What Tree Pose Can Tell You About the Way You Walk

"This is my strong leg."

"My other leg is weak."

"This side has always been my bad side."

I hear these statements all the time. They sound logical. One side feels steady. The other wobbles. One side feels confident. The other feels awkward. One side has all the pain issues.

Case closed, right?

Not so fast.

Those labels—strong side, weak side, good side, bad side—often send us looking in the wrong direction. As a yoga therapist, doing a pose perfectly isn’t my goal.

Tree Pose is a sneak peek into how your body manages gravity, workload and uncertainty.

Tree Pose Is Walking in Slow Motion

Many people come to me because walking has started to hurt. Years ago they stopped running. Then tennis became uncomfortable. Maybe long hikes became shorter walks. Walking became the "safe" exercise.

So why does something we've done since we were toddlers suddenly become difficult?

To help answer that question, I often ask someone to stand in Tree Pose.

At first glance, that seems unrelated. But walking is really a series of tiny Tree Poses. With every step, one leg accepts your full body weight while the other swings forward. For much of every stride, you're balancing on one leg. Thousands of times every day.

Tree Pose simply slows the process down enough for us to watch what normally happens too quickly to notice.

The First Clue

When someone shows me their Tree Pose, I actually learn the most from their worst Tree Pose. That's where the clues are. I'm not judging how graceful the pose looks. I'm watching how your body solves the problem.

• Do you lean your trunk?

• Does your rib cage rotate?

• Does your pelvis drift sideways?

• Do you lock your knee?

• Grip with your toes?

• Hold your breath?

• Does your head not center itself over the weight-bearing leg?

These aren't mistakes. They're often successful compensations. They're clever strategies your nervous system has developed to distribute the workload. The question isn't whether they work. Many of them work remarkably well. The question is whether they're asking one part of your body to quietly do more than its share, thousands of times every day.

The Obvious Suspect

Most people immediately blame the side that struggles.

They spend months trying to strengthen it. Stretch it. Massage it. Balance on it. Tape it. After all, … that's where the problem is.

Or is it?

The Plot Twist

Woman balancing (successfully) in Tree pose but with a strategy of hiking her hip and rotating her pelvis to do so.

Here's where the detective work gets interesting.

Imagine two coworkers. One always volunteers. One stays late. One remembers every deadline. The other isn't necessarily incapable—but over time, everyone has come to rely on the dependable coworker. Eventually, the dependable coworker is doing far more than half the work.

For a while, they look like the stronger employee.

But they're also the one most likely to burn out.

Our bodies often organize movement in much the same way. One leg gradually becomes the dependable coworker. It accepts a little more weight. The body recognizes this and does what it can to shift the work to the more reliable worker. It leans the trunk, rotates the pelvis, grips the toes, or locks the knee.

Those strategies are successful, memorized, and therefore, relatively easy. That's why your body keeps using them.

Meanwhile, the other leg never gets the opportunity to fully learn its job. Not because it's lazy. Not because it's weak. But because the system has quietly repeated a strategy that is easier than returning to its original design, which is now unfamiliar or forgotten.

After years—or decades—that dependable side may be the one with the arthritic hip. The sore knee. The worn-out ankle. Ironically, sometimes it may still be the easier side to balance on. Meanwhile, the other side may feel shaky, awkward, or "weak."

See why labels can be misleading?

The side that hurts isn't always the side that started the story. And the side that balances beautifully isn't always the side moving most efficiently for the long term.

What Tree Pose Reveals

When someone tells me, “I can’t balance in Tree pose because of my knee (or hip or bunion)”, I am of course interested in the painful area. But I'm just as interested in the rest of the team:

• What contortions are the low back and pelvis demonstrating in order to stand on one leg?

• What injuries, accidents, falls, or years of repetitive motions happened that set compensatory patterns into motion?

• How has the painful area forced the body to move differently in order to manage getting around?

• And how have all these things coalesced to shape how someone walks?

Woman standing in her habitual and preferred pattern.

Tree Pose doesn't answer those questions.

It helps me ask them.

Because Tree Pose doesn't create your movement habits.

It reveals the ones you've been practicing with every step you take.

“Pain tells me who is complaining. Tree Pose helps me discover who's been doing all the work.”

Becoming a Movement Detective

The next time you try Tree Pose, don't ask yourself, "How long can I hold it?"

Instead, become a movement detective.

Notice which side feels completely different.

Put one or both hands on top of your pelvis and observe your body’s strategy in a full-length mirror. Importantly, don't try to fix anything! Don't try to stand straighter or do your best, most correct Tree pose. Just observe.

• Does your pelvis stay ‘square’ or rotate?

• Does one side of your pelvis ‘hike up’?

• Does your torso lean backwards or to the side?

• Does your foot pivot from side to side like it’s a boat on turbulent seas?

• Do your toes grip?

• Is your head centered over your weight-bearing foot?

• Is the leg you are balancing on almost perpendicular to the floor or more diagonal?

Instead of “What am I doing wrong?”, ask yourself a different question. What strategy is my body using to succeed? Because your body is rarely trying to fail. It's trying to solve a problem.

Sometimes brilliantly.

The challenge is that a strategy that helps you balance today may also be the strategy you've repeated through millions of steps over decades.

That's why I'm much less interested in making your Tree Pose prettier, although for sure the pose will improve as you dismantle the compensations. I'm more interested in helping both coworkers learn to share the work again.

This is also why I'm cautious when people tell me they just need to strengthen their "weak side." Sometimes they do. But sometimes muscles are plenty capable and the body has simply forgotten how to include them in the process.

And when the workload becomes more balanced, walking often becomes easier.

And that's a goal that matters long after you've stepped out of Tree Pose.