Floor bow: why are wrists straight?

Hello Susan

Your wrists have to be straight in Dhanurasana! Why? Because it is a sign that you are doing the pose correctly. If your wrists are flexed then this is a sure sign that you are muscling your arms in this pose making it impossible for you to surrender to the kicking forces. If you use the wrists, then you are most likely using the arms and the shoulders, which completely goes against the intent of this pose.

Instead of holding on to the feet, think of yourself as ‘hanging’ from your feet. This pose is about the KICK. You kick your legs up and back behind you. This pulls on your arms. The arms have hold of the feet only through the grip of the hands (the only active part of your arms). The kick of the legs pulls the arms back allowing a surrender of the shoulders so that they get pulled behind you as well.

Namaste
Gabrielle 🙂

Hi Martina

I see your point. Let me see if I can explain this.

Many students grab too far around the foot. They don’t just grab the feet with their fingers, they put the heel of their hand around the foot, and when they do that they bend their wrists right in. If you are doing this pose correctly you are holding with fingers only. Having said that some poses like this one actually strengthen fingers so you may find (or have found that) in the beginning when you have not yet developed your finger strength that you will have to grab further around the foot. People have different length fingers, short or long. This pose can be about body geometry when it comes to the hands and wrists. If you are grabbing too far around you will certainly be causing undue bending of the wrists. The important consideration here is that many folk then pull with their hands instead of surrendering to the kick of the legs – which is the driver of this pose.

In a nutshell the right grip, which you may take time to develop the finger strength for, prevents activating or engaging the strength in the arms.

Esak on the left is doing a great floor bow pose. You can see his shoulders are beautifully open and he is holding on to his feet with only his fingers. You can see he is using the principles of an active stretch to open up his body. His arms are straight and through his work and because of his arm position (with arms very high because of his excellent flexibility) his wrists bend ever so slightly in because of his body geometry.

The straight line you want to consider that goes through the wrists is from the shoulders to the fingers. Esak has a straight line there. With fingers on his feet in this proper grip he is neither thinking about, nor has any control over the inward bend of the wrists as they surrender to the force of the kick.

The bend of the wrist that you want to avoid is the lateral bend (which breaks the straight line and active stretch set up from shoulders to fingers).

To set up this pose you are literally hanging from your feet with your fingers only. (It can help if you imagine you are hanging from your feet as if you would be hanging from a branch from your fingers only without any other action from your arms involved – hence the straight arms and wrists). So long as there is work in your legs and you are kicking up and back as strongly as you can, without any component of work from the arms then if your wrists bend in slightly to reach your feet, it happens without breaking the vector of stretch! (no energy is dissipated and the benefits contribute directly to opening up the body. There is no conscious bending of the wrists in. Because the arms are passive in this pose they just yield to the stretching forces by virtue of the strong kick…

Now let’s get to that other photograph.

While it looks impressive, please tell me if you think this person is demonstrating how flexible she is or if she is doing bow pose. Frankly it is very hard to tell the amount of work that is being done here. It looks beautiful. I would really have to talk to this person to work out if this is a kick we are seeing (that is being able to determine the signs that she is hanging on to the feet). The grip does not seem correct here. The fingers are over the top of the toes.

Many of us would love to be this flexible. One of the great things about yoga is finding a balance between flexibility and strength. The stronger yogis find challenge in finding flexibility. The more flexible yogis find challenge in finding their strength. When someone in floor bow pose works the pose as it is intended they are kicking their legs back and up. The thing that stops the legs being kicked straight backward behind you on the floor is the hooked grip of the fingers. So as the feet get kicked up and back the arms get pulled back and up with them.

Martina the ideal is that you use your legs’ strength to drive this pose. Let that work be in your conscious awareness. My hunch is you are doing it fine! Kick and surrender!

PS I only see 2 photos posted. Would you like to email me the missing one. I have only answered in reference to the 2 I can see.

Namaste
Gabrielle 🙂