Why Don’t My Heels Touch In Dhanurasana?

Transcript of: Why don’t my heels touch in dhanurasana?

You grab your ankles in dhanurasana (bow pose), and your heels immediately splay apart. You try squeezing your inner thighs, and your knees come together, but your ankles still separate? What’s that? What’s going on here?

The Question:

In this month’s question of the month, Kat wrote in and asked, “I struggle to get my heels to touch in dhanurasana. For reference, my heels touch just fine, and I can lift my thighs if I take the posture without reaching for the feet. But the moment I grab my ankles, my heels splay apart. If I try to counter this by engaging my inner thighs, it seems to draw my knees to touch, but my ankles still separate. So I feel it must be something to do with hand or shoulder placement pulling them away from each other, or perhaps a lack of strength in my hamstrings or even my external rotators?”

The Answer:

Kat, you gave me some good clues here and some confusing parts. The answer probably has nothing to do with your hamstrings. Put that aside. First, whether your heels actually need to touch in dhanurasana is worth questioning on its own, but let’s put that aside for a moment and try to figure out what’s happening mechanically.

Check shoulder and arm position

One thing you told me that’s really useful is that your heels touch fine, and your thighs lift when you’re not holding your feet. That tells me this isn’t purely a hip or strength problem. Something changes the moment you reach back and grab. So here’s the first thing to check. Before you even think about lifting, can you lie on the floor, reach back, grab your ankles, and keep your heels together without lifting your spine at all? Just on the floor holding. If you can’t do that, we’re probably looking at a shoulder or arm position issue. In other words, the geometry of how your arms reach back may be pulling your feet apart before you’ve even moved.

Check the glute max in dhanurasana

A quick test, can you take your arms and put them behind your back with them together? If yes, it might not be the shoulder problem. So now, if your heels are together on the floor but splay when you lift, that’s a different conversation. When you lift in dhanurasana, the glutes have to fire to extend the hip. And here’s the thing about gluteus maximus: it does two jobs. It extends the hip, which is exactly what you want, but it also externally rotates. So when it fires hard to get you off the floor, it is also trying to spin the femurs outward. Knees wide, feet wide, that’s not a weakness, that’s just what the muscle does.

Check the adductors

So you mentioned that when you engage your inner thighs in dhanurasana, your adductors, your knees come together, but your ankles still separate. Now, that’s an interesting observation. The adductors are technically internal rotators. So, if you’re over-recruiting them, it’s possible you’re drawing the knees in while the feet are rotating in a different direction. Now, that is unusual.

From what you’re describing, the pieces don’t quite add up to one another. It makes it harder for me to give you a clean answer, more than a description can. That’s an unusual pattern that I’d really love to see. If you can, Kat, please send a photo or short video of this. Seeing it will tell me more than the description can.

Now, if you’ve got a question you want me to try to answer, just try, go to: yogaanatomy.com/myquestion.