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About the Book

Want to take your yoga practice deeper but don't know where to start?

The hip control guide teaches you how to feel and control the deep muscles of the hip joint. It shows you how you can use these muscles to deepen your yoga poses, or make them more efficient.

If you have trouble with forward bends or back (I do) learning to feel your hip muscles and control them can help. 

The feeling part is important so that you know what you are doing is having an effect. 

The control aspect is learning what to do to consciously activate these muscles. 

It's like being in a conversation where you take turns listening to each other. You actually respond to what the other person says instead of just saying whatever is on your mind.

Learn to Relax and Activate

Now you might think that muscle control means just learning to activate those muscles. It also includes learning to relax them. In the hip control guide you practice both actions, relaxation and activation. This gives you the ability to activate and release almost at will but it also gives you a better chance to learn to feel the muscles involved.

What is it you feel? The target muscle activating and then relaxing. And even if the muscle itself is to small to feel, what you can learn to feel instead is the movement of the bones that the muscle attaches to.

Learning Your Body Made Easy

Very few people in the yoga world will tell you how to deliberately activate particular muscles. Nor do they break postures or action down into simple component parts that are easy to understand, and perhaps more importantly, easy to practice. 

With the hip control guide you learn to practice activating and relaxing target muscles in 8 different positions from easy to slightly more challenging. The intent is so that you can then activate the target muscles at will in yoga poses. 

The Hip control guide also provides an introduction on how you can use these actions in yoga poses like: standing forward bend, wide leg standing forward bend, triangle forward bend, triangle twist, warrior 3, chair pose, half moon pose, seated forward bend, wide leg seated forward bend, butterfly pose, janu sirsasana, bridge pose, wheel pose, low lunge and high lunge.

There are forward bends and backward bending poses in that list. And there are a couple of one legged balancing poses. Hip control can help you in all of them by improving your ability to tilt your pelvis forwards or backwards. It can also improve stability, you ability to stand on one leg without wobbling so much.

Whether you are beginner or advanced, the hip control guide will help you to understand your hip muscles and use them.

What's In It?

The hip control guide is a pdf outlining all exercises to help you control and feel the single joint hip muscles.

The really cool thing is that these are actions that help you to feel and control your body. Instead of thinking about what to do you can focus on feeling your body and doing it. And all of these actions are simple to do.

Once you've experienced them, it's like learning to ride a bike, you won't have to struggle to remember what to do, you can simply get on with using these actions and experimenting with them in any yoga pose where you are standing, or sitting, or even while back bending.

*One area in which these actions may not be affective is while doing inversions. 

If you want a simple guide to learning to feel your body, in particular your hips, then try the Hip control guide.

Knowing if you are Ready

Because this is about learning to feel and control your body, there may be some people who can't learn from a pdf (or mobi or epub file).

I'd suggest a simple test. If you can squeeze and release your buttocks at will then you can learn to control the single joint hip muscles. 

About the Author

Neil Keleher

@kneelkeleher

Hi, I'm Neil Keleher

I’ve been a yoga teacher for about 20 years.

I have a degree in systems design engineering from the University of Waterloo.

Prior to that I served for five years in the British army as an armourer.

As a yoga teacher I teach my students how to feel and control their body. In this context I’m like a driving instructor for your body.

One of my other hats is “indexing specialist”. One of my current ongoing projects under this hat is designing an easy to use indexing system for Chinese characters.