What Do “breathe in the Back” and Other Weird Yoga Terms Really Mean?

Yoga instructors love to come up with creative ways to explain what your body is supposed to do when you do a series of poses. Language can be evocative and poetic, whimsical or funny. And sometimes – especially for a beginner – it can be confusing. Here’s what it all really means.

“Breathe into ___” (back, hips, etc.)

Yoga, according to many practitioners, is all about your breathing. You hold each pose for a set number of breaths, or breathe as you enter or exit a pose. Sometimes the instructor will tell you to “breathe in the back” or “breathe in the hips”. Your breath only reaches your lungs, so what do they really mean?

If they name a part of the body that is in your torso, they usually mean some part of the act of breathing. In fact, we have many different ways to make room for our lungs. One of them is to expand the chest outward in all directions. The other is to allow our chest or shoulders to rise. Another way is to keep the chest still, but let the lungs fill the chest area and squeeze our organs into the stomach. (You can do it all at once, or focus on one area more than others.)

Thus, to breathe with the belly means to breathe in such a way that the belly moves. Back breathing can refer to the outward expansion of the ribs.

What about other parts of the body, like the hips? This is usually said when you are in a pose and are going to stay in it for a few breaths. Your body moves slightly when you breathe, so this is an opportunity to see if there is a way to stretch or move the part of the body that the teacher says a little more. If you can’t feel your “breath” going there, try to visualize the flow of energy or focus a little more on the sensations coming from that part of the body.

“Get up one by one”

Your vertebrae are the small bones in your spine. Each one forms a protective ring around your spinal cord, connects to different back muscles, and supports your body’s weight, among other things.

If you are leaning forward, for example, in a forward bend, you may be asked to stand up “one vertebrae at a time.” (To be pedantic, one of these bones is a vertebra, and the plural is vertebrae . You will sometimes hear “vertebrae after vertebrae,” but that’s not grammatically correct. Just like that.)

What they really mean is to tuck your pelvis so that it’s more or less vertical (since you’ve finished leaning forward) and then keep your back round as you return to a standing position. This may be a gentler way to stand up than just hanging from your hips, although there is plenty of room for yogis to argue over which way of moving is “better”.

“Jump, step or swim on the surface of the mat”

The top of your mat means the front of your mat. The jumps and steps probably make sense. But how do you “float” from plank to standing?

The float is actually a special way of moving, quite advanced. It’s like a restrained handstand where you put your weight on your hands so you can lift your legs and put them in a different position. Here is a video that shows how to learn to swim.

“Let your anus bloom”

Beginner classes usually don’t talk much about the ass, but if you do enough yoga, you will eventually hear the line about “blooming your anus” or “sending your sunflower into the sky.” It could be a cue to relax your glute muscles – stop squeezing your cheeks, for example – or, in some cases, they want you to do what one redditor called “reverse kegel” by actually relaxing the sphincter itself. Either way, Yoga Journal confirms that it’s completely normal to giggle like a baby when your instructor talks about your butt.

“Activate your toes”

To “activate” a body part means to contract the muscles in and around that body part. If you activate your toes, you may be spreading or squeezing them, or even trying to do both at the same time. Peek at the instructor to get an idea of ​​what he wants from you and do your best to tighten the muscles of the part of the body he names.

“Let your muscles fall off your bones”

Don’t take it literally. Your muscles are attached to your bones, but letting them “fall” means relaxing those muscles. On the other hand, “pull the muscles into the bones” means to bend them. Or, to use the word we just learned, activate.

“Root to the floor”

This means you have to use your balance as well as your leg muscles to make sure you have a stable and strong connection to the floor. You will be tensing your leg muscles, perhaps spreading your toes, perhaps activating your calf muscles to make sure you keep your feet in place and not just let them freeze under you.

If you hear about the “angles” of your feet, consider putting on a pair of old-school four-wheel inline skates. You have four wheels; if you lean too far forward or backward, you will fall. If you lean too far to the right or left, you will find yourself rolling in a curve. Try to evenly distribute your weight across these four “corners”, or think of your foot as a tripod (thumb, pinky, heel) and try to evenly distribute the weight across all three.

“Curl up like a Japanese ham sandwich”

You may hear this phrase if you go to hot yoga. This is from a script written by the problematic (to put it mildly) guru Bikram Chowdhury, who wrote about the hand-to-foot posture: “Touch your belly to your thighs, your chest to your knees, your face to your legs below your knees. From the outside, you should look like a Japanese ham sandwich, there should be no gaps anywhere.” Hot yoga practitioners sometimes argue why he chose a Japanese ham sandwich instead of, say, peanut butter and jelly. I don’t have an answer to this.