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Top 5 Health Benefits of Reverse Warrior Pose

Happiness | Lifestyle

Reverse Warrior is a challenging posture to be sure. There are a lot of moving parts and a lot of little alignment issues to think about, and it's often thrown into asana sequences a little haphazardly.

However, when practiced with a little mindfulness and awareness, this posture can be really awesome for your body. Here are 5 benefits of Reverse Warrior Pose.

1. Strengthens the Front Leg

Like in Warrior 1 and 2, in Reverse Warrior your front leg is bent into a lunge position. If you can, resist the urge to "cheat" your lunge by leaning back and allowing more of your weight to be offered to your back leg. In doing this, you will be taking advantage of the awesome strengthening benefit that is available to you in this pose.

Be mindful that you are keeping your knee behind your toes so that you are not putting any extra strain on your knee. Aim to get your thigh parallel with the ground.

2. Solidifies the Core

The lunge position of the legs combined with the leaning and reaching back of the upper body provides a nice challenge for your core. It may not feel like a traditional core posture like Plank, but keeping yourself upright in this pose requires a lot of core strength.

The deeper you go into your lunge, the harder your core will work! By widening your stance and getting a deep lunge, you'll be gaining some functional core strength. In other words, it mimics the work your core does in regular, every-day life.

3. Challenges Balance

Along with the core challenge, this posture is going to be giving you a workout where your balance is concerned. The action of reaching back and looking behind you is a great way to test your balance and stability on your feet.

Be sure to enter this posture with care and grace if you know your balance is a little weak. It's a challenging pose to hold, but know that the longer you remain in Reverse Warrior, the more of a balance challenge you'll get.

4. Opens the Side Body

While you are leaning your torso towards your back leg and extending your arm up over you head, you are getting a wicked stretch in all the muscles in between.

These muscles line the side of your body from your front hip to your extended finger tips. This part of the body is often neglected and is subject to being overly tight in most people. In this way, this side stretch is so important and a rare treat in asana practice!

5. Challenges the Mind

Finally, with all that is going on within this pose, you will be giving your brain quite a workout as well.

Making sure your lunge is safe and deep, your hips are in position, that you're not offering too much weight to your back leg or sinking into your legs and resting your upper body, while you simultaneously try to maintain your balance and not grimace from the shear amount of work you are doing in this pose is a lot! I'm tired just from writing all that!

If you can find stability in your mind in this pose, you are basically enlightened.

What do you think? Do you love this pose? Hate this pose? Feel indifferent? Let me know!

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