Playing Your Edge

By Joel Kramer

The body has edges that mark its limits in stretch, strength, endurance, and balance. In each posture, at any given time, there is a limit to stretch that is called the final or “maximum edge.” This edge has a feeling of intensity, and is right before pain, but is not pain itself. The edge moves from day to day and from breath to breath. It does not always move forward; sometimes it retreats. Part of learning how to do yoga is learning how to surrender to this edge, so that when it changes you move with the change. It is important to learn to move back if your edge closes, as it is to learn to move forward slowly as the body opens.

The tendency to push toward maximum extension quickly puts you out of touch with the body’s feedback and makes you come out of the posture sooner. Each posture ideally involves the whole body. If you reach for your maximum edge to quickly, you bypass many areas. This gives the illusion of a completed stretch, but the body may not be properly aligned or as open as it can be.

There is another less obvious edge that is very easy to miss.  It is called the first or “minimum edge.” This is where the body first meets resistance. It is very important to stop here, at your first edge, to acclimatize yourself, realign the posture, and become aware of your breath and deepen it. Your attention should be in the feeling, waiting for it to diminish, and which point the body will automatically move to greater depth and a new edge will appear. This process repeats itself until you eventually reach your final edge. By this time your body has opened with minimal resistance of effort. Often the more slowly and carefully you treat your early edges, the deeper your final edge will be. Building endurance involves staying longer at the early edges and moving slowly toward intensity, for the closer you are to your final edge, the less endurance you tend to have. Also, learning to hold the posture at intermediary edges, until you can deepen and slow the breath, enables you to relax along the way.

Playing edges slowly in this fashion has the advantage of giving you better alignment throughout the whole process, and a sharper capacity to listen to feedback. This enables you to enjoy greater levels of intensity without pain and minimizes the possibility of injury. 

It is important to know the difference between pain and intensity. If the feeling is such that you are trying to get away from it, it’s pain. Pain causes inattention in the pose increasing the likelihood of overextending the body and pulling a muscle. States indicating discomfort, or a degrees of intensity are: stoically enduring a pose, waiting to get it over with, thinking of something else, or rushing the posture.

Pain is feedback, which if ignore or push through, can eventually hurt you. Practicing yoga with habitual discomfort colors your attitude toward yoga, making you more reluctant to do it. It turns yoga into a chore instead of the joy it should be.