If you practice yoga, you are sure to increase the flexibility of the hips and hamstrings. However, that doesn’t mean you will gain greater mobility and functionality, or even be able to access the myriad of hip opening postures, because most of us don’t realize how many muscles surround the hips. Since hips are ball-and-socket joints, there are ample available movements, yet most of us only utilize two daily — flexion and extension — when we walk, sit, and stand.

Because we only make use of two movements, we tend to be overdeveloped in one or two muscle groups and underdeveloped in the others. The problem with this is limited range of motion and, more importantly, imbalanced hip alignment that could lead to hip pain or increased friction in the hip joint over time, potentially damaging soft tissue. Bottom line: it’s important to work toward evenly balanced strength and flexibility in all the muscles that surround the hips.

Before we dive in, let me be clear: there is no magic place of health and balance where everything is perfect and no pain ever exists. We can, however, find a place where our body feels consistently good and we have the awareness to recognize when one muscle group is too tight, strong, weak, flexible, or inflexible. In other words, we can build a relationship with our body, learn what it needs, and be able to catch an issue before it becomes a long-term problem.

THE BENEFITS GO BEYOND PAIN RELIEF. Developing awareness of your hips can allow you to move better on a daily basis AND access more postures within the context of yoga.

To simplify the development of your hip and hamstring flexibility, we can break down muscle groups into 4 basic categories: front, back, inside, outside. There are muscles in each of these areas that create movements.

1. Front: hip flexors and quadriceps
2. Back: buttock muscles such as gluteus maximus and piriformis
3. Inside: adductors such as longus, brevis, magnus
4. Outside: abductors such as gluteus minimus, medius, and TFL

This is, of course, a simplified way of looking at the hips. Some muscles cross over from the outside to the inside, such as the sartorius, or from the back side to the inside, such as the adductor magnus. But the simplification is helpful if you aren’t an anatomy nerd and just want to feel better in your hips.

Designing an intelligent yoga sequence for your at-home practice or for your students can create a massive lifelong impact. Whether you are an an aspiring yoga teacher, an at-home practitioner looking to build your personal practice, or a seasoned teacher looking to increase the efficacy of your classes, this is for you.

Because most of the 200 hour yoga trainings in the West have so much material to cover in a relatively short amount of time, the element most often neglected is anatomy, especially in designing yoga sequences that help your students get the most from their time with you.

So today I want to share a yoga technique with you that I teach in my 200- and 300-hour trainings.

Designing a class is much like a puzzle; there is a clear destination in mind, but we need to put one piece together at a time. Or consider sequencing as an instruction manual, a step-by-step, action-oriented guide for what to do and when to do it. In order to design an intelligent yoga sequence, we can use a technique I call “reverse engineering.” What does that mean?

A peak posture is a yoga pose that is challenging to your student. That challenge may present itself as requiring one of 4 anatomical elements.

1. Strength
2. Flexibility
3. Balance 
4. Proprioception (knowing where your body is in space)

Balance and proprioception can overlap, but they each present their own challenges, so I count those as separate features.

So choose a peak posture. For today, let’s work with Dancer Pose (Natarajasana), because it requires a few different anatomical elements.

After you choose your peak pose, assess the anatomy of the pose.

In my 200 hour and 300 hour trainings, we go into much more specificity of many yoga poses — covering anatomy, biomechanics, and technique. To clarify, the 200 hour training is designed for yogis looking to deepen their practice and learn the skill sets for teaching yoga. The 300 hour training, on the other hand, is for certified yoga teachers looking to certify at the 500 hour level. In this training, you wish to both develop a masterful understanding of the body as it relates to the yoga practice and attain highest-level skill sets as a teacher (200 hour + 300 hour = 500 hour certified).

You don’t have to be an anatomy expert to design a yoga sequence that will help your students get the most from your classes and come to know their bodies better. Anatomy is really just a language — names for bones, muscles, joints, etc. These are important, of course, but communication and connection with your students is arguably even more important.

A surgeon might be incredible at her craft, but if she doesn’t have a good bedside manner, she won’t make her patient feel comfortable, and that can impact how well the surgery goes. A yoga teacher might know a lot about anatomy, but if they aren’t connecting with their students, the students may not return, and a valuable opportunity is missed.

So let’s think about Dancer Pose. If you’re an anatomy geek like me, you may already be thinking about what makes this posture challenging for some and accessible for others. To assess this, we need to look at which muscles are lengthening and which will require flexibility. If you are a yoga teacher already, this will likely be familiar: Typically, you learn this at the 200 hour level. In my 300 hour training, we go a step further and consider the required strength as well as actions, techniques, and biomechanics. To keep things simple, I won’t be diving into all these avenues here. My intention is to convey the structure of an intelligent yoga sequence. Once you understand the structure, it can be applied to all aspects of the physical practice.