Bhujapidasana…what does that mean??!?!
Bhujapidasana (boo-jee-pid-asana), or bhuji for short, means shoulder-pressing pose. The name refers to how your knees need to press against your shoulders to assist the movement.
In the photo above, Charlie has lifted her hips and tilted her upper body towards the floor. The knees have to grip the shoulders, or the body simply slips out of the pose. Only Charlie’s hands have contact with the floor, which makes this expression of the posture very challenging for most people. I call it next level bhujapidasana.
Ok, so where do I start?
With appropriate practice, most people will be able to get to an entry-level expression of the posture (see below). It’s easier, because the hips simply hover rather than lift.
It’s not shown above, but you can make it more accessible still by placing the hands on bricks. If you want to work towards this version of the posture, see my recent blog. The blog deconstructs the entry-level posture and offers you targeted exercises to build the movement skill required. It talks about how to use bricks as well.
Then how do I level-up?
Once you can lift your feet and support yourself with your arms (entry level), what do you need to do to lift the hips and lower the upper body (next level)? The rest of this blog offers you some methods to build the strength and mobility required.
It’s going to take time! And effort of course. You can’t rush it – tissue grows and changes at the rate it grows and changes and there is no good magic to make it go faster. There’s bad magic – in the form of injuries – to make it go slower though. So take it slowly and don’t be hard on yourself based on unrealistic timescales.
Key movement skills
Each of the following is detailed in its own section below.
- The front of your shoulder needs to be very capable (anterior deltoid strength).
- You need to be able to get your knees close to your shoulders (hip flexion).
- Your knees need to grip in well (external rotators soften, adductor strength).
- Your lower back needs to lengthen (lumbar length).
- You need to hold a compressed position (core strength).
This list can’t possibly be exhaustive as everyone is different: however, in my experience, these are the areas most likely to need attention. Try it! And let us know how you get on ☺️
Work on your shoulders
Rotating the upper body forward with the arms fixed is similar to lifting the arms with the body static. This lends itself to a simple exercise with resistance bands.
Be kind to your shoulders:
- Choose the right kind of band for you. There are various colours of band, representing various tensions in the material. Choose a colour that won’t strain your muscles, and change/ stop if there is discomfort.
- Is your shoulder comfortable with the movement? Don’t lift too high – or abandon altogether – if the movement gives you any grief!
- Try different hand positions. There are lots of grip positions for the belt: palm up, palm down, palm to the left, to the right. If there’s no discomfort then try them all.
Practising the transition from high plank, to down dog, and back to high plank is also a great way to build movement capability in the shoulder.
Hip flexion
Hip flexion refers to the movement of the chest towards the knees – or the knees towards the chest. It’s clear that a good degree of movement is needed. A good way to develop this movement is to practise Yoga’s lizard pose (utthan pristhasana) – see below.
You can take some of the strain out of this practice by practising upright: place one foot on a wall, and lean your chest towards the wall. Aim to get comfortable with the knee level to the shoulder – again, be aware of how your body receives the movement: stop and abort if you feel pain or discomfort. Ask your Yogafurie teachers for advice.
Strengthen adductors
Adduction at the hip means the ability to bring the leg towards and past the midline of the body. This is another movement skill that can be improved using resistance bands. The images below probably speak for themselves: as before, choose the right resistance band for you, make sure it’s secured well at both ends and don’t ever try to push through pain.
You’ll be aiming for 10-20 repetitions of each, each side. You can stabilise your standing by resting a hand on a chair, a wall or a kitchen counter.
Soften external rotators
There are three different exercises I’m going to recommend. You could try all three, or stick to just one or two. Softening the hips is likely to take time, so give yourself permission to enjoy the movements without feeling like you have to make an instant transformation.
Pigeon-style hip stretch with facilitation
You are almost certainly familiar with the pose shown below – if not, please get in touch before attempting the position.
This posture opens and prepares the outer hip and outer thigh. You can adjust the placement of any sensation of stretch by altering the height of the stretching hip (left hip in these pictures). Adjusting the height is easy – use some Yoga bricks and blocks, or cushions from your sofa even. It’s important that the hips are as level as possible in this position, so certainly use enough support to bring the front hip (left in these pictures) level with the back hip (right in these pictures).
Please do not practise this if you experience pain. Otherwise, you can hang out in this position for 3-5 minutes, as long as it’s comfortable. You need to be sure that you have warmed up – visit the Yogafurie YouTube channel to see a short and simple warm up sequence, or work through some movements yourself until you’re sure you’re ready for the above posture.
You can increase the effect of the posture by briefly loading some additional weight into the hip. It’s very important not to push through any pain when attempting this. Simply take your arms a little wider and reduce the weight in the hands by whatever degree is pain-free and manageable for you.
Keep the weight as it is for a few breaths, and then rest down again.
As you do so, lengthen the front hip (left hip in the above picture) backwards and roll the back hip (right hip in the above picture) downwards. You can repeat the load-unload sequence 3-5 times if you wish.
Targeting the external rotators
When you exit the pigeon pose, take the front knee (left in the pictures above) behind the back knee (right in the pictures above). Then sit the hips back a little – or as much as is comfortable for you. Don’t sit all the way back into gomukhasana…and don’t push into any pain or discomfort. Exit this pose (and any of the poses in this document) if it hurts.
Assuming it doesn’t hurt, you can hang out here for 1-2 minutes.
Finally, you can work with a variation of supta padangusthasana (see below). There are lots of ways to modify this posture for accessibility.
- Use a belt around the ball of the foot – and never force the leg straight.
- Use additional support under the lower knee, as it’s important to keep both shoulders flat to the floor.
Core strength
Navasana (boat pose) and tolasana (scales pose) are a great combination to build core and hip flexor strength, and get the shoulders and arms used to carrying bodyweight at the same time.
You can support this pose in lots of ways:
- Feet remain on the floor.
- Fingertips can rest on the floor or bricks.
- You can hold on to the backs of your thighs with your hands.
- Obviously don’t do it if you have concerns about back strength, or recent
- abdominal surgery, or if there is no pain-free way to do this.
Tolasana (scales pose) is shown above. In tolasana, there’s going to be bodyweight going through the shoulders, even if you don’t lift your legs, so don’t do this if you have any shoulder injuries or concerns about your shoulders.
- Using bricks under the hands gives you extra height, making it a bit easier to
- lift your legs.
- There’s no requirement to use lotus pose as shown. You don’t even have to
- cross your legs.
- You don’t have to lift your legs off the floor. You could lift just one leg, or
- even leave the legs on the ground.
Hold for a breath if you can – more if you feel ok to do so.
Length in the lower back
If you refer back to the pictures of Charlie in bhujapidasana at the start of this blog, you’ll see that her lower back is able to bend a little outwards. This is an important movement skill for this type of posture – however, one has to be extremely careful. An unhelpful outward bend can mean a slipped disc for a weak or damaged back, and/ or if core strength is compromised. Read the description of the development exercise below and only try it if you’re confident that your back will not be strained in any way. Certainly, do not attempt bhujapidasana if you cannot comfortably do the exercise in this section and/ or the core strength work detailed above.
Firstly, let’s explode some current anatomy doctrine. The psoas is not a hip flexor muscle. A growing number of researchers would now argue that its structure is more that of a stabiliser for the lumbar (lower) spine.
If this is true, then the psoas should drop back when we bend forward at the hips (if all is working well). A key indicator for this is how much support a person can derive from the muscles along the back line of their body. What follows is not an exercise to drop your psoas back when you bend forward. Instead, here’s a familiar and accessible exercise that helps create the conditions in which the psoas might naturally drop back when you bend forward for bhujapidasana.
The image above is the familiar utkatasana pose. The image on the left shows me practising it in the way that I see most people doing it. Sticking the bum out switches off the back line and forces support to be drawn from the front of the body. Quads begin to burn, and teachers remind people to drop their weight into their heels – because front line dominance favours the ball of the foot.
The image on the right above shows the same posture, with the back line engaged. It’s subtle, but you can probably see from the shadows around the shin and ankle that the body weight is squarely shared by the ball of the foot and the heel. When the back line engages, the weight is more central because it balances effort on the front. This leads to the shoulder sitting right above the ankle.
Adapting your utkatasana to the image on the right is simple in principle but may require a bit of adaptation to build capability.
- Start with feet either together or hip width apart.
- Arms can be lifted or hands can rest on hips.
- Try to create a sensation of subtly drawing your skin down the back of your trunk and down the back of your legs.
- Let that sensation cause the shins to press forwards towards the top of the feet.
- The knees bend, but as a result of the back line draining down the back of the body and sweeping the shins forwards. If you start by bending your knees then your default will take over, ie: knees unlock, weight starts to collapse, body compensates by lifting through the back instead of lengthening.
Hang on a minute though, is that true?
You might feel that lifting the sit bones backwards requires tension in the lumbar muscles. Surely the back line is engaged – it’s tense, so it must be engaged, right? Tension isn’t engagement: remember that stretching as a concept relies on putting effort into the muscles that decelerate a particular type of movement.
Do you flare your tail upwards and backwards when you initiate a forward fold? This is particularly common for the wide-legged forward fold (prasarita padottanasana). Try to avoid initiating your forward fold in this way: it disengages the back line right at the beginning of the movement.
Let that sink in. Functional stretching – the kind that might actually improve the longevity of your physical frame – is based around movement. Try your forward fold without pre-lifting the bum and see how different it feels.
