How to Grab Your Ankles in Backbends in Ashtanga Yoga

The delightfully flexible and strong Rebecca Z. demonstrates a sequence she used to learn and practice taking her ankles in backbends. 

As a lazy Ashtanga Mysore teacher, I hope to subtract my physical involvement from students’ practices. This is one progression of postures that I have used to help students work on the strength, flexibility, and awareness to grab their own ankles. That way I no longer have to hold them aloft while pulling in their arms, and then stand there, holding them, forever.

Rebecca expressed a terrific range of motion and awareness when she started at Portland Ashtanga Yoga, and at this point she has practiced daily for many years. She spent some months on shalabasana as well as pulling herself up into viparita shalabasana in order to develop active spinal flexibility, strength, awareness, and connective tissue strength.

At that point, she could drop back and pause the motion at almost any angle from the floor.

A general note on the “stages” below: they are obviously an organic continuum and the boundaries between are not discrete. Essentially Rebecca practiced moving to each stage and holding it for at least 5 breaths, and she would repeat specific stages for weeks or months before moving to the next.

Stage one: walk fingertips to touch feet.

Stage two: curl hips forward to pull herself onto her fingertips. She would hold on her fingertips for 5 breaths.

Stage 3 (she doesn’t really show this one): one hand --- fingertip. Other hand: one fingertip only (pointer finger). This stage is how she learned to free up one hand to reach in to take her ankle.

Stage 4: Holding one ankle, she pulls back to the fingertips of the hand on the floor. She spent a long time at this stage, because she would focus so much on grabbing one ankle she would drift away from her legs and end up glued to the floor.

Stage 5: Holding one ankle, other hand only pointer finger on the floor.

Stage 6: Take both ankles.

I’m not sure if she’s interested or not, but she could possibly start walking her hands up her shins, or even work on grabbing her shins without touching the floor. We have tried that before, and Rebecca reported it didn’t feel great.

We watched this after I filmed it, and told Rebecca it looks way smoother than it ever had --- she displays a smoothness between stages due to pure repetition and comfort.

The Primary Series Saturation starts this weekend! On the real, there is a very strong chance we will not work on grabbing our ankles in backbends. However, we will bring this patient, progressive, step-wise approach to any and all other postures! You’ll also get into the myths and philosophy that surround this practice.

Finally, you can enroll in single sessions! $199 for the whole thing (11 hours), $40 per session (2 hours/ea), or $99 for the seminar (5 hours plus break).