Gomukhasana (cow face or shoelace pose)

Gomukhasana (cow face or shoelace pose)

To do this pose:

Come to a seated position on your mat. Pick up one leg and stack your knees with the top leg directly over the bottom leg. Your feet can be close to your body or farther out and your knees can be stacked or apart with your top leg hugged closer to your chest, whichever is more comfortable for you. From here, reach one arm straight up over your head and bend it at the elbow, placing your hand between your shoulder blades. With the other arm, reach out to the side before bending at the elbow to internally rotate at the shoulder and place that hand on the mid back facing up. If you can, link your hands, but it’s okay if you can’t, grab onto your shirt with each hand. Hold here and breath feeling a mild stretch through your hips and repeat on the other side. You can also bend forward at the hips, resting your upper body over your legs. 

How this pose is especially beneficial for nurses: 

• It helps to strengthen and lengthen the knees! This helps prevent injury and even treat ongoing chronic knee pain, which is one of the most common injuries and complaints in nurses. 
• It serves as a deep stretch for the hips, ankles, thighs, shoulders, chest, and arms. This is one of the few poses that really opens up and lengthens multiple parts of both the upper and lower parts of the body, making it a great pose to do when short on time but needing some sort of movement like before or after a long shift. 
• In the bent forward variation, it offers decompression to the spine, especially the low back. For those nurses struggling with disc herniation or other low back issues, decompression helps open up those discs and spread the vertebrae apart.