Bring your Heart Over Your Pelvis

[LockUpYourDrawers]

Am I the only one?

AIBU that a lot of the instructions given in yoga or exercise are a total turn-off because I don't actually understand what to do.
"Feel your diaphragm moving up as you bring your stomach slowly back to your tailbone"- wtf? Then they give you a few seconds to do this and I panic thinking I must be the only one who doesn't know what this means, looks like or feels like?

I really do try.

I think my knowledge of anatomy is poor. Also I am maybe too fat to really sense my stomach moving back towards my tailbone?

Is it an imaginination exercise or a real thing? I'm actually quite good at imagination, imagine you're on a desert island, you can hear the waves type thing.
But "Align your heart, pelvis and feet and then breathe into this position" is meaningless to me so I have to fake it.

This thread has made me smile.

My favourite was 'breathe into your left lung', I still haven't worked that one out.

One of our Pilates teachers does say 'zip up your skinny jeans!' which does kind of make sense when she wants you to engage your abdominal muscles and pelvic floor and do that slight tip forwards with your hips.

Yoga teachers' bollocky-speak is why I, generally, prefer Pilates.

actually don't really like thinking about body parts and am almost squeamish about some of it

It would be pretty hard to give detailed yoga instructions without referring to body parts!

Tbh I'm pretty surprised the 'heart over pelvis' or the stomach one cause comprehension problems. Heart over pelvis means stand/sit so that your heart/centre of your chest is directly above your pelvis- i.e. you are standing straight without slumping or leaning forward or back.

I think this is a problem with exercise generally - or it is for me. I DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU MEAN!!!!! My current favourite is "zip up your abs". Um, ok. If I could do that surely I wouldn't need abs (wonder if I could get a zip installed - would solve a lot of problems). I have now found a couple of online classes that have instructors whose instructions work for me (and different people do respond to different things) and am starting to be able to identify many different bollocks-speak ways of trying to get you to engage lower abs. Doing it is a different matter.

For yoga I like Chaz Rough's yogamazing. He is very clear (or he is to me) and I find him immensely calming. Also free if you are willing to tolerate a short ad at the start of each video.

@Paperdove87, pelvic floors aren't exclusive to women. Men have them too.

I wasn't sure @anotherwinkywinkybumbum was still embarassed. It was more graphically described than that but maybe I'm just a bit of a prude. There was definite mention of clenching vaginal muscles at some point.

My favourite one is: rise to new depths when encouraging us to go deeper in warrior two.

I get where you are coming from OP, and I agree some of the phrases do seem odd- but after decades of doing yoga most of it makes sense to me.
As a PP said we all have different ideas about standing straight- many of us will hunch shoulders up, form a lordotic arch or whatever.
I have had many teachers talk of lifting your armpits "up and out"- mad no sense then but it does now.
And the " sit bones" ( used to be sitting bones back years ago) makes sense. We need to find them and anchor them to the ground for stability- even if that means manually moving bum lard to each side with our hands!

"Come up, one vertebrae at a time“

I don’t have that many increments of coming up. I’m either up, or down

🤣🤣yep and the getting up ain't that easy these days 🤣

Might have a look at Chaz Rough....

Breathe into the legs/hands/shoulders/tits just means visualise the breath going there. It helps to lengthen the breath. I love wanky yoga speak!

@Paperdove87 Unless she also mentioned "pull up your scrotum", I can see why you'd think it was aimed just women. Awkward!

My teacher’s ‘pick up those pencils’ was definitely not one that translated to the men in the class. What did she imagine they were going to pick it up with?

Although, that said, picking up a pencil with your vagina by squeezing your pelvic floor muscles is such a weird idea that it in no way helped me visualise anything. I’d just be thinking about how pointless and awful the process would be.