Sanskrit Name: Adho Mukha Svanasana
Good for: Energy, stress, shoulders, hamstrings, calves, arches, menopause
Benefits
- Provides peace of mind
- Helpsalleviate stress
- Good to treat mild depression
- Provides energy and vigor to the body
- Provides elasticity to the shoulders, hamstrings, calves, arches, and hands
- Strengthens the arms and legs
- Helps ease out the menopause symptoms
- Alleviates menstrual discomposure when done with head supported
- Helps prevent osteoporosis
- Improves digestion
- Relieves headache, insomnia, back pain, and fatigue
- Great for controlling high blood pressure, asthma, flat feet, sciatica, sinusitis
Guidelines
- Come onto the floor on your hands and knees
- Set your knees directly below your hips and your hands slightly forward of your shoulders
- Spread your palms, index fingers parallel or slightly turned out, and turn your toes under
- Exhale and lift your knees away from the floor
- At first keep the knees slightly bent and the heels lifted away from the floor
- Lengthen your tailbone away from the back of your pelvis and press it lightly toward the pubis
- Against this resistance, lift the sitting bones toward the ceiling, and from your inner ankles draw the inner legs up into the groins
- With an exhalation, push your top thighs back and stretch your heels onto or down toward the floor
- Straighten your knees but be sure not to lock them
- Firm the outer thighs and roll the upper thighs inward slightly
- Narrow the front of the pelvis
- Firm the outer arms and press the bases of the index fingers actively into the floor
- From these two points lift along your inner arms from the wrists to the tops of the shoulders
- Firm your shoulder blades against your back, then widen them and draw them towards the tailbone
- Keep the head between the upper arms and don’t let it hang
- Stay in this pose anywhere from 1 to 3 minutes.
- Bend your knees to the floor with an exhalation and rest in Child’s Pose
Good to know
- If you have trouble freeing and opening your shoulders in this pose, raise your hands off the floor on a pair of blocks or the seat of a metal folding chair
- Don’t do this pose if you have Carpal tunnel syndrome
- Avoid doing this pose if you have diarrhea
- Stop doing this pose in later stage of pregnancy
- Place your head on a bolster or block, ears level between the arms if you have high blood pressure
By : Natural Health News
