A common instructional cue, embedded within a variety of yoga asana teaching styles is: “Pull up your kneecaps to protect your knees.” Repeated with authority and in good faith, the instruction seems to make sense.
Women are not men. On the surface this seems pretty obvious. But I’m not referring to the visual facts of our differing reproductive systems. The physical differences that I refer to here are the unique shape of women’s bones and structure of our joints.
Until the 1990s, Yogi’s did not use sticky mats. The refinement of individual expression of a yoga pose requires that our feet be free to move. When the pelvis rotates and female feet are fixed on a sticky mat, the non-rotating knee and sacroiliac joints become vulnerable to pain and injury.