Month: August 2018
Participating in a sixty or ninety-minute yoga class is fantastic! And even fifteen minutes of the intelligent stretching, strengthening, and mindful breathing that comprises a sequence of yoga asanas (poses) and vinyasas (a series of poses linked by fluid movement) can have profound benefits.
But what if you only have ten minutes? Five? What’s the one yoga pose that you should do?
Downward-Facing Dog (whose formal Sanskrit name is Adho mukha śvānāsana) would be an excellent choice. Downward-Facing Dog stretches and strengthens pretty much every major muscle group in the body. In particular, it lengthens and strengthens the back and shoulders, and – when practiced intelligently – is a great way to release unnecessary tension and transform pain into comfort in these areas. As an added bonus, since Downward-Facing Dog is a partial inversion, it delivers a good measure of the benefits of yoga inversions to the cardiovascular, lymphatic, nervous and endocrine systems. In short: it’s a truly wonderful pose!
How To Practice Downward-Facing Dog (Adho mukha śvānāsana)
Here’s a step-by-step guide to practicing Downward-Facing Dog:
- Begin by coming into kneeling position on the floor, on all fours: with your knees directly beneath your hips, and your hands beneath but slightly in front of your shoulders.
- With the palms of your hands on the floor, in this kneeling position, stretch your fingers wide, anchoring the hands/fingers evenly – but with a special emphasis on anchoring at the base of your first finger and thumb of each hand.
- Now curl your toes under, and lift your knees slightly off of the floor. Keep your arms fully extended, and allow your head and neck to naturally drop between your arms as your hips lift upward.
- With your knees still hinged, draw your hips strongly away from your hands – lengthening your spine, side-ribs and back fully. Feel your tailbone lengthening and then curling slightly toward the floor as the sitting-bones lift.
- Now begin to straighten your legs, reaching the heels of your feet back and then down toward (or all the way onto) the floor. But only straighten the legs as much as you can without sacrificing the extension of your spine. If your hamstrings are less flexible, it’s fine to keep your knees bent a little bit or even a lot.
- With your arms and spine fully extending, feel your shoulder-blades engaging on your back, then widening away from your spine, then drawing slightly down your back.
- With your heels dropping toward or all the way on the floor, draw from the inner ankles upward toward the inner hip – and feel the kneecaps lifting.
- Continue to lift your sitting-bones upward, and strongly away from your hands. At the same time, draw the upper-front hips (the ASIS) gently toward one another, and feel the lower-back and back of the hips widening.
- In this position, follow the movement of your breathing for ten or twenty rounds of inhalations and exhalations. Stay relaxed through your face, jaw, neck and throat. And feel the various sensations that arise and dissolve within the space of your body.
- When you’re ready to come out of the pose, drop your knees to the floor and then allow your hips to rest back onto your heels, and your forehead to rest on the floor (or on your stacked hands) in Child’s Pose. Relax here for as long as you’d like, and then continue with your day – newly refreshed!
Downward-Facing Dog – Variation
For a lovely variation of Downward-Facing Dog, place a straight-backed chair against a wall. Then place the palms of your hands (shoulder-width apart) on the seat of the chair – and step your feet back (hip-distance apart) until your head drops between your arms, and your spine is more-or-less parallel to the floor. Now, follow all of the same instructions as listed above, to enjoy this variation of Downward-Facing Dog for as long as you’d like.
And remember: As well as being a wonderful stand-alone yoga pose, Downward-Facing Dog is an excellent warm-up for any Sworkit exercise sequence you might have chosen.