ASANA BREAKDOWN: Downward Facing Dog or Adho Mukha Svanasana

Downward Facing Dog or Adho Mukha Svanasana is likely a pose you will practice many times in a yoga class. Ensuring you’re doing it correctly avoids injury and brings more fun into your practice. Once you master this foundational asana, much more potential opens up for your body, mind, and spirit.

Enjoy ~

Benefits:

• Stretches lower body, souls of feet, achilles, calves, and hamstrings.

• Builds strength through the upper body. 

• It helps to open the chest and shoulders to align the spine. 

• With the head below the heart, this inversion helps improve blood flow through the body. 

• Relieves tension from shoulders, neck and upper back.

Tips and Tricks:

• Engage Hasta Banda, or hand lock. Spread your fingers like a starfish and press down through your pointer finger and thumb. 

• Bring ears in line with biceps.

• Find a gentle bend to elbow and squeeze inner elbows toward one another, like you were holding a block between. This will help to externally rotate shoulders and create more space for the neck. 

• If you have tighter, shorter hamstrings, BEND YO KNEES! 

• Tilt the pelvis forward and send the sits bones toward the sky to help keep the spine long.

• Inwardly rotate thighs.

• Engage the core and protect the low back by hugging the navel in and knitting together the low ribcage. This will prevent collapse through the mid back.

• Experiment with taking the gaze toward the belly button and then back down between the knees.

DON’T RUSH! Enjoy this pose! We usually time Down Dog as a transition posture. Challenge the body and the mind to be still and see what comes up!