Trikonasana (Triangle Pose)

Trikonasana means the triangle pose, from tri three and kona angle. The full name in most schools is Utthita Trikonasana, the extended triangle, and the extension in the name is the instruction: the body reaches out sideways before it goes down.

It appears in the Ministry of Ayush common protocol and in nearly every school of hatha yoga, and it is one of the four or five standing poses a beginner will meet in their first month. It is also one of the most consistently misunderstood, because from a photograph it looks like a person bending down to touch their ankle, and that is not what is happening at all.

What is actually happening is a side bend of the spine held up by two strongly working legs, with the chest rotating open towards the ceiling. The hand on the shin or the block is a resting point, not a destination. The whole difficulty and the whole benefit lie in keeping the underneath side of the waist as long as the upper side while gravity does its best to fold you.

Stand up and try this. Reach your right hand out to the right as far as it will go, keeping both shoulders in one line and the chest facing forward. Notice how the right side of your waist has to lengthen and the left side has to work to hold you.

That is the pose. Everything after it is just letting the hand come down.

What most beginners do instead is turn the chest towards the floor and reach down for the ankle. It feels productive because the hamstring complains loudly, but the spine is now bending forward instead of sideways, the top shoulder has rolled in, and the lateral muscles that the pose exists to work have been switched off entirely.

The wall test settles it in one attempt. Stand with your back a few centimetres from a wall and do the pose. If your bottom shoulder blade and your top shoulder blade both stay near the wall, you are bending sideways. If your chest turns to face the floor and your top shoulder leaves the wall by a foot, you are folding forward. Almost everybody does the second one the first time, and almost everybody can correct it within one class once they can feel it.

Nowhere in particular. This is the most liberating sentence I can offer about this pose.

The hand should land wherever it can rest lightly while both sides of the waist stay equally long. For a very flexible person that is the floor. For most adults it is the shin. For a stiff beginner it is a block set at its tallest, or a chair seat, and there is no version of this in which the pose is worth less.

What goes wrong when people insist on the floor is a chain of collapses: the underneath waist shortens, the top shoulder rolls forward, the chest turns down, and the front knee gets hyperextended to buy a few more centimetres. Every one of those is a step away from the pose.

Two useful checks while you are in it:

• Can you take five percent of the weight off the bottom hand without wobbling? If not, you are leaning on it, so raise it.
• Is the space between the bottom ribs and the hip the same on both sides? If the underneath one has closed up, come up a little.

Students think of this as an upper body pose because the interesting part is happening in the waist and the shoulders. The legs are where it is actually held.

The front leg. The thigh is firm, the kneecap lifted, and the knee tracking over the middle of the foot rather than rolling inward. Do not lock it hard. A knee jammed backwards under a wide stance is one of the few genuinely risky habits in a beginner practice.

The back leg. This is the one that gets abandoned. Press the outer edge of the back foot firmly into the floor and firm the back thigh strongly, and roll the top of the back thigh backwards. The modelling study of this pose found the gluteal muscles of the rear leg among the main contributors, which matches exactly what a teacher sees: when the back leg switches on, the whole pose stops sagging.

A simple test. In the pose, try to lift your bottom hand off its support for three seconds. If you can, the legs are holding you. If you fall in, they are not.

The classical instruction is to turn the head and look at the raised thumb. It is also the part of the pose most likely to give somebody a headache, and it is entirely optional.

Turning the head upward while the spine is side bent asks a good deal of the neck, and for a person with cervical spondylosis, an old whiplash or a stiff desk neck, holding that for a minute is a poor bargain. There is nothing in the pose that depends on it: the legs, the trunk work and the chest opening are all unchanged if you look straight ahead or down at your front foot.

What I teach, and what I would suggest for most adults: look forward for the first two months. Then, if the neck is comfortable, turn the head for the last ten seconds of the hold only. If you ever feel a pull, or a headache begins later that day, go back to looking forward and stay there. Nobody has ever been held back by this.

Thirty seconds to a minute on each side, once or twice, always both sides. It belongs in the standing section of a practice, after the sun salutations have warmed the body and before any seated work.

A month of building it:

• Week one: at a wall, hand on a block, thirty seconds a side, looking forward.
• Week two: away from the wall, hand on the block, forty seconds a side, checking the back leg deliberately.
• Week three: hand on the shin if that keeps the waist long, forty five seconds a side.
• Week four: one minute a side, adding the head turn for the last ten seconds if the neck is happy.

It pairs well with Vrikshasana in a short standing sequence: one pose asks for width and one asks for stillness, and together they cover most of what a standing practice is for. Come back to Tadasana for one breath between sides, which is the counter pose and also the check.

Everything on this table is per side, and both sides always get the same. The hand height is the variable, not the hold.

The hand belongs on the shin or a block for most people, permanently. Reaching the floor is a proportion of your own limbs, not an achievement.

The triangle is the standing pose that teaches the difference between bending sideways and bending forwards, and that distinction is why it turns up on seven condition pages.

• Yoga for beginners over 40 uses it with the hand on the shin rather than the floor, which keeps the chest turning instead of the body folding.
• Yoga for neck and shoulder pain keeps the gaze forward rather than up at the raised hand, which is the single change that makes this pose usable with a sore neck.
• Yoga for weight loss and yoga for diabetes both use it as a repeatable standing pose that works the legs without any jumping.
• Yoga for PCOS and yoga for thyroid include it for the side of the body, which almost nothing else in a short practice reaches.
• Yoga for high blood pressure keeps the arm down rather than overhead and the hold short.

It appears in the ten minute morning routine, on the standing days of the seven day beginner plan, and in a standing side bend form in the desk sequence.