Tadasana

Standing still is a pose, it is the pose every other standing shape is built from, and it is almost never taught properly because it does not look like anything.

Here is what is happening, from the floor up. Work through it once slowly and then check yourself against it for a month.

Set the feet

Stand with the feet hip-width apart — that is the width of your hip joints, roughly two fists between the ankles, not the width of your outer hips. Feet parallel, meaning the outer edges are parallel to each other, which will feel slightly pigeon-toed if you normally stand with your toes turned out.

Now find three points on each foot: the base of the big toe, the base of the little toe, and the centre of the heel. Press all three down. Most people are heavy on the outer edge or collapsed onto the inner arch, and you will feel which as soon as you look for it.

Lift and spread your toes, then set them down without letting the arch collapse. The arch should be alive — not gripped, not flattened.

Wake the legs

Contract the thigh muscles until the kneecaps lift. Then stop before the knee joint locks backwards.

There is a position a few degrees short of full extension where the muscle is holding you and the joint is not. That is where you want to live in every straight-leg pose for the rest of your practice. Locking is easier, which is exactly why it becomes a habit, and over decades it stretches out the back of the joint capsule.

Feel for a slight outward spiral of the thighs — as if you were trying to turn the inner thighs backwards — without letting the feet turn out.

Level the pelvis

Two common defaults. Some people stand with the pelvis tipped forward, which arches the lower back and pushes the belly ahead of them. Others tuck it under, which flattens the lower back and shoves the ribs backwards.

Find neutral by exaggerating both: tip forward as far as you can, then tuck as far as you can, then settle halfway. Neutral is where the lower back has a small natural curve — you should be able to slide a flat hand into the gap against a wall, but not a fist.

Set the ribs

This is where most people stop paying attention, and it is the correction that changes the most.

The lower front ribs should be drawn down and in, not flared forward. Put a hand on your sternum and one on your lower belly. If the front ribs are jutting, the lower back is doing the arching for them.

Draw the front ribs down without slumping the chest. It is a small movement — a centimetre or two — and it takes the strain off the lower back immediately.

Set the shoulders

Not back and down, which is the instruction everyone gets and which produces a stiff, pinched upper back.

Instead: let the arms hang and turn the palms to face forward, which rolls the shoulders open. Then turn the palms back towards the thighs without letting the shoulders roll in again. The shoulders are now where they should be — wide, not squeezed — and the arms hang from them rather than being held.

Set the head

The head weighs about five kilograms and it sits on top of everything else, so its position costs or saves the neck a lot of work.

Bring the ears over the shoulders. For almost everyone this means moving the head backwards, because a life of screens has parked it forward. Then, from that position, lengthen slightly upward from the base of the skull — as if the crown were rising — and let the chin come very slightly down. Not tucked. Level.

Breathe

Once everything above is set, take five slow breaths and notice that standing has become work. It should. Tadasana held properly for a minute is genuinely tiring, and that is the evidence that you were previously hanging on your joints instead of holding yourself up.

Why bother

Three reasons, all practical.

It is the reference position. Every standing pose is Tadasana with something changed. When a teacher says the back leg in Warrior I should be doing what it does in Tadasana, that instruction is only useful if you know what that is.

It is a diagnostic. Everything you find here — a collapsed arch, a flared rib, a forward head — will show up magnified in every harder shape. Fixing it standing still is enormously easier than fixing it in Half Moon.

It is the pose you are in for most of your life. No other pose in yoga has that claim. An hour a week improving how you stand is worth more than an hour a week improving anything else in the repertoire.