Tadasana (Mountain Pose)

Tadasana looks like standing because it is standing, done on purpose. The difference is that ordinary standing is whatever habit has made of you after thirty years of desks, scooters and bad chairs, and Tadasana is standing arranged deliberately, bone over bone, with the muscles doing only the work they need to do.

The name comes from tada, a mountain. A mountain is not tense. It is simply settled, wide at the base, and going nowhere. That is the quality to aim for, and it is why the pose is usually the first thing taught and the last thing mastered.

Every standing asana is Tadasana with the limbs moved. If the plumb line is wrong here, it is wrong in Trikonasana and wrong in Virabhadrasana too, only harder to see. This is why a teacher who seems to spend an unreasonable amount of time on standing still is not wasting your class fee.

Two checks tell you almost everything.

The plumb line. Seen from the side, the ankle, the knee, the hip, the shoulder and the ear should stack roughly over one another. Ask someone to look, or stand sideways to a mirror once. Most people find the head sits forward of the shoulders and the pelvis sits forward of the ankles.

The four corners of the feet. Weight belongs on the base of the big toe, the base of the little toe, the inner heel and the outer heel, on both feet, at the same time. Shift your weight around slowly with the eyes closed and you will discover you have been living on one leg more than the other. Almost everybody has.

• If the lower back feels pinched, the tailbone has tipped back. Drop it.
• If the front ribs stick out, draw them down without slumping the chest.
• If the shoulders creep up, exhale and let them go. Then check again in ten seconds, because they will have crept back.
• If the toes are gripping the floor, you are fighting for balance rather than standing. Widen the feet.

The wall version described in the variations above settles all of these arguments in about a minute.

Nothing about the pose asks you to change your breath, and that is exactly what makes it useful. Stand, do nothing, and listen. Most people discover their breath is short, high in the chest, and a little held, particularly if they came straight from work.

Let it be normal for five breaths before you try to improve it. Then, without forcing, let the exhale get slightly longer than the inhale. The shoulders drop on their own. The jaw usually follows.

Tadasana is a good place to arrive before any breathing practice. Two minutes of standing, then sit down for Bhramari, and the breathing practice starts from a body that has already stopped fidgeting.

In Surya Namaskar, Tadasana is both the first position and the last. Standing with the palms joined at the chest is often called Pranamasana, and standing with the arms simply by the sides is called Samasthiti. Both are Tadasana wearing different arms.

What matters is that you return to it at the end of every round and actually stand there for one full breath. Beginners rush the last position and go straight into round two, and after six rounds they are breathing hard and have no idea why. That one breath at the top of each round is where the practice regulates itself.

Between rounds, it is also the place to notice the heart rate. If it has not settled at all by the time you begin the next round, you are going too fast for today.

A person who sits eight hours a day arrives with a predictable set of habits: head forward, upper back rounded, chest closed, hip flexors short, and a lower back that either flattens or over arches to compensate. None of that is a moral failure. It is what a chair does.

Tadasana is the counter instruction. It puts the head back over the shoulders, opens the front of the chest without arching the back, and asks the hip flexors to let the pelvis sit level. Practised for two minutes twice a day, at your desk if necessary, it does more for a stiff office body than an occasional ambitious class.

I tell working students to do it three times a day: once on waking, once at some point in the office, and once before bed. It costs nothing and needs no mat. If you are starting from scratch, the home practice guide shows where it fits in a short routine.

Thirty seconds is enough to be worth doing. Two minutes is where people start noticing things about themselves. Beyond about three minutes it becomes an endurance exercise, which is fine but is a different intention, and is not appropriate if your blood pressure runs low.

A sensible progression over a month:

• Week one: thirty seconds, eyes open, once a day.
• Week two: one minute, eyes open, checking the four corners of the feet.
• Week three: one minute with the eyes closed, near a wall.
• Week four: two minutes, and add the arms overhead for a few breaths at the end.

Anyone over forty coming back to movement after some years away will get more out of four honest weeks of this than out of chasing shapes. That is the whole premise of the beginners over forty approach we teach.

Standing still is measured in breaths as much as in seconds. Here is what I ask for, and the last column is the part that matters most.

Beyond three minutes it becomes a standing endurance exercise, which is a different intention and is not appropriate with low blood pressure.

Tadasana is on every one of the nine condition pages on this site, which is not a distinction any other pose has. The reason is dull and worth stating: it is the only posture that asks nothing of the joints and everything of the arrangement, so there is no body it has to be withheld from.

• Yoga for back pain uses it to re establish where a neutral lower back is, because most people who have hurt for months have lost that reference entirely.
• Yoga for neck and shoulder pain uses it for the head over the shoulders, which is the whole problem in one instruction.
• Yoga for weight loss and yoga for diabetes both start here because a standing practice has to begin from a stable stance before it can be repeated for thirty minutes.
• Yoga for high blood pressure uses it in place of the inversions it advises against, and yoga for thyroid does the same.
• Yoga for PCOS and yoga for anxiety use it as the standing pause before a breathing practice.

In sequences it opens and closes the ten minute morning routine, appears on almost every day of the seven day beginner plan, and is the one thing in the desk sequence that can be done in an office without anybody noticing.