Bridge

There are many ways to enter the bridge pose. The most common method is to enter for laying on the floor with knees bent, feet placed close to the glutes. The hands on on the floor, fingers pointing towards your toes, underneath your shoulders. From here you then push up into bridge, locking out your arms and pushing into your shoulders so that your arms are perpendicular to the floor.

The bridge pose is one of the foundation poses in contortionist training. It is a backbend that utilises large movements in the hip flexors and the shoulders, making it a very useful pose to help progress other areas of a contortionist’s overall backbending ability. The bridge pose is also a very good beginning pose as it easily modified to make way for progressions. From the bridge you can progress to have feet and ankles get closer and from there grabbing the ankles.

Another variation is a Gymnastic Bridge whereby you push largely into the shoulders and keep the legs locked out, and straight. In yoga the bridge gets called “wheel” or Chakrasana. More colloquially and in other disciplines this pose gets called “crab”.