Downward Dog Pose

Downward Dog Pose, Downward-facing Dog Pose, or Downdog, also called Adho Mukha Svanasana (Sanskrit: अधोमुखश्वानासन; IAST: Adho Mukha Śvānāsana), is an inversion asana in yoga as exercise. It is often practised as part of a flowing sequence of poses, especially Surya Namaskar, the Salute to the Sun. The asana does not have formally named variations, but several playful variants are used to assist beginning practitioners to become comfortable in the pose.

Downward Dog stretches the hamstring and calf muscles in the backs of the legs, and builds strength in the shoulders. Some popular sites have advised against it during pregnancy, but an experimental study of pregnant women found it beneficial.

Downward Dog has been called "deservedly one of yoga's most widely recognized yoga poses" and the "quintessential yoga pose". As such it is often the asana of choice when yoga is depicted in film, literature, and advertising. The pose has frequently appeared in Western culture, including in the titles of novels, a painting, and a television series, and it is implied in the commercial name, "YOGΛ", of a foldable computer.

The name comes from the pose's similarity to the way a dog stretches when getting up. The Sanskrit name is from adhas (अधस्) meaning "down", mukha (मुख) meaning "face", śvāna (श्वान) meaning "dog", and āsana (आसन) meaning "posture" or "seat".

The name is not found in the medieval hatha yoga texts, but a similar posture, Gajāsana (Elephant Pose), was described in the 18th century Haṭhābhyāsapaddhati; the text calls for it to be repeated "over and over again" from a prone position.

A similar pose, together with a 5-count format and a method of jumps between poses resembling Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga's system, was described in Niels Bukh's early 20th century Danish text Primitive Gymnastics, which in turn was derived from a 19th-century Scandinavian tradition of gymnastics; the system had arrived in India by the 1920s. Indian gymnastics, too, had a system of postures, called "dands" (from Sanskrit दण्ड daṇḍa, a staff), linked by jumps, and one of the dands is close to Downward Dog. In addition, in the 1920s, Bhawanrao Shriniwasrao Pant Pratinidhi, the Rajah of Aundh, (1868–1951; in office 1909–1947) popularized and named the practice of Surya Namaskar (Sun Salutation), describing it in his 1928 book The Ten-Point Way to Health: Surya Namaskars. Downward Dog appears twice in its sequence of 12 postures.

Neither the dand exercises nor Surya Namaskar were considered to be yoga in the 1930s. Swami Kuvalayananda incorporated Downward Dog into his system of exercises in the early 1930s, from where it was taken up by his pupil the influential yoga teacher Tirumalai Krishnamacharya. He in turn taught B. K. S. Iyengar and Pattabhi Jois, the founders of Iyengar Yoga and Ashtanga Vinyasa Yoga respectively. Both styles make some use of vinyasas, sequences of postures often including Downward Dog with movements between them, to connect up the main postures in a class. Modern "flow" yoga styles, which can be vigorous, are based on the vinyasa approach.

The pose has the head down, ultimately touching the floor, with the weight of the body on the palms and the feet. The arms are stretched straight forward, shoulder width apart; the feet are a foot apart, the legs are straight, and the hips are raised as high as possible.