Knees and Shoulders and stuff

Yoga Discussion General Yoga
#1

I am new to the forum, but have been practicing yoga regularly for about five years (power and ashtanga). I now live in Panama, so I am without instruction and have a couple of questions regarding my home practice.

  1. I have patella femoral syndrome, so that my knee cap tracks laterally causing degeneration of the cartilage below the knee cap. The problem is related to my hips; they tend to inwardly spiral. I have been told to avoid any postures (i.e. hero pose and warrior I) which promote inward spiraling of the femur. Are there any postures that I should focus on to stabilize my hips and correct the alignment?

  2. My shoulder sometimes feels pinched and my hand tingles after doing chatarangas - a physical therapist told me it was a pinched bicep tendon from having weak upper back muscles. The problem goes away when I skip chatarangas, then I slowly reintroduce them and the problem reappears. My former teacher said I needed to have a 90 degree bend in my elbows for my alignment to be correct, but this seems to aggravate the problem. Do you have any suggestions for strengthening shoulders and improving alignment in chatarangas? I’ve heard similar stories from other women and it seems this may be a common problem.

Thanks for your help,
Carla

#2

First for more general help I would recommend you go to my website bookstore at www.yogatherapycenter.org and purchase Yoga Therapy articles on Knees and Shoulders I wrote for Yoga International magazine.
For your knees you need to work on external hip rotation strengthening poses. These can be found in my book under charts for postural changes. They include Warrior II, Triangle, Tree, Bound Angle. Optimal is to feel the effects of all these poses in the enhanced muscle tone of the gluteus maximum an other external hip rotating muscles. The contraindacted movements are correctly identified as internal hip rotation.
Indeed there are problems inherent in the posture as it does inflame this tendon and others in the anterior compartment of the shoulder. Safest is to avoid the pose as it is contraindicated for certain bodies with vata predominant constitutions or increased pitta. Both of these are aggravated by doing this type of hatha yoga sadhana. Repeated down dog, chaturangas and upward dog can in general create bursitis, arthritis, and on milder side just aggravation to connective tissue. Therapeutically if your body is capable of being free of the problem you need to strengthen the shoulder extensors - latissimus, teres and triceps. These can be done by practice of camel, upward plank, and Vasistasana moving to upward plank slowly. Again others are cited in my book Structural Yoga Therapy under asana kinesiology charts. namaste mukunda