3 Weeks to Happy Hips
One of my favorite things about traveling is just walking.
According to my phone’s Health app we walked between 16,000 and 25,000 steps each day during our trip to France. We walked everywhere—to the boulangerie, the market, museums, sight-seeing, the train station. We had one day of bike riding, and took the metro quite a bit in Paris.
But all this walking was bookended by the other extreme: sitting. Door to door each trip took 24 hours. Between a 9-hour overseas flight, connecting flights, trains, taxi’s, and the metro, there was a lot of time on our tushes.
What do walking, biking, and sitting all have in common? They make my hips stiff. They all involve this isolated forward and backward movement (or just a flexed position of the hips, in sitting, of course). Sure, I tried to sit cross-legged as much as I could on the plane (until G got annoyed), but mostly it was just forward, then backward.
Our bodies aren’t meant to only move in one plane. They are meant to rotate and twist and turn and bend and have multiple ranges of movement. They want to move in variable ways.
The first thing I did when I got wherever we were going was just that: give my hips different ways to move. I’m not shy to do yoga or stretch in public. This pic is at the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport after the flight back from Paris (and felt oh so juicy—for my swollen feet too!).
How do you take care of your hips? Do you have a sitting job or long commute where they’re stuck in the same position all day? Do you do a lot of running or biking or walking where they’re always moving in the forward plane?
I’ve got a 3-week series coming up called Yoga + Anatomy: Hips Edition at Yoga Wild. With new inspiration from my trip (a mini-travel flow that doesn’t require putting your hands on the nasty airport carpet), I’ll teach about the bones, ligaments, muscles and joints that make up the hip joints. Then we’ll move them, using asana (postures) to open them up and stabilize them too.
The class is designed to give a novice yogi a solid foundation, and experienced instructors some new inspiration and deeper understanding of these important joints. We’ll talk about emotional patterns of holding tension in our pelvis too, which can lead to various discomforts.
By the end, you’ll feel more knowledgeable, open and grounded.
If you’re local to Tacoma, I’d love to have you join. You can register here. (But hurry—there are only 6 spots left!)
If you’re not a local, I’m curious: does this sound interesting to you? And is it something you’d like to see as an online course? Drop me a line and let me know! I’m toying with the idea of online courses and would love to know what you want!