Downward-Facing Dog Exploratorium

Downward-facing dog is one of those ubiquitous yoga poses, spanning styles, methods, disciplines, and approaches. It is a defining (visual) symbol of contemporary yoga. I am a bit tempted to go on a bit here and talk about down dog as a concept deserving its rightful place in yoga's ever-evolving polysemic lexicon (meaning a vocabulary of words which have many and different meanings depending on the context, courtesy of the always thoughtful and thought provoking Matthew Remski), but I'll confine myself to what usually fascinates me in my practice and that is the alignment of the human flesh in this pose--a pose that is as basic as it is wildly advanced.

In particular, the front end of the pose is where it gets especially interesting: the arms and the hands. Practicing down dog in particular and asana in general requires using your hands and arms and weight-bearing on them. This coupled with contemporary lifestyle habits and patterns is often a recipe for sore wrists, misused shoulders, and jammed necks, to name but a few abominations.

Tom Myers puts it very well when he says that "the arms have to control the finest instrument the world has ever known—the human hand—at one end, and are anchored into the head, neck, upper spine, ribs, low back, hips, sacrum, and even arguably the femurs at their other end." (Myers 2012). In other words, a lot is at stake when we practice down dog or any other pose that derives from it (plank, low pushup, handstand, arm balances, side plank...). Further, "the arms are highly complicated bits of machinery, very handy accoutrements to our body’s repertoire, and amenable to the poetry of bird’s wings and nonverbal haiku" (Ibid.). Whereas the legs lead us to the world and into our environment, our arms and hands bring the world to us.

Tom Myers identifies 4 arm lines, presented very schematically below:

• Deep Front Arm Line connecting pec minor (tight chest, anyone?)-biceps-supinators (radius bone rotators)-thumb muscles
• Superficial Front Arm Line connecting pec major-latissimus-teres major-hand/wrist flexors (undersides of forearm in down dog)-palm surface of the fingers
• Deep Back Arm Line connecting rhomboids-levator (pesky villain)-rotator cuff muscles-triceps-pinky finger muscles
• Superficial Back Arm Line: traps-deltoid-hand/wrist extensors (tops of forearm in down dog)-back/top of the hand

Myers further compares the arms lines as the four aspects of a bird's wing, with the superficial and deep front arm lines being the bottom of the wing and the superficial and deep back arm lines being the top of the wing. In this cute video on How Wings Work, we are told that extending the wing fully creates a smooth surface for flying. We are also told that the bird's first finger allows it to fly slow speed without falling out of the air.

Where am I going with this? What I am trying to say is that the arm lines (especially the front arm lines vs. the back arm lines) need to be balanced for down dog to be an integrated pose rather than overusing the back arm lines at the expense of the front arm lines. The underside of the wrist—where a lot of us collapse in down dog—is called the volar surface of the wrist, which means the hollow of the hand and it is etymologically rooted in the Latin for "fly."

In terms of the lines above, my take is this:

• The Superficial Back Arm Line is the line that tends to overwork and grip in down dog, starting with the upper traps, the deltoids, the tops of the forearms and hands. The one part of this line that is often asleep and needs to be nudged is the mid and lower fibers of the trapezius muscles which have the wonderful function to take the inner edges of your shoulder blades down your back and thus create a lot of freedom at the base of the neck/tops of the shoulders. But we'll get to that in a moment.
• The Superficial Front Arm Line is your flying line: if the undersides of the forearms and palmar surface of the hands engage isometrically (you think of the action but you are not actually doing it), this will keep the tunnel in your carpal tunnel, will give space for the ligaments that maintain the arch of the hand to do their work and also begin to take the outer edge of your shoulder blades up (away from the floor), like bird wings spreading and getting ready to fly (with the help of the lats and the teres major).
  (This is a good place for a caveat: in many yoga classes, students are instructed to take the outer edges of the shoulder blades toward the floor in down dog and wrap them towards the outer armpits with the idea of lifting the inner armpits; what I am describing here disagrees with this instruction. I feel that this "wrap" is what the wonderful Barbara Benagh calls "borrowing" without giving back: like shortening your bottom ribs in parsvokonasana (side angle pose) and bowing out the top to allow your hand to reach the floor or like using the mobile T12-L1 juncture in your spine and pretend that your top chest is open. Further, if you take your blades off your back in this way, how can you then take them down your back?)

As I said above, my take is that the Superficial Back Arm Line tends to overwork in down dog due to tight/overused extensors (the tops of the forearms, i.e. the hairy part of your forearm; these are the muscles that help you gesture stop with your arm and hand, which is the same position as in down dog but in a different spatial orientation if you think about it).

Further, modern humans tend to have weak/underused hand/wrist flexors (the underside of the forearm; these are the muscles that help you make a fist).

To add to all this, very often when we go to yoga class, we are told to take the chest down towards the floor or towards the thighs and to aim to touch the floor with our forehead. (I know, I am maybe exaggerating a bit, but I sometimes think that to make a point, it is sometimes helpful to exaggerate, and no, I am not saying that the chest should not be open in down dog.) This, however, tends to disengage the front arm lines and collapses the whole endeavor towards the floor and you are quite literally subsumed by gravity and stuck to the floor with any number of unpleasantries such as achy wrists or elbows, a pinch in your shoulders around the tops of the deltoids, and a neck that feels heavy and hard like lead. Further, if we go with the bird wing metaphor, you have to lift from below (the front arm lines or bottom of wing) in order to be able to fly.

What about the other two lines:

• The Deep Front Arm Line is your stabilizing/weight-bearing line in the front, in the sense that the thumb connects to the radius (that's the forearm bone on your thumb side), which in turn connects to the humerus (upper arm bone), which connects to the ribcage in the front via the pec minor. The front needs to engage and draw up so that you don't fall.

• The Deep Back Arm Line is your stabilizing line in the back, in the sense that the pinky finger connects to the humerus (via the ulna—that's the forearm bone on your pinky side), which connects to the shoulder blade via the rotator cuff, which connects to the spine and neck via the rhomboids and the levator scapula respectively. 

Further, for your down dog to "fly" out of gravity's lovingly smothering embrace, your wings need to be fully extended and lined up as per the bird wing video above. In a human, lining up your joints helps muscles to work optimally with/against gravity, decreases drag and inefficiency along the myofascial lines of the body, and facilitates the flow of energy between the joints (not to be confused with hyper-extension at the elbow joints though: locking your elbows stops the conversation between your hands and your shoulders for example in the same way that locked knees destabilize your hips because they have no feedback from the feet and the earth beneath them).

How does this all work in asana? Please read this first, reflect on it, and then try it in action.

Have a block handy. Start on hands and knees. Come down onto your forearms and place the block wide-side between your elbows on the floor. Then, position your forearms in such a way that you are not holding the block with the fleshy part of your forearms but really with the bony protrusion at the elbow (which is really the inner rounded end of your upper arm bone, the humerus). If you do this well, your forearms will be parallel with each other, rather than narrower at the wrists. Hips will be over your knees (or a bit behind to keep the torso long), low belly lifting towards the spine, torso long, fingers spread, head/neck neutral so that the back of your neck is not shortened. Press down through your palms to lift your elbows and the block just a couple of inches off of the floor (leave the knees on the floor for the first round and then experiment with lifting the knees off of the floor and pressing back through the hips like you would in down dog). Now, the arm lines, which are cumulative (in the sense that the actions build on each other and don't cancel each other out). 

• First, press down through the thumb pad and index finger knuckles and draw energy up along the inner forearms, the biceps and right where the biceps disappear under the deltoids to create a lift in the inner armpit and stability in your pose. (Deep Front Arm Line for establishing your base and stability from the front/bottom)
• Second, draw up from the entire palmar surface of your hands: the more you spread this action, the better; hopefully, you will feel the undersides of the forearms begin to engage and the arches of the hands begin to emerge and create an energetic lift away from the floor. Remember, the knuckles of the fingers--where what we perceive as fingers meet the palm--are rooted to the floor. The more you direct the weight into the front of the palm, the more space and lift you will create in the bottom of the wrist/carpal tunnel. Now, think of taking the outer edges of your shoulder blades away from the floor and onto your back (Superficial Front Arm Line, or lifting your wings)
• Third, draw energy up into your triceps from the fleshy part of your pinky "finger" (5th metacarpal) while keeping it firmly grounded, and think of plugging/connecting your triceps into/with the muscles connecting your shoulder blade and your arm bone (the rotator cuff). Hopefully, you will feel the bottom tips of the blades start telling you things as a result :). (Deep Back Arm Line for establishing stability from the back/top)
• Finally, think of length and space in the Superficial Back Arm Line (or spreading your wings). Lift your collarbones away from the floor to free the upper traps, then lengthen from the deltoids through the tops of the forearms and fingers, like you are exhaling from under your finger nails. At the same time, think of the inner edges of the blades sliding down your back (or up towards your hips if you are a spatial person) to awaken the mid-low traps. You are still doing 1-3 and holding the block, right? :)

Come down and rest and repeat a couple of more times, progressively straightening the arms in the process, without ever locking your elbows (yes, it can be done even with the block). Can you feel how this is creating more balance between the undersides and the tops of the forearms? One way to gauge if you are on the right track is to bring your attention to your elbows and create an energetic balance between the elbow crease and the elbow point, so that the crease is not overstretched and the point is not digging in. Keep space between the teeth and your tongue relaxed. Then, of course, try this in full down dog, plank, handstand, your choice :).

Questions? Feel free to drop me a line or leave a comment!