Downward Dog Tutorial: Perfect Your Alignment (16-Min Class)

But we have to stop thinking about the normal. If you go to a normal yoga class and everything the instructor says in the normal yoga class, please just forget about that. Don't listen to normal yoga teachers because most of them, I've been in the game for a long time. Most of them are just, I don't want to say talk out of their ass because many of them know a lot what they're talking about.

But many of them, especially the new ones, they copy others. So there is a lot of, you know, jello journalism or whatever it's called when people are just copying each other without actually thinking. So I've been to yoga classes where the teacher knows perfectly exactly how I feel and others that are just completely lost. So stop listening to general yoga advice and start really tuning in to what your body is responding when you're doing stuff.

Okay, so. This is a good down dog. This is also a good down dog. This is also a good down dog.

And this is also a good down dog. As long as you get an effect, the down dog is good. But why do we use down dog instead of other positions? There are some benefits of pushing back.

So if I'm here, this is not a down dog. This is a forward fold. And I think the difference between this and this is that there is traction under my head. And this is one of the reasons we use the sticky mat.

To be able to push away to create traction. Now there is absolutely no pressure on my hamstrings. Now there is a lot of pressure on my hamstrings. I'm basically trying to stretch the mat and that creates tension and lift.

The more I push my hands into my feet, the more the butt lifts. And this can be used to stretch the back or the back of the legs. Okay, so. Down dog creates traction in the back.

So you can stretch, you can elongate. You can make the spine feel longer and you can stretch the back of the legs. If the back of your legs are restricted, if you have stiff hamstrings or call it what you want, there is no need to overdo it and dig the heels into the ground in order to get even more of a stretch. If you just bend your knees or stretch your legs just enough, you will feel it here, here, here, here and here.

You never wanna feel like, okay, I need to get my heels down and I feel my knees are busting and burning. That's not what you wanna do. You want to stretch your legs enough or keep them, because look here. If I'm stretching the legs, this pose is a leg stretching pose.

If I bend the knees, there is no stretch in the legs, but now I move the stretch to my lower and upper back. So depending on how much I bend the knees, I'm moving the focus from the legs to the back. So I can create kind of like a flow. Look at this.

Back, calves. Back, hamstrings. Just depending on how I position myself, I move the stretch to where I wanted it. And this is because I've been doing a lot of down-dogs.

There is no one down-dog. There is no correct down-dog. And it also depends, like depending on how much you bend your knees, it also depends where you place your hands. So if you have a really long down-dog, this has one sensation.

And if I move the hands back, this is arguably a very different pose. So these two variables, how much you bend the knees and where you place your hands is going to affect the whole structure. And my teacher, Jason, he always said, when you're teaching a pose, begin with what's touching the ground. So if the hands and feet are in the ground, begin by placing those in the right spot for what you want to achieve.

So if you want the down-dog to be a flowy one, where for example, we do a rolling knee and place the foot between the hands, that's what's gonna be possible if I have a really long down-dog, because it's simply impossible to get the foot all the way forward. If I see that my class is full of really stiff people, I'm gonna ask them to, before we start rolling in the forearm, we say, take a small step forward, because now I know it's a lot easier to get the foot between the hands. So place the hands and feet where it helps, and bend the knees enough to move the stretch where you want it, both for your class and for yourself. These are the two main variables.

The other thing that we need to talk about is the width of the shoulders. If someone ever says square or straight, maybe they have a good intentions, but it's almost never true. Having a square or a straight usually doesn't bring any value, and many times it's the contrary. So you don't need to square up your index fingers to the side of the mat, you don't need to point your middle finger straight forward, all of this, put it in the BS pile, because it's not gonna be valuable for you.

Instead, place the hands where you feel that you don't get a pinch in the shoulder. If you do down dog like this, with the thumbs together, and then you try to push back, you need incredibly mobile, you need insane mobility, and a range of motion in your shoulders in order to not feel compressed here. For most Jiu Jitsu guys, especially ones that are wide and a bit pluggy, and maybe your elbows doesn't stretch all the way out, because they simply lock, like the joint locks before it goes straight, they're always gonna have bent arms, and that's gonna be a bit more intense when they do down dog. So if you do down dog with arms like this, and you can't ever stretch them out, it's not gonna feel as good as for people that can lock their elbows all the way off.

And that's just a simple fact. And if you force your hands to be too narrow, the reason I'm talking about this now is because it's, I've seen it thousands of times, people start with the hands here, and whenever I tell them go wider, and turn their fingers out, then they get deeper into the position, and instead of being here, where they can't go back more, they come further back, and maybe just this far further back makes them able to release their head, and relax their traps and their neck. On that point, we're gonna come back to the shoulders, but on that point, moving the stretch from the hamstrings to the back is possible. And one of the main points of down dog is creating lift and stretching the legs, and releasing the back.

But also, you can also release the shoulders and neck in down dog. So we're pushing your arms overhead. So intuitively, it might think like we're creating tension there. But this was a huge revelation for me, because for me, the first couple of years of yoga was like a lot of tension in down dog.

It was like a handstand, basically. But when someone taught me that you can have the energy and the strength on the outside, and you can completely relax the inside, you have like a structure goes here, and the release is up here. So. Now all the tension is in my neck.

But if I move here, and I kind of point my elbows a little bit downwards and in, now there is a lot of release in my neck, and all the power is in my triceps and lats. So that's probably a secret little trick hack, at least, to dig into the outside of the hand, like this knuckle and this knuckle. You don't have so much pressure there, and you definitely don't have your hands narrow and point your fingers in, because that moves the tension on the inside. You want to be able to power up the outside in order to release the spinal column and the neck.

Your neck and traps and spine should feel free to move. Freedom of movement of the spine and moving the energy into the legs to stretch them and into the arms, like the arms should get tired. If you stand 10 minutes in down dog, your arms should be tired, but you should not be tired on the center, central column. You should be tired on the outside, if that makes sense.

Let's look at this. We're in a plank. We're in a down dog. Being able to move your spine effortlessly here, I think that's the main goal.

To be able to release the spine, the word is mobilize. Down dog is a mobilizer. We want to be able to use the down dog to use the strength of some body parts to mobilize others. We want to be able to have a dynamic down dog.

The goal is not for down dog to be a static position. This is a static position. We don't want to be able to be dynamic necessarily, this pulse, but down dog, the goal is to be able to do stuff like this. So the down dog is here.

The plank, it goes together with down dog and the sprawl, the upward facing dog, those three together, the down dog, the down dog, those three together with the child's pulse or the turtle, those four together creates this dynamic where you can move as you want without ever creating pinching in any joints. So in down dog, your goal is to make sure that shoulders and neck are relaxing. You're creating tension by pushing your butt up and back because this is not really a down dog. Like when the butt is down here, that's not a down dog.

The down dog is when the butt is moving up. You are pushing your butt up. You don't need to straighten your legs or bend the heels down for it to be a down dog, but this can be, this is more like a floating turtle. The definition of down dog is that the spine is free and the butt is moving out and back.

I think that's everything I have to say about down dog. Everything else, I think you can figure out on your own, but you're gonna fall short if you listen to conflicting advice. I think you're always full of well-intended advice and when you have too many of them, they create contradictions that are impossible to overcome until you realize that some of the things that you're hearing and learning and assuming are completely wrong. I've been wrong myself a lot and that's why I can say with confidence that being wrong doesn't take you anywhere good.

You will not create a good pose when you have the wrong assumptions like, for example, I need to dig my heels down into the ground for it to be a down. What happens when you dig the heels down is that you round the spine. It's impossible to do this and arch the back when you dig your heels down. When I'm digging the heels down, look what happens to my lower back.

Now there is no, I have not mobilized the spine at all when I'm digging the heels down. So if I want a cap stretch and a deep hamstring stretch, I try to dig the heels down. But when I do that, I'm compensating with the lower back not having any mobility. So when you start understanding these relationships between the stuff that you're doing, you realize that when I do A, X happens and when I do B, Y happens.

And this lesson or lecture, call it what you will, this tutorial that I've been teaching you today is not meant to show you what I know. It's more showing you like displaying, putting a table with many things on display and you can look at it and, hmm, I'm gonna try this. Well, didn't taste so good for me. Oh, this one's great.

So my job is to be a buffet host and you can pick whatever little nugget of wisdom or claim you want and attempt it for yourself. But the general idea is down dog, the definition of down dog is that you're creating a upside down A and you're pushing your butt up and back. The goal is to be able to relax the spine and create tension on the outside in the legs. The legs should be active.

If the legs are passive, it can't be a good down dog. The leg is hard to work because you're taking energy out from the arms and relaxing the spinal column and the legs have to do more of the work. And you want to have a useful down dog. It's not a one pose, it's a pose that can be used for many things, to connect transitions and just generally mobilize and make you more capable.

And that's why it's such an important position. And when you use it correctly, you can get a lot of things done just with a down dog. Okay, thank you for watching this very long tutorial. I promise that the other ones will be shorter and I hope you learned something today.

Peace.