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Filmed on location at Yogatree Studios - @yogatreestudios - top-rated yoga studios in Toronto

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Hello and welcome to my channel - In today's video, I’m going to talk to you about a foundational yoga pose - the chaturanga dandasana or chaturanga as its popularly called.

You’ll find this pose in most modern yoga classes and is used as a transition between high plank and upward dog in sun salutations or surya namaskars.

However, this pose is often neglected, because not a lot of time is spent in this pose, and as a result I see a lot of mistakes being made by students in yoga classes.

Today, I’m going to break down this pose and focus on a few key areas to improve your chaturanga, but also help build strength in the entire body.

#1 The most common mistake the ppl make in this pose is right at the beginning their hands puff in plank, and this is something I discuss in detail in this video, so you can go ahead and check it out, and learn to stretch your fingers wide and spread the weight evenly across your hands.

Once you have your palms flat lets look at the starting alignment in high plank - your shoulders should stack on top of your wrists, and the heels on top of the toes, this gives you the correct length for your sun salutation poses. Looking slightly ahead, we bend the elbows as we exhale and lower down towards the floor.

#2 Here’s where I see a lot of people collapsing on the ground and coming down with very little muscular engagement. What I mean by that is that gravity is doing the work of bringing the body down and the muscles are not in control of the descent whatsoever. This not only puts pressure on the wrists, but also does not help build any strength in the body.

I’ll use an analogy from lifting weights here, anytime the weight is moving down whether that’s in a squat or a bench press, you want to control the negative movement by engaging the muscles, it’s the exact same principle here.

Now, what if you don’t have the strength to support your body weight and control it on the way down? first thing to do in that case is to lower the knees to help ease the weight on your hands.
Next, press your hands into the floor as if you’re trying to push the floor away from you. Fill the space in the upper back by protracting your shoulder blades or scapula, and try and keep that space between the scapula full as you lower down to the ground, as opposed to letting them come together. This builds strength in the shoulders and eases some of the pressure on the wrists.

#3 Another Mistake I see a lot is the elbows winging out on the way down. You want to turn your elbows so the inner part of the elbow is facing forward, this helps to keep the elbows tucked close to the body as you come down in chaturanga.

chaturanga is not just about strength and engagement in the shoulders, its a total body exercise and you must keep the core and the legs engaged throughout as well. For how to strengthen the core, check out this video.

Now let’s work on some exercises that you can do to build strength and also build muscular awareness to know which muscles to engage in chaturanga. The challenge with practicing chaturanga is that if your form isn’t correct you can damage the wrists by adding excessive reps. So let’s work on building strength without putting weight on the joints.

As a bonus I’m going to add in a movement that will make you look like a real pro in your next yoga class. In high plank with your heels on top of the toes, start moving back and forth by pushing on your toe mounts. Incorporate this into your chaturanga so when you bend your elbows to about 90 degrees, you push forward from your toe mounts and swoop up into your Upward facing dog or cobra.

Keep practicing these moves and your will find new found strength in your chaturanga.

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