Ashtanga Namaskara (Eight Limbed Salutation)

Ashtanga Namaskara means the salutation with eight limbs, and the count is literal. Lie in the position properly and exactly eight parts of you touch the floor: two feet, two knees, the chest, the chin, and two hands. The hips and the belly stay lifted, and the body makes a distinct arch from the toes to the chin.

It is the sixth position of Surya Namaskar, the lowest point of the round, and it is the position with the most obviously devotional character. In the older Indian usage a full eight limbed prostration, sometimes called sashtanga namaskara or dandavat pranam, is how respect is offered: the whole body brought to the ground.

In practice it is also the position most often done badly, because it arrives at speed, at the point in the round where people are tiring, and it requires the arms to lower the body slowly rather than let it fall. Almost every beginner falls. Learning not to is most of what this posture teaches.

Everybody thinks of this as a shape you arrive in. It is better understood as a movement you perform: a controlled descent from the plank to the floor over about two seconds, with the elbows tucked in.

That descent is doing the work. Muscles lengthening under load, which is what happens to your arms and chest on the way down, is one of the more effective ways to build strength, and it is the reason a person who has done sun salutations daily for a year has visibly stronger arms without ever having lifted a weight.

When you fall instead of lower, three things are lost at once. The strength stimulus disappears. The shoulders take an uncontrolled impact. And the chest lands flat, which means the slide forward into Bhujangasana starts from the wrong place and the cobra becomes a lower back crunch.

So the instruction I give is unglamorous: knees down first, then count one, two, as you bend the elbows. If you cannot count to two, take the all the way down variation for a month.

If you watch a room lower to the floor, you will see most of the elbows swing out sideways. It is not laziness, it is simply easier: the arms are in a mechanically stronger position out wide, so the body finds it.

The problem is what happens at the front of the shoulder. With the elbows flared, the head of the arm bone rolls forward and the soft tissue at the front of the joint gets compressed repeatedly. Once per round, twelve rounds a day, three hundred days a year, is a great many repetitions of a movement the shoulder does not enjoy, and it is the single most common way people accumulate a nagging shoulder ache from a daily practice.

• Squeeze the elbows in so they brush the sides of the ribs.
• Point them backwards along the body, not out to the sides.
• Expect it to be considerably harder. That difficulty is the arm strength you came for.
• If you cannot lower at all with the elbows in, lower onto the knees first, and if that fails, go all the way down.

This is the same instruction that governs a proper push up, and the habit transfers straight across.

The classical instruction is chin to the floor, and it puts the neck into a strong extension: the head tips back and the front of the throat lengthens. For a healthy neck at the speed of one breath, that is unremarkable.

For a neck with cervical spondylosis, degenerative changes, an old whiplash or a disc problem, repeated forced extension is not something to do casually, and it is one of the more common causes of a headache appearing after a fast practice. There is a simple and complete answer: bring the forehead down instead. The neck stays neutral, the eight points become seven, nobody minds, and the rest of the pose is unchanged.

I teach forehead down as the default to anyone over sixty, anyone with a desk neck, and anybody who reports even occasional neck pain. In four decades I have never seen a student lose anything by it. What they lose is a headache.

In Surya Namaskar this is position six, reached on an exhalation from the plank at position five, and left on an inhalation into the cobra at position seven. It is the hinge of the whole round: everything before it is going down, everything after it is coming back up.

Two practical notes for a real practice.

It gets harder as the rounds accumulate. By round six the arms are tired and the lowering degrades into a fall. When that happens, put the knees down and keep going, or stop at six rounds. A degraded round is not a round, it is practice at doing it badly.

The slide forward matters more than the shape. The chest slides along the floor first, then lifts. Get that right and the cobra opens the upper back. Get it wrong, pushing straight up and back, and the cobra becomes a lower back compression, which is where a great many sore backs in this sequence come from.

This is a strength position dressed as a devotional one, and it responds to patient graded practice like any other.

• Weeks one and two: wall salutation, ten repetitions, elbows tucked. Learn the elbow path with almost no load.
• Weeks three and four: in the round, lower all the way to the floor with the knees down, then slide forward. No attempt to hold anything off the ground.
• Weeks five and six: knees down, lower over a count of two, and keep the hips lifted for the last few centimetres. The arch begins to appear.
• Weeks seven and eight: the full eight point position, hips clear of the floor, on every round of a three round practice.

If you can do the full position on three rounds but it collapses by round six, do three good rounds. The number of rounds is not the achievement. The control is. Anyone rebuilding strength after years away should read the graded approach on the beginners over forty page before pushing the count up.

Inside a round this position lasts one breath and is passed through. Practised deliberately it is a short strength hold and the numbers are small.

Eight points or seven makes no practical difference. The forehead version is the one I teach as the default to anybody past sixty.

The eight point salute is the position between the lunge and the cobra in the sun salutation, and it is the one where a beginner is most likely to land heavily.

Come down under control: knees first, then chest, then chin, with the elbows staying in beside the ribs rather than flaring out. If the chin does not want to reach the floor, bring the forehead down instead. It becomes seven points, nothing is lost, and the neck is left alone.

It leads directly into Bhujangasana, and the quality of the cobra that follows is decided by whether the elbows stayed in here. Rest in Balasana if a round has taken more out of you than expected.

Around it: it is lowered into from Dandasana and it leads into the cobra, so a heavy landing here is felt in the lower back a position later. Warm up with Marjariasana, and if the shoulders are tired, drop out of the round and go to Adho Mukha Svanasana instead of grinding through. It appears only inside Surya Namaskar, which itself sits inside the ten minute morning routine. Finish in Savasana. The eight point count and the salutation both come from the hatha tradition rather than from any modern school, and anyone with a wrist or shoulder history should read the pages on their own condition before adding rounds.