Downward Dog, Properly

The most-performed shape in modern yoga and one of the worst-explained. It is treated as a rest, which it is not, and cued as a hamstring stretch, which it mostly is not either.

What the pose is

An inverted V in which the arms are holding a large share of your body weight overhead, the spine is being lengthened by traction between the hands and the hips, and the backs of the legs are being stretched as a consequence.

Read that again: the arms and shoulders are the working part. The hamstrings are the part that complains. People spend years chasing heels to the floor and never notice that the shoulders are what the pose is actually training.

Building it from the floor

Do not step back into it. Build it, once, slowly, so you know what you are aiming at.

Start on hands and knees. Hands under shoulders, knees under hips.

Set the hands. Spread the fingers wide. Turn the hands so the index fingers point straight ahead or very slightly outward. Now press down through the whole hand — specifically the base of the index finger and the inner heel of the palm, which are the two points everyone under-uses. The middle of the palm should lift slightly, like the arch of a foot.

Set the arms. Straighten them without locking the elbows, and turn the upper arms outward so the inner elbows face each other. This is the single most important correction in the pose. It creates space in the shoulder joint; without it, the head of the arm bone jams forward into the front of the shoulder, and that is where the ache after class comes from.

Now lift the knees and take the hips up and back. Keep the knees bent, generously. Do not straighten the legs yet.

Lengthen the spine. With the knees still bent, reach the sitting bones up and back until you feel the lower back lengthen. The line from your hands to your hips should be straight. This is the position the pose is about.

Only now, straighten the legs as far as the spine allows. The moment the lower back starts to round, you have gone too far. Bend back into it.

Most people should keep the knees bent for the first year and possibly forever. A Downward Dog with bent knees and a long spine is the pose. A Downward Dog with straight legs and a rounded back is a different, worse pose that happens to look more like the picture.

The four failures

Weight in the hands. If the hands slide, the wrists ache, or the shoulders sit over the fingertips, your weight is too far forward. Send the hips back until the arms feel like struts you are hanging between rather than legs you are standing on. The pose should be roughly balanced front to back — you should be able to lift one hand briefly without falling.

Rounded lower back. Caused by straightening the legs before the spine can accommodate it. Bend the knees. There is no other fix and no reason to want one.

Shoulders shrugged to the ears. Press the floor away and let the shoulder blades slide down the back — but not by pinching them together. Widen them.

Heels forced down. The heels reaching the floor is a consequence of ankle and calf length, and it is not the point. Forcing them down flattens the arch and rounds the back. Let them hover.

Wrists

The most common complaint, and it is almost always a load-distribution problem.

The wrist is at ninety degrees, taking weight through a joint built for grasping rather than bearing. Three things help, in order:

1. Spread the load across the whole hand, especially the base of the index finger. Most people dump everything into the heel of the palm.
2. Take weight back into the legs. Less weight in the hands is less weight in the wrists.
3. Reduce the angle. Hands on a low block or a rolled mat edge, or fists, or forearms in Dolphin.

If it persists past a couple of weeks of doing all three, get it looked at by someone qualified rather than practising through it.

Is it a rest?

No. In a well-taught class it is called a resting pose because it is where you return between harder things, which is not the same thing.

If Downward Dog is restful for you, you have probably stopped working the arms. Try this: in your next hold, actively press the floor away with your whole hands for the full five breaths. It stops being a rest immediately, and that is the version that builds the shoulders you need for everything else.