Lesson Two • Spacious Hands & Pushing/Pulling Cat Cow
Spacious Hands, Supported Shoulders:
Embracing Suppleness from the Ground Up
Suppleness Starts with our Hands
When you look at your hands, its easy to overlook their suppleness. When the hand is relaxed, it naturally rests with a subtle arch, like when your hands rest on the keyboard of a computer. We often feel that we have to flatten this arch in order to find stability when using our hands— but that would be like flattening your feet to find stability, it just feels counter intuitive to the whole mechanism when you see it clearly. Nonetheless, you have probably been cued in table to press the index finger and thumb into the floor, flattening the hand, and that cue leads to the next cue of spinning the eyes of the elbows forward, which then requires that we stack the shoulders over the wrists, and last but not least, root the shoulders down the back. This ‘pillar of support’ method works to ensure a measure of stability in postures like table or maybe even Urdhva Mukha Svanasana, but how does it feel when you stand up and apply it to your life— like walking around the room. As we saw earlier, locking out our limbs might keep our surfboard stable on a Disney ride, but it doesn’t keep our shoulders stable amidst our life’s daily waves (and nothing against Disney rides, they’re great for a vacation but we just don’t want to live there).
Test it out:
Don’t take our word for it, put the “Pillar of Support” paradigm to the test. Stand up and walk around the room with one of your arms locked out and notice the effect of this through the rest of your body. When one part of you locks out, everything else is effected— you rotate less in your hips and torso, you breath shallower, your facial expression even tightens. And it’s not just a physical phenomenon, it’s a subtle one too— release your arms and just clench your teeth, locking out your jaw, and you’ll notice the same debilitating effect throughout your entire body. Locking out might feel supportive in one isolated scenario, but its not how our body was meant to move, so we might as well start to work more skillfully on our mats if we want that work to support us in our life.
Padding of the Hands:
You might be surprised to learn that your hands have arches, just like your feet! There are actually three arches in the hand, just like our feet: The Oblique arch runs from the pinky to the thumb along the padding of the hand. The Longitudinal arch runs up the center of the hand, and the Distal transverse arch runs across the knuckles. The take away here is that our hands were built to have a natural spring, so why flatten them?
Take another look at your hands and notice where the padding is in them. Notice the padding that naturally runs from your pinky edge, across the palm to the base of your thumb. You can also notice the lack of padding under the index, middle and ring finger. This alludes to the fact that the weight of our hands is meant to rest laterally in our hands, towards the pinky edge. Skeletally speaking, the outside edge of our hand corresponds to the Ulna in our forearm, its stabilizing aspect, and then to the humerus— whereas the index finger and thumb side of our hand correspond with the radius of our forearm, its rotating aspect.
Arm lines and the hands:
Muscularly, the pinky edge of our hand aligns with the shoulder muscles of our back, starting with the triceps, which unite with the rotator cuffs, surrounding both the shoulder socket and scapula with stability via their shared connective tissue with the rhomboids, which anchor firmly to the spine. That’s why you karate chop with the pinky edge of your hand— it’s built for stability. The pinky edge of our hand also ignites the support of our deltoids, the shoulder pad itself, which integrates fully with the fibers of the Trapezius as it wraps over the superior edge of the scapula, which anchors to every bone of our cervical and thoracic vertebrae. In this way, pressing through the pinky edge of your hand can actually inspire incredible support and activation throughout the entire arm, shoulder and spine. Compare this with the muscles of the thumb and index edge of your hand— which align with the biceps and pectoralis muscles of the chest, and we see that the pinky edge of the hand was made to push or chop, whereas the thumb edge was made to turn and pull. As we learn to work with, and not against, our body’s natural architecture, we find that we have the capacity to move skillfully in any direction— a type of suppleness that keeps us flexible, yet strong.
Exercise: Spacious Hands
This positioning takes pressure off of the wrists, activates the “arches” of the palm and awakens more musculature in the arms, shoulders and core. Hands, arms and shoulders should feel springy and light and there should be no tension in the neck and upper traps.
Bring hands to heart center in anjuli mudra.
Let the center of the hands be soft and spacious, like you are cupping a firefly. Notice the sensation where the hands connect, namely the thumbs, base of the palms and pinkies. This is the “horse shoe” of support that we will be using any time our hands contact the earth.
For the rest of the section, we will call these our ‘Spacious Hands’
Exercise: Pushing/Pulling Cat Cow
From table top, paw out the hands, shifting weight from hand to hand.
Let the hands be soft, connecting the horse shoe of the hands from thumb to pinky to the earth (see “Spacious Hands” exercise).
Exhale as you Isometrically push hands forward and together to integrate the front of the body as you allow the spine to round into cat. You can also initiate a gentle push backwards through the knees, as if stretching the mat long between hands and knees.
Notice the abdominal retraction at the peak of Cat pose, attempt to maintain that retraction as you move into cow.
Inhale as you Isometrically pull the hands back and wide to activate the back of the body as you lengthen the spine forward into cow. You may also initiate a slight forward push through the knees, like wrinkling the mat between hands and knees.
Repeat this several times. Notice how the arms connect to the torso and feel the support waking up in the front and back of the shoulder.
Take your time working from cat to cow, maintaining tone across the front line.