Welcome to yoga lands yoga teacher companion. I'm your host Jason Crandall and I am going

to teach you the most important thing about a you developing your arm balances and

b you teaching arm balances. Now this is a very very overlooked but important technical

insight about almost every arm balance which is this. To transition into nearly every

single arm balance you do not lift up. You move forward and frequently you move forward

and downward. I'm going to say it again. In the vast majority of arm balances with very

rare exceptions the dominant action that takes you into the posture is not up. It's almost

always forward and often times forward and downwards and oddly enough sometimes downwards

and backwards. Now I don't know if you believe me so I'm going to show you this and this

is so important everyone because of the most common mistake that I see people making

their transitioning into arm balances and not getting there is they're trying to lift up.

And if you are trying to lift up you're probably doing the technique wrong. Now one more

quick thing before I go into this everybody and show it which is attributes help. So the

stronger you are and the more dexterous you are and the greater range of motion you are

those attributes contribute to the ability to do arm balances. There is no doubt about

it but the thing that you are looking for when you are looking to get into balance is balance

and balance is not up. Balance is forward. Let me show you with balkosana and then I'll just run

through a bunch of these and then I'll tell you what you can start to do about this immediately

in your own practice and in your teaching. So watch me set up and I'll just do a half a dozen

arm balances and we're going to see this dominant action. So when I set up everybody let's

say I'm going to start with balkosana. I'll go this way. So I'm going to start with balkosana.

Now there's different setups for balkosana. I'll go this way. There's different setups for

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