Chaturanga Dandasana is one of the most talked about yoga asanas and tends to create challenges for yoga practitioners and yoga teachers alike for two main reasons: the transition into the traditional version of the asana requires a significant amount of upper body strength, which is lacking for many practitioners; so many rules around this asana have surfaced over the years that it is easy to imagine that there is one perfect way to practice it versus a lot of incorrect ways. Read on to unpack all of this!
Let’s start by breaking down the main movements happening in the transition from Plank Pose into Chaturanga. The elbows begin in a position of extension and move into flexion. The shoulder joint begins in a position of flexion and moves into extension. Both movements occur under a considerable amount of our body weight and working on progressions can be really helpful here, for example, practicing Chaturanga at an incline against your kitchen counter or by lowering your knees to the floor before beginning the transition.
From Plank to Chaturanga we maintain the engagement of our core musculature to keep our spine in a neutral position and we also need a good degree of shoulder girdle stability to maintain a sense of control in the shoulder blades as we lower. Our shoulder blades are typically in a position of protraction (moving away from each other and wrapping round the sides of the ribcage) in Plank position. Ideally, we will want to avoid moving fully into retraction (shoulder blades hugging towards each other) as we lower to avoid moving our spine into a backbend. The video below shows some shoulder girdle mobility exercises which can really help with this!
Two of the common “rules” that circulate around practicing Chaturanga are that our hands must be directly under your shoulders in Plank before we transition, and our elbows shouldn’t leave the sides of your torso as we lower.
Take a look at your elbow joints for a moment as they move through flexion and extension. Notice that the joints are slightly oblique, resulting in your hands being positioned away from your body when your elbows are extended but towards the midline when your elbows are flexed. The angle between the axis of the forearm and the axis of the humerus when the elbow is extended is known as the ‘carrying angle’. This angle essentially prevents us from hitting our hands against our legs as we walk and swing our arms. The hand moving towards the midline when the elbow flexes allows us to easily direct the hand towards our face. The carrying angle typically ranges between 11° and 16° (Morrey 2000).
The carrying angle
If we always transition into Chaturanga with our hands directly underneath our shoulders, our elbows will naturally leave the sides of our torso because of the carrying angle. As we attempt to hug them back in, the latissimus dorsi and pectoralis major are activated which in turn internally rotate the shoulder joints. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but most teachers don’t like to see this! (We discussed internal rotation of the shoulder joint in my last blog post.) So, I recommend that you either try to place your hands wider than shoulder-width before transitioning into Chaturanga, or just stop worrying so much about your elbows leaving the sides of your waist.
If you’d like to explore some different ways to practice Chaturanga check out my article for Yoga Journal here looking at 6 different variations.
https://www.yogajournal.com/practice/ways-to-practice-chaturanga
Reference:
Morrey, B. (ed). (2000) The elbow and its disorders. Philadelphia: WB Saunders.
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