how does compression work help you find concavity without fighting your hips?

This is Ashtanga Yoga Tech Support. Real questions from the yoga community, answered.

Our Response

Yes. That’s exactly the direction.

Compression work with parallel legs gives you a container. You get to feel what your abdomen does when your hips aren’t externally rotated, when there’s no flinch pattern steering you away from the midline. The concavity you’re looking for is intra-abdominal—it happens inside, it might look like a well braced surface, but is by supporting the inside with pressure dynamically.

Letting your hips move naturally means you’re not bypassing or going around a shape. You’re maintaing an isometric everywhere else, but then articulating whichever joint it is that you wish to articulate (probably the hip into flexion), which keeps the compression honest. If you lock the hips into some ideal without double checking that the pressure is well globablized, you’ll never find out what’s actually available.

The flinch reflex is the next layer. It’s protective, usually unconscious. It shows up as a subtle recoil when you get close to real depth. Once you can stay with the compression and the concavity, start noticing where you pull back without meaning to. That’s the flinch. You don’t fight it—you just see it, breathe with it, and sometimes it lets go.

It’s the ghost from Mario. If you look right at it and don’t let yourself flinch, it’ll stop following you. Here’s the thing, though, you really do have to be on the no pain train. You can’t let yourself hurt yourself here and that means being real about when it hurts. Real pain and psychic pain and all pain is psyhic pain and all that. Just, like, don’t do it if it hurts. It won’t work and it’ll waste your time. Wrestle with a pig and you both get dirty and the pig has a great time.