Five Minutes in Downward Facing Dog

One of the things I'm going to experiment with here in Buenos Aires is holding poses for a very long time. I did this a little bit last year, and found it very intense and interesting.

As my first experiment, I thought I'd hold downward dog for five minutes or so. Turns out five minutes was a good amount of time. Definitely a challenge, but not too great a challenge. I definitely could have held it longer, but didn't feel a need to at this time. Here's how it went.

Holding the pose for this long was much more of a physical challenge than a mental challenge. Mentally, it was great, I had no trouble staying focused. Physically, a few things started to happen. After about two or three minutes, my hands started to tingle. There must have been some nerve impingement in either the shoulders or the wrists. This happens to me bicycling sometimes too, one or both hands will start to tingle a little. After three or four minutes, I started feeling my latissimus dorsi muscles, or lats, the muscles at the outside of the upper back. No surprise here, those muscles are obviously doing a lot of work holding the body up. This was my biggest limitation in the pose, probably the only thing that would keep me from doing it for 12 or 15 minutes.

In addition to challenges, holding the pose for a long time produces some interesting benefits. There are some yoga people who say that the muscles only really let go after being stretched for three minutes. And indeed, I felt the backs of my legs, in particular the calves and maybe even the achilles tendon, relax and let go as I held the pose longer. I didn't push at all, no pedaling the feet or anything, but after three minutes or so I definitely felt more of an ease in the stretch of the back of the leg, especially the lower leg.

I'll be trying this experiment with a bunch of poses, and will report here any interesting results.