TENSION AND COMPRESSION
You hear me talking about tension and compression. Have you wondered about why do I find it important you to know what do these mean?
Let's start from the beginning.
Is there a posture that you tried so many times but for some reason it still feels like it's impossible and you don't get from A to B?! - Wouldn't that feel liberating to know that this may be more to do with the structure of your body and less to do with lack of ‘effort’ on your behalf?!
To be able to know that, you have to understand what tension and compression means in the human body.
In general a tension force is one that pulls materials apart. A compression force is one that squeezes materials together.
In the human body looking at the muscles you should feel tension in a muscle when you are stretching, twisting or in some way of form you stimulating it. The Muscle has an ability to deal with this tension and become more flexible over time. But it is important to note, that you should do this with awareness and from a place of Ahimsa(non-violence) to be able to stretch safely.
Compression on the other hand is the sensation of tissues being pressed or pushed together. This can happen because bone hits bone, squeezing whatever is in between. You have hit a boundary that won’t change over time. This is the skeletal structure of your body reaching its limit: bone hits bone.
Now this varies body to body, so never compare yourself to others, as it happens because of the end of the range of motion within a joint, as we all have different sized and shaped bones. Forcing it will most likely result in injury. Years of practice are not going to change this. When bone hits bone, or presses the tissue between – this is it.
This can feel frustrating, but it will teach us to be more energetically aware within our practice for our own safety.
To approach postures from an energetic point - "What should I be feeling? How can I achieve that?" .Instead of: "The postures should look like this and I have to look the same!"
Learning how to modify postures will help you to achieve a variation of the posture that is safe, kind and good for your body.
Let's see them in an example:
Tension is when you feel your hamstrings or back stretch in a forward fold.
Compression: think about a forward fold like dragonfly (wide legged forward fold) when some of us try to fold forward after a point we can't feel stretch on our back or inner thighs/hamstrings(on the tension side of the body), but instead you feel this funny pinch in the front of your hip. That is your compression point. Your femur (thigh bone) compresses with your pelvis, around the hip joint (f.e. femur head or top part is hitting a protrusion of the hip socket (the acetabulum- is the deep, cup-shaped structure that encloses the head of the femur at the hip joint)
