Teacher Training
The first two Teacher Training Group Sessions this week were all about anatomy. With anatomy, there’s so much more to learn than what you could possibly pack into (2) 3-hour sessions so we skimmed over some of the basics – physical benefits of yoga, why anatomy is important for yoga, why alignment is important, what neutral alignment looks like (hint: it will look different on every body), a few fundamental anatomy terms, planes of motion, fundamental bones, the spine, joints, fascia, ligaments and tendons, muscles, anatomy of the lower body, abdominals, upper body, muscle contractions, anatomy of breath, the nervous system and tension vs compression.
It was a jam packed, super informational two nights spent with Sunny as we went over all of these topics together. At one point, when we were talking about the spine, I saw the word, “Coccyx” in our manual. The only time I have ever heard this word was in a cue for the Hands to Feet posture in a Bikram Yoga class. I’ve heard this word used in the cue for this posture for years and had no idea what it meant. Now I know. Coccyx is the very tip of the Sacrum, aka as your tailbone. I also enjoyed learning about which yoga postures worked on and opened up specific parts of the body as we went over the anatomy of the lower body, abdominals and upper body. Learning about the specific parts of the body and how it works was cool. The human body is quite fascinating! When we got to bring it around to how yoga applied to each body part, things got even more interesting.
All through Yoga Teacher Training so far, I kept hearing about the build up of the anatomy lecture with how important it was and that this was the lecture we could not miss. I worried these two Group Sessions were going to be heavy and make me sleepy, especially since they’d be done during our weeknight sessions, 7:30 to 10:30PM. Turns out, both of these lectures were quite fun and super interesting. Sunny did a great job covering each section with us and making it as fun as possible.