Hero Pose: Understanding the Blissology Principles

This is a sample video from our “Align Your Yoga, Align Your Life” Online Course and Eoin’s upcoming book.

Of course, this video makes more sense when you what the videos in the course sequentially but you still get some nuggets out of Hero pose.

This is the seventh video in the family of poses we call “Front Body Stretches,” but most schools call Backbends (we explain why in the course).

In Virasana (Hero Pose,) what we see is most people have the intention of getting the shoulders and hips on the floor at any cost. Therefore, they let the spine round (extension).

You will have to “de-prioritise” this external marker of success or nothing in the video will make sense. Let the feeling of the stretch be the guide.

Specifically, let the stretch be like a tug of war between the distal (the lower thighs bone) and proximal (the front upper pelvis) attachments of the long quadricep muscle (rectus femoris) and the hip flexors.

Our intention for this pose is a precise stretch of the quadriceps and hip flexors and the more we feel this stretch, the more “success” we have in Hero pose. To get the stretch in the places that we want you to feel it, don’t make a priority of getting the back and shoulders on the floor.

This means we have to educate ourselves about how to move the pelvis:

In earlier videos, we go through in detail where these muscles are as well as what muscles to engage to not just passively let the pelvis tilt forward on the “path of least resistance.”

To fill you in, it’s the lower two abdominals (rectus abdominus) which are the bottom two muscles of your “six pack” that lift the pelvis in the front.

We want you to press forward and up with the pelvis (and not just fall back passively into the stretch.).

As well, to really feel this pose as a front body stretch, we want you to shift the “pivot point” from the lower back to the knee.

On that note, if you do feel uncomfortable knee sensation back off. We spend a long time in this course explaining how to use the feet to protect the knees and in just one video without the whole course, we don’t want you to make knee injuries worse.

We start with half Virasana and progress from there.

Please share with people who love yoga and making their poses feel amazing.

Check out our Align Your Yoga, Align Your Life course online.

We are offering it at a 50% discount during this post COVID era where health has never been more important and money for many of us has never been more scarce.

You can do it as a self-guided study or interactive study with zoom calls with Eoin.