Lecture Part 1: Let's Give Our Shoulders a Hand!
Let’s give our shoulders a hand!
A lot of our work with stabilizing the shoulders comes from the way that we interact with the floor through our hands in a variety of postures.
When you look at hands, you see the infinite formations they can take on, but one thing they rarely look like is flat— which is funny because so often that is how we are told to use them in yoga postures.
You have probably been taught in many yoga classes to flatten out your hands, pressing through the index and thumb, in an effort to stabilize the arm and shoulder to prevent injury. This cue, though, also requires that we stiffen the arm itself to the point of locked out, and cement our scapulas down the back. All of these very specific choices are being made to keep us safe, to create a pillar of support for the shoulders. But we aren’t a building, we’re a free standing organism, and this kind of ‘bracing’ eventually causes its own unique problems, and prevents us from learning how to use our hands to support our shoulders in general.
Example: Walking with Stiff arm
For fun, you can try it in your daily life by simply feeling your hands while you pet a dog, or touch a flower petal, or with heavier activities like feeling the box or baby you are lifting while you lift it. We find that increased awareness leads to increase in stability and strength.
We’d like to propose that pressing through the pinky edge of the hand, rather than the index finger, is a much more functional approach to supporting not only the wrist, but the shoulder itself. If this is a new concept to you, you’ll see the anatomy that proves its validity, but you’ll also need to really allow yourself to experiment in order to find this possibility as we have found in previous trainings that this is a hard habit to loosen up on. So let’s take a look at this concept anatomically in order to see it through a functional lens.
When looking at the bones of the forearm, we have the Ulna and Radius.
Bring your hand to your opposite wrist and find the medial and lateral boney landmarks. On the pinky finger side of the wrist we have the Head of the Ulna. From anatomical position this would be considered the medial edge of your arm, although in daily life this is more commonly felt as the lateral edge. For that reason, I will commonly refer to this side of the hand/wrist/arm as the pinky side. You can trace the edge of this bone up along the outside of the forearm to your elbow, where the other end of the Ulna is labeled the Olecranon process (pronounced like ‘Ol’ Cran-un’). If you hold your arm on your elbow while you bend and extend it you’ll see that that boney protrusion that you call your elbow is the head of this forearm bone.
Bring your fingertips to the boney landmarks surrounding the Olecranon process— these are the medial and lateral epicondyles of your Humerus. Between these two points is the Trochlea of the Humerus, around which the Olecranon process hinges, as it fits into the olecranon fossa, where this boney head can interact and join with the humerus for a strong boney connection of support. This is the humeroulnar joint. Compare this connection to the Radius and you’ll see that the ulna is much more suited to be the fulcrum of support when transferring force through the arm.
Bringing our attention back to the wrist, feel the boney protrusion on the inside of the wrist under the thumb joint, that’s one end of your Radius. The head of the Radius is up in the elbow joint, although you can’t feel it like the Ulna because its covered by the muscles of the forearm.
The Radius is an incredible bone that allows us to supinate and pronate our lower arm. It corresponds directly with the thumb side of the hand, which make sense when grasping an object and supinating and pronating, like turning a door knob, or picking fruit off a tree. The larger end of the radius is at the wrist, giving our entire hand an boney anchor to the arm itself. The smaller end is at the elbow, which makes it a tough sell for stability purposes.
The Ulna and Radius are like yin and yang to each other when you look at their shape and function. The Radius is meant to revolve, and allow you to supinate and pronate your hand whereas the Ulna stays straight as a fulcrum of support for the humerus and shoulder joint above.
Place your forearm on a table like a frozen karate chop. Now pronate the forearm by turning the palm face down, and then supinate the forearm by turning it face up again. Say it out loud to yourself for the sake of memorizing, as you pronate your forearm by turning it face down, imagine you are pressing a button and say to yourself ‘I am pro this’. And as you open supinate the arm allowing your palm to face up you can say, “That’s super, please give me some more!” You gotta try when it comes to anatomy stuff— it all pays off in the end.
But More importantly, I hope you notice that the pinky edge of your arm and hand can stay on the table while the thumb side of your arm and hand rotate. Lift your arm off the table and watch the same thing occur. This is the work of your Radius, the rotating forearm bone. The Ulna is fixed, and is a stable fulcrum around which to rotate.
So when we place our weight in the pinky edge of the hand, we are utilizing the stability of the Ulna. But when we place our weight in the index finger and thumb, we are asking a mobile joint to become the stabilizer, which is why it takes so many extra cues up the arm to pull it off. Why not just put your weight into the side of your hand and arm that are meant to be stabilizing? There’s a reason karate chops are done with this side of the arm, it’s built for it.
And the muscles tell the same story. The Deep Back Arm Line begins in the pinky side of the arm, runs along the Ulna, then teams up with Tricep followed by the rotator cuff muscles, rhomboids and levator scapula. This means that when you bring your weight into the pinky side of the hand, you not only are able to utilize the boney support of the Humeroulnar joint for support, but you are also activating the deep back arm line which ties directly into the shoulder joint itself via the rotator cuff and rhomboids. In fact, many serratus anterior exercises, such as the “inferior Glide” which looks like a frozen karate chop, not only activate the serratus but also the deep back arm line.
As opposed to the deep front arm line, which correlates with the thumb, your biceps and pec minor, which aren’t shoulder stabilizes per se. They would come online for a bear hug for example, or when lifting— we’ll talk more about this later. But the main idea is to notice that they aren’t shoulder stabilizer socket stabilizers like the back arm line. The pinky edge of the hand ties directly into your rotator cuff and works synergistically with scapular stabilizing muscles like the serratus anterior, where as the thumb side of the hand corresponds more to the front of the chest.
And finally, the hand itself has a little something to share as well. Much like our feet, the palmer side of the hand has 3 supple arches that not only allows it to grasp objects of different sizes, but also create a spring of support when weight bearing.
There are three arches in the hand: The Longitudinal arch which runs through the center of the palm, from mid wrist to middle knuckles. The Oblique arch, which runs in a parabola from the base of the thumb to the base of the pinky. And the Distal transverse arch, which runs along the knuckles themselves.
You can easily see and feel these three arches in Anjlai Mudra, when bringing the hands together at the heart. Instead of pressing the hands together flat, let them naturally open inside. There shouldn’t be anything you have to do for this to occur, but there may be some things you have to ‘undo’ as we can get used to flattening the arches of our hands to create certain shapes. In the Buddhist image of Chenrezig, the buddha of compassion, he holds in his hands a wish-fulfilling jewel. By holding your own hands with compassion, you will feel the arches creating space between them. This presence of feeling is itself a wish-fulfilling jewel, much like Chenrezig’s, as it allows us to adapt and work with the world to ‘see what’s possible’ as ShambhavAnanda teaches, instead of flattening out our world by pressing our will onto it.
And of course, this applies to our practice on the mat. Feel the same space, half of the wish fulfilling jewel, as you lay your hand on a table top, or on the floor. You will probably notice that the knuckles of your index, middle and ring finger naturally float up, allowing for the longitudinal arch and transverse arch to remain intact. What you might also notice is that your oblique arch is naturally in full contact with the surface, and what’s more, that this oblique arch seems to be built for such placement as it is the most padded surface of your hand.
Notice also the placement and stability of your shoulder in its socket, as well as your scapulas.
Now, play with flattening the arches of your hand, and notice a few ramifications. First, you will feel your elbow lift and your scapula elevate, as well as your humerus internally rotating into a pretty awkward position. Next you will feel the weight shift into the thumb side of your hand, placing your weight into the radial side of the forearm. This engages the front of the shoulder, like the biceps brachii and the pec major, which further elevate and float the scapulas away from the rib cage. And last, you may have already noticed that the base of the index finger has little to no padding, and if you are anything like me, can feel achey and arthritic after this kind of pressure.
And all of this neglects to highlight that choosing to flatten your arch is a choice in itself that has odd logic— its basically saying ‘though my hand was built with an arch, I don’t think it is important for its overall function.”
So if we want to give our shoulders a hand, then we should listen to the bones of the forearm, the lines of supportive musculature, and the arches of the hand in order to show our support for the shoulders when using our hands on the ground.
Let’s your hands be hands, keep them springy.
Use the oblique arch (pinky base knuckle around base of palm to thumb base knuckle) to allow the weight to distribute through the boney support of the Ulna, on the pinky edge of the forearm.
As you do this you will feel that support ripple up through the tricep into the shoulder rotators, rhomboids, and synergizing serratus via the deep back arm line.
Easy to say, but sometimes hand flattening is not as easy as we think to undo. So put it into practice, experiment, play and feel.