With the exponential growth of yoga in the last few years, class sizes are getting bigger, and the content more imaginative. It is wonderful that more people are exposed to yoga. As a physical therapist, what concerns me is the lack of emphasis on internal stabilization. This stability comes from deep muscle activation, in sanskrit called bandha, which translates to “Lock.”

In our fast-paced lifestyle, we are often tempted to put ourselves in a position of compromise to “just get things done.” We skip the part where we find our sense of center, and we forget to return to it repeatedly. This is what the practice of bandha teaches us. Developing the bandhas takes effort to build strength, vigilance to maintain, and patience to master. However, once the bandhas are in place, all the other aspects of yoga practice become more accessible, fluid, and enjoyable.

Bandhas stabilize the body during dynamic movement. Some yoga postures can even be damaging if done repeatedly without this awareness. Sure, a teacher might now and then mention a bandha, or advise students to “engage the pelvic floor.” . The problem is that many people have never been taught how to access the bandhas in the first place.

yoga on a mountain top representing internal and external stability — Yoga and the bandhas can apply to every day life.

What are bandhas, and how do we access them?

In yoga there are essentially three bandhas in the body. The main two we will discuss today are “mula bandha” and “uddhiyana bandha,” which represent the pelvic floor muscles and the transversus abdominus muscle, respectively. These are the deep stabilizers of the trunk and pelvis. The third bandha is “jhalandara bandha,” which involves the core muscles of the neck and head known as the deep neck flexors (longus colli and longus capitus muscles).

Mula Bandha (Pelvic Lock)

Let’s start with mula bandha, the root lock, or the pelvic floor. In physical therapy practice we often teach patients to engage their pelvic floor if they have hip, back, and leg pain. I even now teach pelvic floor exercises to help patients who have neck pain, because the pelvic floor is the “foundation of the house.” If the head and neck are the roof of the house, you can imagine how a poor foundation would result in an unstable roof.

In my experience working with patients, these muscles are inherently difficult to engage for several reasons. The first is that they are “postural muscles.” Unlike big mover muscles, like the thigh muscles that bend the knee, the postural muscles are under subconscious control. This makes it difficult to fire them at will, and they are harder to feel. The thing that makes pelvic floor muscles really hard to access is the fact that we can’t see them, and many people have never even heard of them.

How to access Mula bandha

As mentioned above the pelvic floor is hard to access, but visualization can be helpful.

Sit on a firm chair with knees and hips at 90 degrees and feet flat on the floor.
Sitting up straight, hinge forward and back from the pelvis until to feel ventered on your sit bones (the boney protrusions at the base of the pelvis).
From here, draw the sit bones closer together, without tightening your gluteal muscles.
Keep this as you visualize the sit bones pressing down into the chair, as the space between them moves up (this is the doming up/activation of the pelvic floor muscles that make mula banda).
If you can achieve this lifting sensation, you can try maintaining that while visualizing your coccyx (the tailbone) and the pubic symphysis (the very front of your pelvis) also moving towards each other.
These four points (the sits bones, coccyx, and pubic symphysis) all are moving towards a central point.
Even if you feel nothing initially, with continued visualization you will begin to feel something. It is a process.

Uddhiyana Bandha (Navel Lock)

Also known as “flying up” bandha, this is the place between your navel and your pubic bone that wraps around your waist. It creates lightness and lift, and stabilizes the trunk and pelvis during movement and during static standing and sitting. A long, flat sheath of muscle, this bandha is made up primarily by the transversus abdominus and the internal oblique muscles.

The transversus abdominus muscle which activates navel lock, or uddhiyana bandha — The transversus abdominus muscles that make up uddhiyana bhanda.

How to access Uddhiyana Bandha

One accessible way to feel uddhiyana bandha is by activating the leg muscles strongly.

Stand with your feet hip width apart, feet parallel.
Draw up through the inner arches of the feet, while rooting the base of the big toe, base of the pinky toe, and straight down through the heel. You may feel something light up in your core with just this! If not, no worries, keep going.
Imagine you are drawing all the musculature of your legs up towards your pelvis.
Maintain that as you tighten the front and back of the thighs simultaneously.
At this point you should feel the area below your navel turning on. That is uddhiyana bandha.
Now see if you can relax your legs somewhat while keeping the activation in your abdomen.

Jalandhara bandha (Throat Lock)

While the full expression of Jalandhara Bandha is more applicable during breathwork, a sense of this lock can help with asana practice as well.

Due to our lifestyle that now frequently involves sitting, the head tends to come forward with the chin protruding. Then, when it comes time to practice yoga on the mat, we carry this poor posture with us.

Jalandhara bhanda can mitigate this effect by teaching us to draw the head back over our spine. In the full expression of the bhanda, the chin is nestled in the nook of the breast bone between the collar bones, called the sternal notch. This can be a good release of the fascia along the back of the neck, but is impractical for asana practice and may cause strain for some individuals.

A lighter version of Jalandhara bhanda can help us find a neutral and stable position of the head and neck by recruiting the muscles that make the “core of the throat.” These deep muscles return the head to a neutral position.

How to access Jalandhara bandha (throat lock)

Sit in a firm chair, feeling your sit bones.
Exhale completely through your mouth as you let your neck and shoulders relax and your front lower ribs move down and in (for more info about the importance of the ribs here, see my other post “the posture myth”)
Now, draw your head straight back so that it sits atop the rest of your spine.
Maintain a relaxed posture of your neck and shoulders as you draw slightly nod your head down as if you are holding a small orange between your chin and the space between your collarbones.
Imagine the base of your skull floating up as your chin drops slightly, lengthening the back of your neck.
Check to see that your shoulders are still relaxed. If not, take another exhale and let them drop.
Stay here a few breaths, inhaling to lengthen through the back of the neck, exhaling to settle the shoulders and the front lower ribs.

Yoga and Injury

As a physical therapist, the most common yoga injuries I see are in people who are naturally flexible (usually young to middle-aged women, which happens to be the largest demographic of yoga practitioners). These individuals can put themselves in many challenging postures but lack the deep stabilization of the bandhas. I also see stronger men and women who are able to muscle through arm balances but end up with neck and shoulder pain because really it is the deep connections of the bandhas that create a sense of levity in arm balances, not the arms. Practicing poses with correct activation of the deep stabilizing muscles may mean that you have to approach the pose in a new way, and you may not be able to make the pose look as good initially. This is where the yoga really happens- when we shift our focus from what the pose looks like to what it feels like, when we move from place of integrity and patience.

It can take time to develop a keen awareness of the bandhas and to incorporate them into practice. However, by learning to engage the bandhas, yoga injuries can be prevented and healed by practicing with increased awareness, intention, and patience.

From the outside we look symmetrical. Left to right, it seems that if you drew a line down our center we would get two equal parts. Most anatomical drawings present the human body in this way.

When we dig a little deeper, it turns out that right to left we are quite different, and these differences can have a profound effect on our physical functioning.

Often I have patients ask questions like, “why is it that only my right knee hurts with running?”

Good question! Some may say that this is due to handedness, with most of us being right handed. But have we ever stopped to ask why it is that most of us end up being naturally right handed? I don’t intend to get into a debate about handedness, but it certainly hints that there is something else at play, some asymmetry inherently present in all of us. These asymmetries are normal and natural. However, these asymmetries can become problematic when they become unbalanced.

This can occur due to external or internal circumstances. For example, your life requires that you do repetitive tasks to one side only, like reaching for the phone on the right, or getting in and out of the driver’s side of your car. It may also be something intrinsic to you, such as an injury. If you had an injury to your left leg, you felt more stable on your right leg as you were healing. That is helpful while you heal, but that patterning of preferring the right leg to stand on can remain long after the tissues have healed.

The Postural Restoration Institute has a deep understanding of these asymmetries and how they affect us. This institute is unique in that it addresses these complexities of being a human when creating a treatment plan, which I have not seen in literally any other course or training for physical therapists, even when I was in my doctorate program this was glossed over at best.

Let’s Talk Asymmetries.

The primary source of these asymmetries is the center of our body, the trunk. It is the generator of motion in our limbs and it is our center of stability. At the center of our trunk (the “core of the core,” if you will) lies the diaphragm, which is dramatically impacted by the asymmetries of our organ and lung placement.

The diaphragm on the right tends to be more domed due to:

lower attachments of the diaphragm onto the right side of the spine compared to the left.
The central tendon (which makes the dome of the diaphragm) is thicker and stronger on the right than the left.
The right diaphragm has the support of the liver underneath.
The presence of three lung lobes on the right and only two on the left to make space for the heart.

Radiograph showing the right diaphragm (left side of picture) being higher than the left. This is normal human patterning.

All these things cause the right rib cage to be in an “exhale” position with the ribs dropping down and into the body, and the ribs on the left to be in an “inhale,” an elevated and expanded position. Think of the left lung as a big balloon pushing on the smaller balloon on the right. This causes an orientation of our ribcage to the left. The attachments of the diaphragm on the spine cause the spine to turn right.

The Postural Restoration Institute has recognized this natural asymmetry and incorporates this anatomical variance into their training of physical therapists and therefore the treatment of our patients. When I first heard that everyone is biased one way, it was news to me. When I was in my doctoral physical therapy program, we learned all the asymmetries of the vital organs, however the influence of this asymmetry was not applied to physical function. Furthermore, the asymmetrical structure and pull of the diaphragm was hardly mentioned, if at all. I find this surprising now as the diaphragm is a muscle that we use all day, every day, and it has profound impacts on how we move and interact with our world.

So what’s the big deal about the diaphragm?

The diaphragm is huge! It attaches to our lower back spine and interfaces with our abdominals, low back muscles, and hip flexors. After I took my first postural restoration course, I was pleasantly surprised at the emphasis on diaphragmatic function and it’s role as a driver of human movement. I was also surprised at how “belly breathing,” which I taught and practiced myself, was actually detrimental to harnessing the power of the diaphragm. The inherent asymmetries within our diaphragm drive the initiation of human movement, specifically walking. Essentially, the stability of the right diaphragm supports right stance phase of gait (standing on your right leg and left leg swinging).

walking still shot in Right stance phase with left swing phase

The problem occurs when we go to stand on our left leg, but we are still in right stance with our supporting muscles. The left diaphragm is not able to support our body in this position, and our right leg does not adequately recruit muscles to swing the right leg. This occurs not just in walking but also during day to day tasks. This can create all kinds of issues, knee pain on one side being just one of them. Fortunately, this asymmetry can be addressed with specific exercise that is asymmetrical, and therefore corrective. These exercises incorporate the breath to achieve diaphragm function.

Once again, I want to reiterate that this asymmetry is not a bad thing inherently. It is in fact a wonderful thing as it initiates the walking cycle and allows us to begin rotating through our trunk and pelvis. Asymmetry becomes a problem when we get stuck on one side, and are not able to get over to the other side. Relearning how to transition from right to left, and then back from left to right, is how we get balanced again.

Are you transitioning well from right to left stance?

You may have difficulty transitioning from side to side if you:

Tend to always have tightness in one hip more than the other
Always cross one leg over the other (usually the left one over the right)
One leg feels longer than the other
You notice different wear patterns on your shoes or bike saddle

Try this simple exercise to test your asymmetry:

Stand with toes pointed straight forward (feet not turned in or out). Keep this foot alignment as you transition to standing on one leg. You can touch a counter in front for support. Now, turn your pelvis so that the zipper of your pants comes over your right big toe. Try the same thing standing on the left leg, toes pointed forward, knee slightly bent. This time, try to turn the zipper over your left big toe. Notice if you can do this on one side, but not the other.

If you find one side to be challenging, but not the other, that indicates you may have trouble shifting to one side. Because of our natural human pattern, it is usually harder to do this standing on the left leg. That doesn’t mean you can’t stand on that leg at all, but it means that when you are standing you aren’t using the correct chains of muscles, which results in pain and dysfunction. To address this issue, come see me or a PRI trained therapist near you to get properly screened and the tools to find better ease and balance in your body.

Tag: diaphragm

How to find Stability in your Yoga Practice