Pose: Eagle
Sanskrit: Garudasana

Eagle is the first one-legged balancing pose in Hot 26. In the sequence, it comes right after the Awkward series.

Pose Breakdown

Getting into Eagle starts with swinging your arms up. This will help with wrapping the arms in front.

The swing helps tighten the wrap of your right arm under your left arm. Your right leg crosses your left leg. Palms should face each other. You have an imaginary straight line from the tops of your fingers to your feet.

In Eagle, you’re pulling everything into your midline.Ideally, there’ s no coming between your arms and legs. The standing leg is bent and the foot is wrapped around the ankle.

Once in Eagle, start bending your standing leg even more. Push your navel to your spine. The other challenging part: squaring your hips and shoulders to the front of your space. There’s a bit of micro-adjusting, or even imaginary adjusting.

Once you do one side, then you’ll want to switch sides. The left arm comes under the right arm. The left leg wraps around the right leg.

Because Eagle is a balancing posture, you want to hold the pose for at least a minute on each side.

Benefits of Eagle

• Balance
• Focus
• Stretching of shoulders, upper back, and thighs
• Strengthening core, thighs, legs, ankles

Yoga with Adriene provides a deep dive of Eagle in this video.

Return next Monday for the following pose in the Hot 26 sequence: Balancing Forehead to Knee

Note: My yoga poses are always a work in progress. The photos in this series will display what I was best able to do at that moment in time. Some poses feel “perfect” in my body but aren’t quite the fullest extension of them in a photo, and vice versa. With that in mind, consider the text just as much – if not more – as the image.

Peace,

Shuva