Full Locust: The Lift That Opens the Upper Back

Where Locust attends to the lower back, Full Locust rises higher, lifting the chest, the arms, and the legs all at once, like a body learning to fly.

It opens the upper back and shoulders, the very places that round and slump through our days. There is something almost joyful in it, the whole body lifting away from the floor at once, the chest blooming open toward the front of the room.

What is happening in the body

Lying on your stomach with the arms out to the sides like wings, you lift the chest, the arms, and the legs away from the floor together. The upper back engages, the shoulder blades draw toward each other, the chest opens. It is a balanced lift of both ends of the body at once.

The why to keep is this: the lift opens the upper back and draws the shoulders open, the chest blooming as the whole body rises in balance. It is strength and openness together. If lifting only the chest and arms is plenty today, that is the whole posture. The pose is the intention, not the height of the legs.

The openness of the upper back

Full Locust opens the place our days work hardest to close: the upper back and shoulders, rounded forward over every desk and device. To lift here, to draw the shoulder blades together and open the chest, is to undo a little of that daily collapse.

The posture is an antidote to the shape modern life presses us into, a reminder that the upper body was made to be open and lifted, not perpetually curved forward.

On and off the mat

What you carry home from Full Locust is an opened, lifted upper body and the felt memory of undoing the day's slump. The body learns to draw the shoulders open and lift the heart, and that openness shows up in your posture, your breathing, the way you carry yourself through the world.

The slump softens, the openness stays. That is the yoga life.

Where Pilates meets it

The upper back and the muscles between the shoulder blades are a focus of good Pilates work, which counters forward-rounding posture with targeted strength. Time there builds exactly the support Full Locust asks for, so the lift comes from strength and the chest opens with ease.

Yoga asks the upper back to lift. Pilates builds the strength that opens it.

A note from the valley

I see so many rounded shoulders across South Jordan, the posture of full lives lived over screens and steering wheels and the people we bend to care for. Full Locust gives that upper back its lift back. People stand taller after it, and they feel the difference long after they leave.