Remember to always have the following two parts of your body glued to the floor:
1. lower ribs
2. pubic bone
If you feel pain in your back region, don't even think about about doing this. Take a break. Relax. This exercise should only be performed if you're feeling good. If pain persists, see a doctor at your earliest convenience.
This is a great way to condition, build, and strengthen your lower back. If you sit for long periods of time on a chair - and you suffer from lower-back-pain - then there's a good chance that chair-sitting is causing the back pain; this pain is likely underpinned in the mechanical relationship between the legs and back - specifically involving the hamstring muscles; tight hamstrings will pull on the spine thereby causing tension in an already tense muscle. Without going too much into this tangent, suffice it to say that one should definitely look into exercises of the leg and hamstring - focused to improve back health. This exercise that we're attempting today is another tool to help one improve back health, but it's not the only approach to improving back-health.
To improve your back health, I recommend:
- learn to sit on chairs properly. Keep your spine in a neutral position (shaped like an 'S' character), and engage your core muscles. Do not slouch as slouching will cause problems with your spine, muscles around the spine, nerves, and act as a catalyst for a plethora of other ailments.
- stretch regularly. Focus on both legs and back.
- practice regular cardiorespiratory training
- practice regular muscular conditioning and strength training
- drink adequate amounts of water
- eat veggies, fruits, and nuts (unsalted) (my favorites: almonds, pine buts, cashews)
- most importantly, listen to your doctor
Anyway, getting back to locust position. Locust can evolve in many difficult challenging & visually-appealing positions. I do not demonstrate any advanced locust positions, rather in this video I stick to the basics. This is a very introductory Locust Pose example which is excellent for beginners looking to build the fundamental foundation required for advanced yoga training. Remember that every human body is different. Some people may feel pain after five seconds of this, whereas others may be able to go for five minues and feel great. Listen to your body. Start slow - meaning short durations (e.g. 4 to 30 seconds) combined with a low number of repetitions (((8 seconds work + 1 minute break) * 3 repetitions) * 3 times per week). If you do the math, in a year, you would have approximately 50 weeks * 3^4 seconds = more than one hour of active Locust per year! Think less is more. Think consistency. Human physiology is incredible in its ability to make dynamic calibrations in real time - however some programming is required to start the process. The programming required is: training the body by way of actively engaging different muscles. Based on past load, your body is able to make changes at some performance growth rate. Our bodies were built for change. Now microscopic differences in our anatomies directly impact how quickly our bodies are able to change. The body is incredibly efficient in that its default operating mode is to conserve energy; in other words, if there's no demand to perform physically demanding tasks such as lifting heavy objects, moving swiftly through space, moving our limbs and joints to varying ranges-of-motion and then performing strenuous activity at various points in that spectrum to further complicate things... if your body doesn't regularly do these things, it will resort to its default mode and hence these activities may become difficult to do or even impossible.
To complicate matters further, different human bodies may have certain innate abilities which are rooted during the formative years of human life. For example - in Bee Wilson's book for 2013, 'Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat', she talks about how anthropologists observed fundamental bone differences in humans in very short amounts of time - namely the human jaw. The human jaw was traditionally flush. Within a short period of time (i.e. too short for genetic evolution), humans developed an overbite, she was found it was caused by a shift in the use of different cutlery. Fascinating.
Even today, humans roaming the planet earth are composed a varying genetic composition. In short, this implies that all humans have very different body types. For example 23andme currently tests 7,462 genetic variants linked to Neanderthal DNA. Amongst a user's connections, she can compare the relative differences. Both the Homo neanderthal and the Homo sapiens have fundamentally different bone structures. Accordingly, some people have specific bones which are fused together where as others have the same bone which is separated. For example, within the axial skeleton, specifically in the vertebral column, we note that modern humans can have anywhere between 32 and 34 bones. According to Wikipedia, "the number of the vertebrae differs from human to human as the lower 2 parts, sacral and coccygeal bone may vary in length".
To make a long story short - if you're in a yoga class and you see someone that does something that looks absolutely impossible - don't worry about it. You may very well be right. The objective of your yoga practice is not to copy someone verbatim rather it's to find your own unique version, understand your limits, and train within a safe space and explore. Watch your growth - which may occur in days, weeks, months, or maybe never (in the case of boney-limits). Think about intrinsically enjoying the process.