Yoga Downward Dog Pose

Video Transcript

"Another posture you can use for warming up, but it's also used in yoga practice is downward dog or Adho Mukha Svanasana is also what you'll hear it called. So what you want to do is come back to your table top position. Find that nice grounded position with your hands. I discussed table top in a previous clip, but I will go through it briefly. But what you want to do is to find nice sunbursts of the fingertips, weight pressed down through, evenly through the hand. Your wrists will be lined up with your shoulders. Again if you have hyper-extended elbows like I do, find a way to turn those elbows out, so the elbow points are actually facing one another. You can slightly find that part between bent and straight, so you're not overextended but not bent. So what you'll do, is you'll tuck the toes behind you, and you're slowing going to push your sits bones towards the ceiling. You can stay up on your heels, and then press back. If you can not touch your heels down towards the earth, you can grab a blanket, or if you have a wedge or anything like that. Go back to that table top position. Put the toes just slightly in front of the blanket. Find that evenness between your shoulders and your wrists, and slowly press your sits bones up. If you overshot or undershot where your position is then slowly let your heels fall back on to the blanket. For your shoulders, again, same thing in table top, you want to take and turn the shoulder points towards one another and let the heart slightly melt toward the earth. Finding a way to lift the sits bones up towards the ceiling, and let the heart melt and flatten through the back. Again, some people may never be able to touch their heels down in downward dog, and that's ok. The important part is, is that you ease into the stretch. So as you're up here, you can slightly walk the feet, and let yourself warm up the feet. If you don't need the blanket as you walk the feet, you can scoot it out of the way. And let yourself walk, really walking through the feet. If you find any shoulder discomfort find a way to ease off the shoulders. You can pull up a little bit, through the shoulder blades, and let yourself press back. And again, rise up on the heels and let yourself press back. And these are just a couple of ways to warm yourself up and ease into downward dog."