Adho Mukha Svanasana (Downward Facing Dog)

Adho Mukha Svanasana means the downward facing dog pose: adho down, mukha face, svana dog. The name is descriptive, and anybody who has watched a dog get up from a nap has seen it done perfectly.

It is the eighth position of Surya Namaskar and by a distance the most photographed pose in modern yoga, which has done it some harm. The photographs show long straight legs, heels flat, a perfectly flat back, and they belong to people with a particular set of proportions and twenty years of practice. Beginners look at them, force the legs straight, round their lower back badly, and conclude they are bad at yoga.

The pose is actually two ideas held at once: push the floor away with the hands, and lift the sitting bones towards the ceiling. Everything else, including where your heels are, is a consequence of your particular skeleton. In several Indian traditions the same position in the sun salutation is called Parvatasana, the mountain, which describes the shape more honestly than the dog does.

This is the sentence I have repeated in the hall more than any other, and it is the whole teaching of the pose.

Here is why. The pelvis can only tip forward, sending the sitting bones up, if the hamstrings allow it. In a body that has sat in chairs for thirty years the hamstrings will not allow it, so when you straighten the legs the pelvis stays put and the lumbar spine rounds to make up the difference. Now you have a pose that looks like a downward dog and is actually a loaded spinal flexion with your body weight on it.

Bend the knees and the hamstrings go slack. The pelvis tips, the sitting bones lift, the spine lengthens, and the pose starts working on the shoulders and the trunk as intended. Over months the hamstrings lengthen and the legs straighten themselves without you asking.

• Bend the knees until you can feel the tailbone tipping up.
• Lengthen from the hands all the way to the sitting bones.
• Only then, slowly, begin to straighten the legs, stopping the instant the lower back rounds.

The same principle, and the same reason for it, runs through Uttanasana and every other forward bend.

This is the pose where wrists get sore, and it is almost always fixable.

The load in a downward dog should be spread across the whole hand, with a real emphasis on the mound at the base of the index finger and the base of the thumb. What most people do is let all the weight pour backwards into the heel of the palm, which compresses the wrist joint at its most vulnerable angle. Spread the fingers wide, press the knuckles down, and imagine trying to drag the mat backwards towards your feet without actually moving it.

For the shoulders, roll the upper arms outwards so the creases of the elbows face one another, then draw the shoulder blades down the back and broaden across the upper back. The shoulders should feel long, not jammed.

If the wrists still complain after a fortnight of this, take the forearm version. It is not a lesser pose. It asks more of the shoulders and nothing of the wrists, and for anyone with carpal tunnel syndrome it should simply be the default.

In Surya Namaskar this is position eight, taken on an exhalation, arriving from the cobra and leaving into the lunge. Older measurements of oxygen cost across the sequence found the demand peaking around this part of the round, which fits: it is the position where the whole body is working at once.

Three things make it work inside a flowing round.

Bend the knees. You have one breath and no time to negotiate with your hamstrings. Bent knees, long spine, hips high.

Push the floor away. After the cobra the shoulders want to collapse. Push actively for that one breath and the shoulders get their length back, which is exactly why the position sits where it does in the round.

Look before you step. The next position asks you to bring one foot forward between the hands. Lift the heel of that foot and shift the weight forward slightly before you step, and the step becomes possible. Details of that step are on the equestrian pose page.

Practised on its own rather than in a round, its natural counter pose is Balasana, the child's pose, for five slow breaths.

The head is below the heart in this pose. That is mild compared with a headstand, but it is not nothing, and there is a group of people who should keep the head level instead.

• Uncontrolled high blood pressure. Use the wall version, or keep the floor version to fifteen seconds and come up slowly.
• Glaucoma or raised eye pressure. Head low positions have been measured to raise pressure inside the eye by a substantial margin within a minute. Use the wall version and ask your eye doctor about inversions generally.
• Vertigo. The change of head height provokes it. Wall version, and come up over several seconds.
• Late pregnancy. Usually fine with wide feet and bent knees, but stop if there is any dizziness or abdominal pressure.
• Recent eye or ear surgery. Leave all head low positions out until cleared.

The wall version is a genuinely good pose and not a consolation prize. It teaches the shoulder action better than the floor version, because there is less weight in the way of the instruction.

Thirty seconds to one minute, repeated three times, with a rest on all fours or in a child's pose between. Inside the sun salutation it is one exhalation.

A month of building it:

• Week one: wall dog, one minute, twice a day. Learn the shoulders.
• Week two: chair dog, forty seconds, three times.
• Week three: full pose with the knees well bent, thirty seconds, three times.
• Week four: the same, forty five seconds, beginning to pedal the heels alternately for the last ten seconds.

Do not add the straight legs as a fifth week. Add them somewhere in the second year, if they come. In the meantime the bent knee version is doing everything the pose is meant to do, and doing it without a rounded spine under load.

Knees bent throughout, at every stage on this table. Straightening the legs is not a milestone and nothing on this page treats it as one.

If the hands slide forward, the fault is usually that the shoulders are ahead of the wrists rather than that the mat is cheap.

Downward dog is the most requested pose and the one I most often modify. It is on five of the condition pages here, always with bent knees and always briefly.

• Yoga for back pain uses it for the whole back line, thirty seconds at a time, knees generously bent so the hamstrings stop pulling on the pelvis.
• Yoga for neck and shoulder pain uses the wall version, hands flat on a wall at hip height, which gives the shoulders the shape without the body weight.
• Yoga for beginners over 40 treats it as a wrist question before it is a hamstring question, and so do I.
• Yoga for weight loss and yoga for diabetes include it as the one pose in a beginner practice that asks the arms to carry something.
• Yoga for anxiety uses it with the head supported on a block, which changes what the pose is for entirely.

In sequences it appears twice in every round of the sun salutation, once in the ten minute morning routine and on most days of the seven day beginner plan.