Upward-Facing Dog (Urdhva Mukha Svanasana)

Namaste everyone, welcome to Yoga & You, you are with Joshna Ramakrishnan. Today we are going to learn about how to do Urdhva Mukha Svanasana, in English it is called Upward Facing Dog.

If you see, Urdhva Mukha Svanasana will strengthen your shoulders, helps to strengthen your back muscles and strengthen your thigh muscles. This is a very challenging posture, so I am going to give you some variations, please feel free to do which is comfortable for you, because these postures, if you are not trained enough, might hurt yourself. So just follow instructions and please do the variations if you cannot do the full posture, let's go into practice.

So for this you have to go on your all-fours, your arms directly below your shoulder, your knees directly below your hips. Now, first position, from here you are going to go down towards the floor, so when you are going down to the floor I am not going to just completely fall onto the mat, I am going to use the strength of my arms to control my movement. So my elbows are bent and I go down to the floor completely, so when I am here you can watch my arms, my arms are slightly behind my chest, I am not here, this is for Bhujangasana preparation.

I am going to go slightly backward from here, and my shoulders are not in front, my shoulders are going to be back and my scapula, your shoulder blades are going to be together, and your chest should be open. Now from here I am going to lift myself up, this is the first preparation for Urdhva Mukha Svanasana. From here you are going to straighten your arms, make sure your shoulders are back and you lift yourself up, and your knees are still on the floor. This is not the final pose, this is the first variation of Urdhva Mukha Svanasana.

Now after you come here, slowly lift your head up and look up, I am not going like this, I am trying to lift my chest up, so do not squeeze your shoulders in front. If you are going to squeeze your shoulders that means you do not have enough strength in your arms, so for that you can just do Bhujangasana. If you want to develop more strength, I want you to keep your arms straight, so take your shoulders back and lift your head up, this is the first step. And slowly, when you come down with control, you come down towards the floor.

The second variation, or the final posture, you are going to look like this, so you are in here, drop your head down, make sure you are making this loose, shoulders back, scapula together, chest open, and come forward and up. Now you are going to lift your knees off the mat, lift your knees off the mat, lift your chest up, this requires a lot of strength to hold here, so if you are not comfortable do the variation one where you can keep your knees on the mat.

Drop your head back, lift your shoulders, lift your chest, squeeze with your thighs, as you exhale, go down to the floor. Now push yourself back into child's pose, as you inhale, come up. So this posture requires a lot of strength, a lot of strength in your arms. If you feel very uncomfortable doing this posture, you just have to keep your knees down and try and rotate your shoulder as much as you can and stay in that position, you don't have to do the full posture. So I hope you enjoy the practice today.