Yoganatomy
Landing and Lowering into Chaturanga
In the last article in this series, we looked at the leap back from the looking up position. In the next step, you have choices. Heck, in the last step you had choices; you could lightly have stepped back. When you hopped back, you could have done so with straight arms and landed in high plank or you could have leaped back and landed in chaturanga.
Which brings us to the next chunk of Sun Salutations: Should you land in a high plank or in chaturanga?
As usual there are arguments to be made for both. As I typically do, I see them both in a larger context of how either one is going to be creating a pattern of movement. The more significant question that you should ask yourself is which patterns are you attempting to cultivate and why?
High Plank or Chaturanga
It seems many people, at least in the Ashtanga world default to leaping back into chaturanga. It is after all the most traditional treatment. I would even suggest that this is an ideal that we should head for if the right patterns are in place. It’s reason enough for me that tradition is significant. Therefore if you want to aim toward the tradition, hop back into chaturanga. However, if the right patterns are not in place, you may become a victim of chaturanga (check out my previous article – Just Blame Chaturanga).
You’re most likely well aware of the anatomical side of my thinking and the context of practice that we are working in. This leads me into my own stories about why people should hop back into high plank and then lower down, especially beginners. Yes, I have a bias.
The beginners are often in need of developing the pattern I’ve been talking about in Part four and Part five of this Sun Salutation series. That pattern is the development of:
- The relationship of arm to floor.
- Development of the serratus anterior muscle.
- Creating a strong and stable shoulder girdle.
- Connecting to core and bandha (not exactly the same thing).
Me and My Bias
Since I am biased toward landing in high plank, most of my pros are going to land on that side. But don’t get me wrong. It’s not that I think landing in chaturanga is wrong or bad, I’m just focused on developing good anatomical patterns that support it very first.
The truth is, if you land improperly in either version, you can cause problems. If done rigidly, landing in both high plank or chaturanga can be jarring. If they are done too loosely, then there is that “sag” that happens in the lower back and SI joint area. I usually see this in two parts. The very first is it usually means that the relationship to controlling the movement is in place. This is related to the idea of core. The 2nd reason is that there is a directional problem to how the feet hit the floor and the assets moves. The feet and assets should be heading more back than down.
I am more likely to find people with issues in hopping back into chaturanga. But my data is skewed. The common problems I see include:
- Lower back issues
- SI joint problems
- Shoulder problems
I often see yoga practitioners, and not just beginners, leap back into chaturanga and basically just take advantage of gravity. By this I mean they are not using any strength to fight back the effects of gravity. If gravity is taking you down, why fight it? Well, how about control?
By isolating the movements, that is, leaping back into high plank very first, you can develop control over this transition. If you’ve been leaping back into chaturanga for some time, it can be fairly difficult to hop back to high plank with straight arms. I see this as the very first step in redeveloping the pattern of leaping back. The pattern of arching the elbows is just so ingrained it’s difficult to shut it off. The 2nd part of developing the fresh pattern is the part that many people seem to want to avoid: lowering down into a high quality chaturanga. What is a high quality chaturanga anyway?
In order to control the hop back into chaturanga these two separate patterns need to be in place already. If not, we default into letting gravity do the work for us and we may lose some of the control we indeed should have.
Developing The Patterns
Hopping back with straight arms does not seem that difficult. It isn’t indeed, just don’t arch your elbows. What this does however, is force you to use and engage muscles more closely related to the core.
It’s the pattern of lowering down into chaturanga that is even more significant. It leads us back to the question, what is a high quality chaturanga anyway?
For me it’s one where the serratus anterior remains engaged. Not to overly complicate it, but when you lower down into chaturanga, it’s your serratus that you’re indeed after to keep the shoulders in a good place. For example, when you see that worrisome chaturanga where the shoulders have dipped too low and tilted forward, this shows me a lack of stability in the shoulder girdle.
I know we often say the shoulders have dipped. But that’s non-specific. The shoulder joint itself is where the humerus meets the scapula. The shoulder joint itself does not dip. It’s the scapula that switches position and takes the humerus with it.
When serratus is engaged during the lowering down, it is resisting the movement of the shoulder blades heading toward one another. Don’t get me wrong, they are going to head toward each other in what we call retraction. Albeit there is sometimes a wordy cue to pull the shoulder blades together, it’s not one I subscribe to. If you do, it’s ok, we can disagree.
What I want, is to stand against this activity with the serratus which is a powerful protractor (bringing the shoulder blades around the front). When the serratus contracts to fight back retraction it is doing what we call an isotonic eccentric spasm. In essence it is contracting and lengthening at the same time. This is discussed in Functional Anatomy of Yoga on p. 29. I also discuss this concept clearly in The Basics of Applied Anatomy Course.
With the engagement of serratus anterior comes stability. From that stability in the shoulder girdle you can then concentrate on isolating the movement of the shoulder and elbow joint. After all, it is these two joints that are lowering you toward the floor. I choose to make this the concentrate with students and keep the instructions for the shoulder blades plain. That is, that they be stabilized by using the serratus. If the shoulder blades are in their “neutral” place or close to it, then the shoulder joint is in its “neutral” place as well. In essence, nothing is dipped too far forward.
With the shoulder girdle in neutral, the real concentrate of movement comes into the elbow joint.
This is where the triceps comes into play. As we lower down from a high plank, the triceps is also doing an eccentric spasm. Its spasm is resisting our downward movement. This creates a managed lowering down. I realize, this isn’t effortless for everyone and can take a long time to develop. My point is, develop it on the right foundation, a stable shoulder girdle.
Conclusion
I realize that so far in almost all of these posts I have been focused on the arms. More specifically, I’ve been focused on the serratus, armpit, forearm, shoulder relationship. From my point of view, it’s an significant pattern of development.
Moving forward it’s time to budge on from the arms and into upward facing dog. Parts of it are tied to the hop back, the distance that our feet are from our mitts, and especially how we head into the yoga position from our beloved chaturanga(related post – Just Blame Chaturanga).
Feel free to leave your comments below and point out the crevices in my story.
Many of the concepts in this article are discussed in: