Wheel pose and shoulders

I've gotten to the point in the last two months where I can pretty much just pop up into wheel pose without too much effort. One thing that helped a lot with this was realizing that my shoulders are still relatively tight.

Lesley Fightmaster's alignment course was teaching about how when we lift our hands up before tadasana, we can identify if our shoulders are too tight if our low back and ribs want to pop out. If that happens, she says, see if you can draw your low back and ribs back into alignment with the rest of your body, OR you can widen your arms to give your shoulders more space.

My ribs almost always want to pop out (although less and less as time goes on) so I took a look at about how far out I have to hold my arms in tadasana, and then I put my hands about that same width apart when popping up into wheel pose. It's made wheel pose a lot easier! Dean did mention that with wheel, you basically either have difficulty with 1) arm strength 2) spine flexibility or 3) shoulder tightness.