Makarasana (Crocodile Pose)

Makarasana, Crocodile Pose, is the resting position of the prone group: lying face down with the legs comfortably apart and the head either turned to one side or resting on folded forearms. Makara is a water creature of Indian myth, usually rendered as a crocodile, and the name describes an animal at rest on a river bank rather than a shape you have to construct.

It is not a backbend and it is not the sphinx. If you are propped up on your elbows with the chest lifted and the chin in your hands, the back is working and you are in a mild backbend, not a rest. In Makarasana nothing is held. The forearms are flat, the forehead rests, and the whole weight of the legs is given to the floor.

It is not Balasana either, although both are rests. Child's Pose kneels, which asks something of the knees and ankles, and it takes the head below the heart. Makarasana lies flat, so there is no knee bend, no compression anywhere, and the head stays level with the body. That makes it the rest to choose when the knees are the problem, and Balasana the rest to choose when lying on the abdomen is the problem.

Its two real jobs are worth stating plainly. The first is that it is the rest between prone poses: after Bhujangasana, Salabhasana or Dhanurasana you simply turn your head and stop, without getting up, which is what keeps a floor practice going for an older body. The second is that it is the best place in the whole practice to learn what breathing into the back of the ribs feels like.

This is the pose's real content, so it is worth spending a minute on.

Lie face down and the entire front of the body is shut: the abdomen is against the floor, the front of the ribs cannot expand, and the usual belly breathing is simply unavailable. The breath therefore goes where it can, which is into the sides and the back of the ribcage. You can feel the back rise and widen against the air behind you on each inhalation, and most students meet that sensation here for the first time in their lives.

Why it matters: a great many people breathe only into the top of the chest, particularly under stress, and a great many others have been told to breathe into the belly and can do nothing else. The back of the ribs is the part almost nobody uses, and it is a large part. Finding it changes what a breathing practice feels like. This is why I put two minutes of Makarasana before a first session of Anulom Vilom with a beginners' group: they arrive at the sitting practice having already felt their own ribs move.

• Do not try to breathe deeply. Let the breath be ordinary and simply notice where it goes.
• Count twenty breaths if you need something to do, and then stop counting.
• Let the exhalation get slightly longer than the inhalation, without forcing.
• A folded blanket under the abdomen makes the whole thing easier, particularly on a hard floor.

The same lesson is available in Child's Pose, which folds the front of the body shut in a different direction, and the two are worth alternating so the breathing is not tied to one position.

Makarasana is unloaded in a way very few positions are. The spine is horizontal, nothing is bearing weight, the legs are heavy and the head is supported. When somebody in my class feels a twinge in their lower back during a practice, this is where I ask them to go, along with a folded blanket under the abdomen if the arch feels sharp.

It is worth being careful about what that does and does not mean. It is a rest, not a treatment. The Cochrane review of twenty one trials and 2,223 participants in chronic low back pain found small improvements in back related function from yoga compared with no exercise, found little or no difference against other exercise, and found increased back pain to be the most commonly reported harm, with no serious side effects reported in any trial. That finding is about practising yoga, not about lying down, and I am not going to claim that a resting position cures anything. If your back is painful today, and particularly if pain runs down a leg, see a doctor and read yoga for back pain before you build a practice.

What lying still does have some evidence behind it as a category. In the PRYSMS randomised trial, 180 adults with the metabolic syndrome practised either restorative yoga or stretching over 48 weeks, using five main resting poses held for ten to fifteen minutes each with the eyes covered, and fasting glucose fell more in the yoga group than in the stretching group at twelve months, while blood pressure showed no difference. A modest finding, honestly reported, and it is the reason the restorative poses are on this site at all rather than being treated as filler between the real ones.

Two uses, two very different durations. As a rest between rounds it is seconds; as a practice it is minutes.

Daily is fine, several times a day is fine. Nothing is loaded and nothing can be overdone, and the only real limit is the neck if the head is turned, which is why changing sides at the halfway point matters. The general argument for short and frequent over long and rare is in how often should you do yoga.

Makarasana sits inside the prone group and it earns its keep by not requiring anybody to get up. Warm the spine with Marjariasana, then Cobra, rest here for twenty seconds, then the locust, rest here, then the bow if you are doing it, rest here again. For a body in its sixties or seventies, not having to stand up between poses is the difference between a practice that gets done and one that gets abandoned.

As a practice of its own it goes near the end, before or instead of Savasana. The counter pose after a few minutes face down is Balasana or simply rolling onto the back with the knees hugged in, which lets the lower back settle into neutral.

It is also the substitute for Savasana for anybody who cannot lie comfortably on their back. That includes people with reflux, people whose lower back aches lying flat, and, quite often, people in their first class who find lying on their back with their eyes closed in a room of strangers more than they want. Nobody needs to explain that to me, and nobody should have to.

Before a breathing practice it is genuinely useful. Two minutes here, then sit up slowly for Anulom Vilom or a few rounds of Bhramari, and the sitting practice starts from a body that has already found its ribs. It is also a reasonable last thing at night, though Yoga Nidra does that job at greater length.

Very few people, and the alternatives are as good as the pose.

• Pregnancy. After the first weeks, lying face down is not appropriate. Use the side lying rest with a bolster between the knees, which is the standard prenatal rest and is entirely comfortable.
• Reflux or a hiatus hernia. Try it briefly with a blanket under the abdomen and stop if it makes things worse.
• Abdominal surgery or a hernia. Wait for clearance, then use the blanket.
• Neck. Folded arms with the forehead down, rather than the head turned. This is the version for cervical spondylosis, which is common after fifty, and the same principle runs through yoga for neck and shoulder pain.
• Shoulders. Arms alongside the body rather than folded in front, since the folded position asks for a fair amount of forward reach.
• Breathing. If lying flat makes breathing harder, or during an asthma episode, sit up. This pose restricts the front of the chest deliberately, and a compromised breath should not be restricted further.
• A large abdomen, or difficulty getting to the floor. The seated version, folded forward over a table with the forehead resting, gives the whole back breathing lesson and none of the difficulty.

For everybody else this is one of the two or three most useful things in the library and it takes two minutes. If you would like to be shown where the blanket goes, come to a class, or start with a first class.