In your Seated Forward Fold, ground down through your sitting bones.

When I was in my 300-Hour Teacher Training in 2017 my teacher advised us on safe and effective ways to give hands on, manual assists in yoga shapes. His philosophy is Ground the thing that needs grounding. With that approach a teacher needs to understand which part of the body is grounded in a specific shape prior to helping a student ground that part of their body.

I can vividly recall him assisting one of my peers in Janu Sirsasana - Head to Knee Forward Bend. He was actively grounding the the thigh of the person’s extended leg and it totally blew my mind! For so long I had been taught to assist that shape in very different ways, and his minimal pressure on the person’s extended leg seemed to provide them with substantially more space to fold into the shape.

He wasn’t grounding the person’s sitting bones. He wasn’t actively pressing the person’s torso further toward their extended leg. He was simply grounding the part of the body that is grounded.

Learning about ways to effectively assist a student in a seated fold exposed to me that I had misunderstood the mechanics of seated folded shapes. For a very long time I was telling students to ground their sitting bones in seated forward folds, but that’s not actually the region of the body you want to ground. Instead, you want to ground your thigh bones in seated folds.

If your sitting bones are grounded you’re limiting your pelvis’s ability to rock forward over your thigh bones which is the primary action of the lower body in a forward folding shape. By grounding the thigh bones you’re allowing the pelvis to move forward over the thigh bones and you might find that you can fold with more ease and depth.

Even if you approach seated folds with bent knees you can still create the sensation of grounding the thigh bones. Maybe your thigh bones will never touch your mat, but you can place a prop under your thighs or even think of moving your thigh bones toward your yoga mat which will still allow your pelvis to rotate forward over your thigh bones.