Setu Bandha Sarvangasana
Bridge Pose
Bridge pose is a simple pose to execute, and provides profound benefits to your body. I use Bridge pose to help my lower back, uncompress my spine, and stretch my stomach muscles, glutes, and hamstrings. When students complain about pain in their backs, hips, or legs I will recommend Bridge Pose practice. In fact, Yoga Journal notes the following benefits of Bridge Pose practice:
- Stretches the chest, neck, and spine
- Calms the brain and helps alleviate stress and mild depression
- Stimulates abdominal organs, lungs, and thyroid
- Rejuvenates tired legs
- Improves digestion
- Helps relieve the symptoms of menopause
- Relieves menstrual discomfort when done supported
- Reduces anxiety, fatigue, backache, headache, and insomnia
- Therapeutic for asthma, high blood pressure, osteoporosis, and sinusitis.
Instruction
- Lie on your back in corpse pose
- Take a deep inhale, then lift your legs with an exhale, bending your knees - dropping your heels toward your thighs
- Grasp your ankles with your hands, and pull your heels to the floor. This will most often cause your pelvis to lift off the ground slightly
- Breathe slow and deep as you lift your pelvis up higher, raising your back off the ground one vertabrae at a time
- Lift your pelvis until it is in line with your knees
- Bend your elbows, and raise your hands up to your hips. Push up with your hands
- Lift your hips higher to take the pressure off of your hands
- When your hips will stay up on their own, go ahead and drop the hands back down to the floor
Coming out of the pose
- Slowly lower the hips back down, one vertebrae at a time. Place each vertebrae onto the floor, from your shoulders through your lower back
- Press your spine gently into the floor
- Release the legs, stretch them out, and lower them back down to corpse pose.