Summary: The second aspect of executing a Yin Yoga posture is to relax the muscles in the area that you are targeting. Confusion tends to arise when students hear this instruction to relax the muscles. There is a tendency to take this as a global mandate that in Yin Yoga poses ALL muscles everywhere MUST relax, but this is going too far. In practice, you endeavor to relax the muscles primarily in the targeted area that you are influencing. It s this action of relaxing the muscles that shifts the emphasis of the posture s stress into the denser connective tissues in and around the muscles and the joints.
