ground and push through your back heel to engage your core muscles and take a little of the burden off your wrists. Try to keep your forearms at a right angle with your wrists. Eventually, you can lift your back leg and straighten your front leg. There’s no need to rush the pose. In fact, getting your front leg to lift may take months or even years.
9. Flying Pigeon (Eka Pada Galavasana)
Leal explains that Flying Pigeon is yet another arm balance that has a similar architecture to Chaturanga in that your chest is moving forward as your arms are moving slightly backward. Taking your hands far enough apart and not leaning your forearms too far forward are essential.
Again, you can ease the intensity in your wrists by developing strength and flexibility in other parts of the body as well as safe alignment of elbows over wrists. Flying Pigeon requires a significant amount of hip mobility and flexibility, as well as strength in the core and shoulders and arms.
How to keep your wrists safe: To practice getting into this pose, familiarize yourself with the alignment and engagement of the pose. Start by coming into the basic shape of the pose while keeping your back foot on the floor, as in the photo above. Practice pressing your front knee into your upper arm, flexing your lifted foot, and taking Chaturanga arms as you slowly shift yourself forward and find your balance while keeping a right angle between your forearms and wrists.
Another deconstructed version of this pose is practicing it facing away from a wall and pressing your lifted foot against it. Press against the wall with your foot to engage the stabilizing muscles throughout your core, which can lessen the intensity in the wrists.
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