How To Practice Pigeon Pose Correctly

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what's the right yoga alignment for pigeon pose?

Here's a great question I recently received about pigeon pose:

"I asked a few different yoga teachers what is the 'correct' way of doing a pigeon pose, but I got a lot of different answers like 'the focus is keeping your hips forward', 'the focus is bending the leg 90 degrees', 'the focus is having your bent leg tight on the ground' and more... What is your opinion about it? Thanks :)"

I receive a lot of questions about pigeon pose (it's quite a confusing yoga asana, right??), but this one in particular stood out to me!

I love this question because it highlights the many mixed messages we tend to hear about pigeon. If we can receive any number of different answers to the same question about this yoga pose, how do we know which one is correct?

Or... could it be that none of them are correct? 😉

In order to offer some clarity on pigeon pose alignment, I created a quick video tutorial sharing a movement science-based perspective on this confusing yoga pose.

In this video, I address these pigeon pose alignment questions:

Shin angle – should the front shin be parallel to the front edge of the yoga mat in pigeon?
Hip orientation – should the hips be squared or not?
Pelvis placement – should the pelvis be on the ground or not?
...and much more!

I hope you enjoy, and feel free to share this video with your yoga networks if you think they'd find it helpful!