In Yoga diaryIn the Archives series, we share a curated collection of articles originally published in back issues dating back to 1975. These stories offer a glimpse into how yoga has been interpreted, written about, and practiced over the years. This article first appeared in the May 2008 issue Yoga diary. You can find more of our archives here.
The first few years of my yoga life Chaturanga Dandasana (Four-Limbed Staff Pose) was the bane of my practice. As a flexible person with loose shoulders, I thought the pose was for a different species, one that had a power that was completely foreign to me.
But over time, Chaturanga has become a wonderful friend and teacher, helping me develop the strength and stability that once seemed elusive, and instilling actions and principles that are useful in my practice. The pose is challenging for many students, but the results are great: it strengthens the arms and legs, strengthens the abdominal muscles, builds healthy shoulders, and prepares students for arm balances, inversions, and backbends. And it is character building.
Chaturanga offers different challenges for different agencies. The key to making the pose doable for any body is learning proper alignment. Proper alignment builds strength for those who struggle in that area and teaches the sturdier student, who often relies on brute force, to refine the posture in ways that prevent damage to the shoulders. Learn to fine-tune yourself, and you’ll see that Chaturanga isn’t just about upper body strength – that’s a misconception.
Chaturanga and your yoga practice
Practicing Chaturanga strengthens and strengthens the entire body, helps teach important alignment, and prepares you for a variety of positions, including the following:
Arm balances
The upper body and lower abdominal strength you develop from practicing Chaturanga, combined with the confidence it instills, translates beautifully into the kind of strength and core awareness you need for arm balances such as Crow or Crane Pose (Bakasana), Flying Dove Pose (Galavasana) and Side Plank Pose (Vasisthasana).
Inversions
Chaturanga creates stability in the shoulders, a feeling of compactness in the center and alertness in the legs. These are crucial for safe inversions. When practiced with attention to alignment, Chaturanga becomes the ideal workout for poses such as headstand (Sirsasana), forearm balance (Pincha Mayurasana) and handstand (Adho Mukha Vrksasana).
Backbends
The legs are prominent in healthy Chaturanga and in healthy backbends where the curve of the spine is evenly distributed. Learning to use the legs effectively in Chaturanga instills this awareness so that the legs can play an active role in poses such as Upward Facing Dog (Urdhva Mukha Svanasana), Bridge Pose (Setu Bandha Sarvangasana) and Upward Bow or Wheel Pose (Urdhva Dhanurasana).
How to Practice Chaturanga
To practice with integrity and ease, distribute the work throughout the body by combining the strength of your abdomen, spine, legs and heels.
Chaturanga vs pushups
The tendency with Chaturanga is to practice it like a push-up, bringing the elbows forward and loading the upper body. This causes misalignments in the shoulders, putting these delicate joints at risk.
To understand how this happens, hold your arms extended in front of you at shoulder height with your hands shoulder distance apart, as if you were in Plank Pose. Then bend your elbows so that they stick out. Observe the effect this has on your shoulders; the heads of your upper arms fall forward and your sternum (breastbone) drops. Now do it again, but this time clamp your elbows to your sides.
Pay attention to the position of your upper body: the head of the upper arm is in line with (not in front of) the side of your body and the breastbone remains floating.
Maintaining this alignment in the shoulders and chest while bearing weight is as challenging as it is crucial. But there are a few ways to make a well-tuned Chaturanga more accessible. First, practice the pose with your knees on the floor and carefully monitor your elbow alignment. Then notice how deep you are going as you lower yourself to the ground and catch yourself before you go too far. Finally, divide the effort of the pose between the upper and lower body, allowing the legs to play an active role.
Use your triceps
Try a variation that takes some of the difficulty out of the pose so you can focus on the details that will protect your shoulders while you develop strength.
Start in plank position. Make sure your hands are directly under your shoulders, your feet hip-distance apart and your heels stacked over your toes. Pull the belly button in to reach your core. Stretch your sternum forward as you press your heels back, feeling your body grow long and strong. Pull the front of your thighs toward the ceiling, but don’t let the tailbone follow or you’ll end up with your butt high in the air. Instead, release your tailbone toward your heels and notice how that makes you more compact in your center.
Keep your gaze on the floor and look slightly forward so that the crown of your head is a continuation of the line of your spine. From Plank, drop your knees to the floor, but maintain the lifted, engaged feeling in your lower abdomen, almost as if it were a tray carrying your lower back. Keep your toes pulled down so you can maintain the feeling of your heels pressing back. From here, recover your alignment: inhale, pull the heads of the shoulders up, away from the floor, and re-emphasize the lift in your abdomen as you point the tip of your tailbone downward.
As you exhale, bend your elbows, keeping them pulled toward your body, and slowly lower yourself toward the floor. Keep your body as straight as a plank of wood, don’t let your middle sag or stick your butt in the air. Note the difference between this modification and the Knees-Chest-Chin variation taught in many classes. Knees-Chest-Chin has many nice features, but is not an ideal model for printing Chaturanga alignment. Make sure that as you lower yourself to the floor, the heads of your upper arms remain level with your elbows (instead of falling toward the floor as with Knees-Chest-Chin).
If you are properly aligned, your stomach will reach the floor before your chest does.
Keeping your elbows at your sides, pull up through your core and press back up to your hands and feet. You feel your triceps working. If you don’t, you’ve probably left your elbows turned out while your shoulders carry the load of the work.
Catch yourself
The next adjustment teaches two characteristics of a healthy Chaturanga: catching yourself at elbow height and activating your legs. Using a belt, make a loop as wide as your hips. (If you hold the loop flat across your stomach at the hip bone, it should go from one side of your hips to the other.) Place it around your arms just above the elbows and come into Plank. As you inhale, reach your sternum and heels in opposite directions to lengthen, then lift the tops of your thighs and point the tailbone toward your heels.
Feel how the previous two actions prevent you from collapsing into your center and activate your core. As you exhale, energize your legs, keep shoulders up and chest extended forward, and bend your elbows until the strap holds you. Your shoulders should be at the same height as your elbows so that each arm creates a 9-degree angle.
Lowering yourself below elbow height makes it very difficult to maintain proper alignment of the shoulders and can compromise them. With the strap to support you, stay in the pose and reactivate the legs so they become lively participants. Heels back and heart forward will stimulate the quadriceps; the thighs up and tailbone down will engage the abdomen, giving the pose vitality in the center. To increase the difficulty and reinforce correct actions, use your core and legs to press back up to Plank.
The full pose
Ready to try the full pose? Come to Plank.
Ideally, your body in Chaturanga should look just like your body in Plank, except with your elbows bent. Emphasize these properties, lifting and firming the entire body. Look slightly forward so that your head does not droop (which tends to pull the shoulders down as you enter Chaturanga). As you exhale, keep your elbows pulled in and your shoulders lifted. Lower slowly. Create 9-degree angles with your arms, with your upper arms parallel to the floor and your forearms perpendicular. Your goal is to stay straight and strong; continue pressing your heels back and reaching your heart forward, keeping your body tight.
Avoid common pitfalls of Chaturanga: one tendency is to either sink into the middle of the torso (creating a backbend), another is to leave the butt in the air while the shoulders sink toward the ground (creating a pike). The more you can activate the front of your body so that it supports the back of your body, the more success you will have in avoiding these polarities.
Engage the abdomen and quadriceps by lifting the tops of the thighs toward the ceiling and pulling your tailbone toward your heels.
Another pitfall is that you put so much energy into reaching forward with the chest that you forget to push the heels back. When this happens, you come too far forward on your toes and lose leg strength, forcing the shoulders to work overtime.
When the shoulders carry the posture, they often slump, sacrificing alignment and creating vulnerability. To avoid this, stack your heels over your toes in Plank and continue pressing them back even as you enthusiastically extend your sternum forward and enter Chaturanga. If your legs come to the party, your shoulders will thank you.
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