Dancers: Fix Your Cat/Cow

Last week we were working with Margot Aknin, a professional with the Dayton Ballet, and our yoga teacher and personal trainer Anna Shearer was helping me diagnose some pelvic positioning issues with Margot. (As it turns out, I had over-coached Margot, and ended up steering her into a posterior pelvic tilt during kettlebell swings. The issue resolved right away as we were troubleshooting and I realized I had given her bad coaching cues.)

Anyway, the cool thing about the experience was that it gave us the opportunity to coach Margot through some cat/cow. When I originally noticed her posterior pelvic tilt, I asked her to show me her cat/cow so I could take a quick video and send it along to my colleagues Anna and Susan. That’s the first video you’ll see below.

The next video you’ll see is a longer one that shows the coaching process Anna walked Margot through in order to fix her cat/cow. Now, Margot’s posterior pelvic tilt we fixed with just better coaching (I should say, Anna fixed it), but the troubleshooting process allowed us the opportunity to dissect one of the most important yoga movements that there is. The key takeaway here is that Anna didn’t use yoga to get Margot into a bigger range of motion. Rather, she took a highly technical approach to shave off some range of motion, which in turn will keep Margot safe on the mat.

I hope you’ll watch the entire video, because I think it’s a really cool look at the coaching process.