108 Surya Namaskar

108 Surya Namaskar is 108 consecutive rounds of the sun salutation, done in one session. At a steady pace it takes 90 to 150 minutes including rests, which is the figure the institutional guides also give, and it covers roughly 1,296 individual positions. It is usually done once, at a solstice, an equinox, a new year or a festival, as a marked occasion rather than as a weekly practice.

Who it is for: somebody who already practises the sun salutation daily, who can do 24 rounds comfortably without their breath running away, and who has four clear weeks to build. Nobody else. If you have never counted rounds, start at the twelve position sun salutation and come back in three months. This is the one page on this site where I would rather you left than continued.

The one number that matters more than 108 is your current honest round count. Everything below is built on it. If today you can do 12 rounds and finish breathing through the nose, you have a realistic four week route to 108. If 12 rounds leaves you sitting down, you have a three month route, and pretending otherwise is how people end up with a strained shoulder and a week off.

A word about the aim. In forty years I have watched a great many people attempt this and the ones who complete it are almost never the fittest in the hall. They are the ones who chose a slow pace at round one and did not change it. The sequence does not get harder at round 90 because your muscles have failed. It gets harder because you started too fast at round 5.

108 is a counting number in Indian tradition rather than a physiological one, and it is honest to say so plainly. A japa mala, the string used for counting repetitions of a name or a mantra, carries 108 beads plus one larger bead to mark the join. The number recurs across Hindu, Buddhist and yogic counting, and the institutional guides describe it as standing for completeness. There are various numerological explanations offered for it. None of them is a reason to prefer 108 rounds to 100 rounds for your knees.

What the number does supply is a fixed target that cannot be negotiated downwards in the middle. That is not a small thing. 108 divides neatly into four blocks of 27, or twelve blocks of nine, or nine blocks of twelve, and every one of those divisions is a usable pacing structure. I teach the four blocks of 27, because three short pauses across two hours is enough rest to stay safe and few enough that the session keeps its shape.

If you want the practice and not the number, 54 rounds is half a mala and a genuinely respectable session, and it is what I would suggest to most people over sixty who ask about this. Doing 54 well is worth more than doing 108 badly, and nobody except you will ever know the difference.

This assumes you begin able to do 12 rounds comfortably, five days a week. Every number below is rounds per session, and the rest days are not optional.

Read the shape rather than the numbers. One long session a week, one medium, one short and easy, and two rest days. Week four is a taper: you do less, not more, in the week before the attempt, which is the part almost every online plan gets wrong by pushing the biggest session two days before.

The rule for progressing is not the calendar, it is this: you may attempt the next long session only if you finished the last one breathing through the nose and were not stiff two days later. If either of those failed, repeat the week. Repeating a week costs you seven days. Not repeating it costs some people a month, and the frequency argument behind that is in how often you should do yoga.

Some institutional guides suggest adding six rounds every one or two days, which reaches 108 in six weeks or so. That arithmetic works on paper and it ignores connective tissue, which adapts more slowly than muscle and does not announce itself until it is sore. Four weeks from a base of 24, or three months from a base of 12, is what I have actually seen work.

If you are starting from nothing, do not use this table. Spend two months on the ordinary practice as set out for beginners over forty or in the seven day beginner plan, get to a comfortable daily 12, and then start week one.

Three numbers to fix before you start, in this order.

• Seconds per round. A comfortable slow round is 45 to 55 seconds. At 50 seconds, 108 rounds is 90 minutes of movement, and with four pauses you are at about 105 minutes. Faster than 40 seconds a round is a different exercise and not one to attempt at this volume.
• Rounds per block. 27, four times. Pause for 90 seconds in Balasana between blocks and drink to thirst.
• Start time. Begin early. In Bangalore that means starting by half past six in the summer months, because a two hour session finishing at half past nine in a warm hall is a heat problem rather than a yoga problem.

Set a timer that chimes every 27 rounds rather than one that counts down two hours. A countdown clock makes people speed up. The single commonest pacing error I see is a first block finished ten minutes faster than the second, which guarantees a bad third block.

Eat nothing for two to three hours beforehand and nothing at all in the hour before. This is the most demanding thing on this site, the abdomen is compressed 108 times, and the head passes below the heart twice a round, roughly 216 times in total. A full stomach makes all three of those worse.

Wear as little as the setting allows, keep a towel to hand, and put a folded blanket where the back knee lands. Over 108 rounds a hard floor under one knee stops being a minor detail by round 30.

Everybody loses count somewhere in the second hour. Choose a method that does not depend on your concentration.

• A mala. 108 beads, one bead moved per round. This is the traditional method and it is the best, because the string itself is the count and the larger marker bead tells you when you have arrived.
• Stones or beans. Count out 108 small objects into a bowl beforehand and move one across at the end of each round. Slower to set up, impossible to argue with.
• Four blocks of 27 on paper. A card with four rows of 27 boxes, ticked with a pencil. Ugly, and it works.
• Counting in nines. Twelve sets of nine, holding only the set number in your head. Best for people practising alone without props, and the method most likely to drift by two or three rounds.

What does not work is counting in your head, and what works even less well is a phone. A phone in front of you during a two hour session is a two hour argument with yourself.

In a group, one person counts aloud for everybody and nobody else counts at all. That is the real advantage of doing this in a hall rather than alone, and it is why the count is the first thing I take away from students on the day.

Decide your stopping rules before round one, because your judgement at round 80 will not be as good as your judgement now. Stop, and mean it, if any of these appear.

• You cannot breathe through the nose for two consecutive rounds. Slow down first. If the next two rounds are the same, stop.
• You feel light headed, or the room greys at the edges when you come up from the fold. Sit down immediately, do not walk anywhere, and do not resume that day.
• Any sharp pain, anywhere. A dull tired ache in the shoulders at round 70 is expected. A sharp pain in a wrist, a knee, a shoulder or the lower back is the end of the session, not a thing to work through.
• Pins and needles, or numbness, down an arm or a leg. Stop and get it looked at.
• You stop sweating, or you feel cold, in a warm room. That is a heat warning and it means stop, get out of the heat and drink.
• Nausea, headache or confusion. Stop. In a session this long these can also be signs of drinking too much rather than too little, which is covered below.

What actually happens at round 60, in almost everybody: the shoulders are the first thing to go, not the legs and not the lungs. The lift in cobra shrinks, the plank starts to sag, and the arms feel heavy in the raised arms position. That is normal and it is the exact moment to take the knees down in plank for the remaining rounds and to make the cobra half the size. People who instead try to hold the shape they had at round 10 are the ones who finish with a shoulder problem.

The second thing that happens around there is boredom, and it catches people out more than fatigue does. There is nothing wrong with you. Move one bead, and do the next round.

Stopping at 60 or at 81 is not a failure. It is a good long practice and a better decision than most. Write the number down, and it is your new base for the next attempt.

This is where a long session differs from a normal one, and where the standard advice to drink plenty of water becomes actively wrong.

Drinking too much plain water during prolonged exercise can lower blood sodium, a condition called exercise associated hyponatremia, defined as a serum sodium level below 135 millimoles per litre developing during or up to 24 hours after activity. The risk increases substantially for activity lasting more than two hours, and it rises with ambient temperature. A 108 round session at a slow pace sits either side of that two hour line, which is precisely why it is worth knowing about. Its early symptoms, nausea, headache and confusion, are the same as the symptoms of the heat problems people expect, which is what makes it easy to get wrong and then treat by drinking more.

The prevention advice in the clinical guidance is not a fixed volume. It is to drink to thirst rather than to a schedule, and to take some sodium with your fluid, from salty food rather than from tablets, which have not been shown to help. In practical terms, for a two hour morning session in a warm hall: a glass of water before you start, drink to thirst at the three block pauses, keep a pinch of salt in a lemon drink or eat something salty afterwards, and do not force fluid down because a plan told you to.

On heat, the honest instruction is to start early and finish before the hall warms up. If you are sweating heavily, the floor is becoming slippery, which is its own hazard across 1,296 positions. Keep a towel down.

The ordinary contraindications for the sun salutation all apply, and at this volume several of them become absolute rather than a matter of modification.

• Uncontrolled high blood pressure, or any known heart condition, without clearance from your doctor. The head passes below the heart roughly 216 times. See yoga with high blood pressure for what to do instead.
• Any acute back injury, a disc problem, or sciatica. 108 forward folds is the wrong prescription. The back pain page sets out a gentler route.
• Glaucoma, a recent eye operation, or retinal problems. Repeated inversion of the head is the issue.
• Hernia, or abdominal or chest surgery in the last six months.
• Pregnancy. At any stage. This is not the practice for it.
• Uncontrolled diabetes, because a two hour session with nothing to eat needs planning that is specific to you. Read yoga with diabetes and speak to your doctor about food and timing first.
• Any wrist, elbow or shoulder injury. The upper body carries this session and there is no version of 108 rounds that spares a bad wrist.
• Fever, an active infection, or a bad night's sleep before the day. Postpone. The date is not important.

Two groups need a smaller number rather than a prohibition. Anybody over sixty five: 54 rounds, and I would ask you to do it where somebody can see you. Anybody who has done this before and stopped early last time for a physical reason: repeat the number you stopped at, do not exceed it.

The figures circulating for 108 rounds, and there are some very confident ones, are not from measurement of 108 rounds. Energy cost depends on your body weight, your pace and your height, and no published study has put a gas analyser on somebody doing 108 of them.

What has been measured is narrower and more interesting. In a study of nine soldiers practising for an hour daily, oxygen consumption during the actual practice of the sun salutation fell from 0.794 litres per minute at three months to 0.560 litres per minute at eleven months, with heart rate falling from 92 to 87 beats per minute over the same period. In other words the same practice became cheaper as they became fitter, which is what training is, and it also means that the fitter you get the fewer calories the same 108 rounds will cost you. A comparative study found that the fast version of the sequence behaves like aerobic exercise, raising systolic pressure and muscular endurance, while the slow version behaves like yoga training, lowering diastolic pressure. A systematic review of fourteen studies reports improvements in strength, flexibility, VO2 max, resting heart rate, blood pressure, body mass index and waist circumference across the literature.

So: a 108 round session is unquestionably a large amount of physical work, and if you are practising the sequence with weight in mind, the daily 12 to 24 rounds you do in the build up will matter far more than the one long session at the end of it. That is the point most of the internet has backwards. What actually reduces weight is what you eat and how much you move on the other 360 days, as set out on the weight loss page.

Two things to print: the build up, and the day itself. Put the build up on a wall where you will see it and tick the days.

The four week build up. Week 1: 18, 12, 24, rest, 18, 27, rest. Week 2: 24, 12, 36, rest, 24, 45, rest. Week 3: 27, 12, 54, rest, 27, 72, rest. Week 4: 27, 12, 36, rest, 12, rest, 108.

The day itself, in order.

1. Sit, 5 minutes. Sukhasana. Lay out the mala. Fix the pace and the stopping rules.
2. Warm the spine, 5 minutes. Twenty slow rounds of Marjariasana.
3. Wrists and shoulders, 5 minutes. Three one minute holds of Adho Mukha Svanasana, knees bent.
4. Block one, rounds 1 to 27. About 23 minutes at 50 seconds a round. Then Balasana, 90 seconds, drink to thirst.
5. Block two, rounds 28 to 54. Same pace. Balasana, 90 seconds.
6. Block three, rounds 55 to 81. Knees down in the plank from here. Cobra half height. Balasana, 90 seconds.
7. Block four, rounds 82 to 108. Do not speed up for the last nine.
8. Rest, 15 minutes. Savasana, covered, nothing to do.

Alternate the leading leg every round so that each side takes 54. Nine rounds of anulom vilom after the savasana, sitting up, is worth adding if you are still able to sit up straight, and skipping it is no great loss on this particular day.

A printable build up chart with tick boxes is being prepared as a one page PDF and will be linked from here when it exists. It is not linked yet.

The round does not change for a long session. It is the same twelve positions: Tadasana with the palms joined, Urdhva Hastasana, Uttanasana, Ashwa Sanchalanasana, Dandasana, Ashtanga Namaskara, Bhujangasana, Adho Mukha Svanasana, and then the lunge, the fold, the raised arms and standing again. The breath rule is unchanged: inhale as the body opens, exhale as it folds. The full position by position teaching is on the sun salutation page and there is no reason to relearn it here.

Three things do change at volume. The lunge alternates legs every round rather than every half round, so keep the pattern simple and do not lose it in the third block. The plank goes to the knees for the second half of the session, deliberately and not as a concession. And the cobra is made smaller, about a third of your usual lift, because it is the position that quietly accumulates the most fatigue in the lower back across two hours.

The day after. Expect the shoulders and the front of the thighs to be sore, and expect it to be worse on the second morning than on the first. Do not practise the sequence at all for three days. Walk, and do the gentle end of the ten minute morning routine without the plank or the cobra. Come back to your normal daily rounds on day four, at half the number, and to full rounds in a week. The people who get injured by 108 rounds are usually injured in the week afterwards rather than on the day.