In India, where Yoga began, squatting is a go-to pose for many of life’s daily tasks. Before there were chairs, counters and tables, women squatted on the ground to prepare and cook meals. Some still do. Malasana (Squatting Pose) supports apana, the downward-flowing energy that governs elimination. Apana energy grounds agitation, making Malasana a great counterpose for stress. Malasana also relieves constipation. In addition, it stretches the ankles, groins and lower legs, and tones the abdomen and pelvic floor.

Some people don’t enjoy Malasana because their heels don’t reach the floor, making the pose feel unstable. This is because every person’s skeletal structure is different. Most of the time placing your heels on the ground in Malasana has little to do with soft tissue flexibility. It usually depends instead on the range of motion in your ankle joints. If your ankle joints don’t naturally flex much past 90 degrees—which is well within the parameters of normal range of motion—elevating them on a Foam or Cork Yoga Wedge will allow you to ground your heels and feel more stable.

To find out more about Malasana’s origins, benefits and practice, read this post.

How to Practice Malasana

1. Gather your props: a Yoga Mat and Yoga Wedge.
2. Start by squatting on a Yoga Mat with your feet hips-width apart and parallel. Let your heels descend toward the floor. If they don’t reach, place a wedge under your heels so that they are evenly grounded.
3. Spread your heels, balls of your feet and your toes, grounding evenly across your feet.
4. Widen your legs so that your torso fits snugly in between your thighs.
5. Place your hands in Anjali Mudra (Prayer Position).
6. Take five to ten deep breaths to settle into the pose.
7. When you’re ready, you can leave the pose by straightening your legs into Uttanasana (Standing Forward Bend). Take a few breaths here and then lift up into Tadasana (Mountain Pose).

For more ideas on how to use a Yoga Wedge, visit our Yoga Props Guide.

Truth is, our hands and wrists are not really designed to support our body weight, at least not repeatedly or for long periods of time. Our hands and wrists are actually very complicated, comprised of small, delicate bones, ligaments and tendons. They are designed for fine work. A properly placed yoga wedge can help prevent collapsing our body weight into our wrists so that we can continue to use our hands in the ways they were designed to work.

A yoga wedge can also keep wrists and ankles from bending further than they are designed to. There are as many variations in wrist and ankle mobility as there are people. When your joints tend to be stable rather than über-bendy, a yoga wedge can help you enjoy greater grounding and opening in certain poses.

Because Hugger Mugger’s Cork Wedge features maximum stability, sustainable materials and a nonskid surface, it’s a favorite in our yoga community. A bit heavier than our ultra-lightweight Foam Wedges, the Cork Wedge has a solid surface with less give.

Use a Cork Wedge in These Three Poses

Downward-Facing Dog: In Downward-Facing Dog, we often collapse the weight of our entire torso down into the wrist joints. Spreading the fingers and making sure the palms are grounding evenly can help, but using a wedge teaches us how to distribute weight throughout the hand. Here’s a post explaining how this works.

Upward Bow: A wedge can make the difference between a free and easy Upward Bow and possibly not practicing it at all. If your wrist joints don’t extend to 90 degrees, Upward Bow will always be a struggle. Placing a wedge under your hands can free your wrists, elbows and shoulders, allowing for a free and even easy Upward Bow. Here’s a post explaining how to use a wedge in Upward Bow.

Squatting: Like your wrists—and all the other joints in your body—your ankles may or may not bend past 90 degrees. If your heels don’t touch the floor in squatting position, it’s probably not a matter of soft tissue inflexibility. It’s likely that your ankle joints are constructed to limit movement past 90 degrees. Placing a Cork Wedge under your heels allows you to ground your feet evenly, making the pose stable and relaxed.

A Cork Wedge is a lightweight, easy-to-transport yoga tool that can make the difference between struggling in your practice and feeling at ease. If you’ve found other uses for our Cork Wedges we’d love to hear what you’ve learned!

It ain’t easy, though. Upward Bow requires a bendy lumbar spine, shoulder joints constructed to allow for full flexion, and elastic quadriceps muscles. Not everyone is born with extra mobile shoulder joints or bendy spines, but those whose bodies are naturally more stable can still enjoy backbending in many forms: Setu Bandha Sarvangasana (Bridge), Urdva Mukha Svanasana (Upward Facing Dog) and Bhujangasana (Cobra), to name a few.

Wrists can pose a major restriction in Upward Bow. People with carpal tunnel issues find the extreme bend of the wrist joint in Upward Bow to be a deal breaker. Even if you don’t have carpal tunnel issues, it may be that your wrists aren’t built to extend to 90 degrees. The structure of your shoulder joints may also play a part. Whatever the cause of your Upward Bow challenges, a Yoga Wedge can be really helpful, because using it decreases the extension angle in your joints.

Here’s how:

1. Place a Yoga Wedge (Cork or Foam) on a nonskid Yoga Mat with the thick side toward the edge of the mat. This will help keep the wedge from slipping.
2. Lie on your back on your mat with your head just below the Yoga Wedge. Bend your knees and place your feet on the floor.
3. Place your hands on the wedge with your fingers pointing toward you so that the heels of your hands are on the high side of the wedge. I like to turn my hands slightly outward. This helps keep your elbows shoulder-width apart, making it easier to raise up into Upward Bow.
4. Press down with your hands and feet, pressing the weight toward your feet so that your legs are doing as much work as your arms. Then lift, any amount, into Upward Bow.

Your arms may or may not be able to straighten. This often has little to nothing to do with flexibility. More often than not, it has to do with the innate structure of your shoulder joints. Even though practicing Upward Bow with straight arms is often exalted as an indication of advanced practice, straight arms are more dependent on the skeleton you were born with than with the depth of your practice.

Remember that asana practice is not about accomplishing amazing feats. Rather, it’s about connecting fully with each moment of your experience. Using a Yoga Wedge might just help you feel freer and at ease in your pose, and that’s what practice is about.

Adho Mukha Svanasana, aka Downward Facing Dog Pose or simply Dog Pose, is arguably the most ubiquitous of poses. Yoga teacher Donna Farhi calls it the “‘garlic’ of yoga poses—a panacea for whatever ails you.” Dog Pose is simultaneously an inversion, an arm balance, a forward bend and a restorative pose. It opens your shoulders, strengthens your arms, lengthens your spine, stretches your legs, inverts your internal organs and nourishes your brain. It invigorates and calms. For dogs and cats, Dog Pose is the equivalent of a morning cuppa, an elixir to clear sleep-induced physical and mental cobwebs.

In Vinyasa practice, Dog Pose serves as a jumping-off pose for the quick transitions. In some of the sweatier classes, yogis and yoginis may move through Dog Pose 20 or more times in a practice.

Bodyworkers tell me that they’re seeing increasing numbers of hand and wrist problems in people who practice yoga. Sun salutations, with their central Dog Pose-Chaturanga Dandasana–Upward Facing Dog sequence are at least partially responsible. If you’re practicing multiple sun salutations, you will likely cycle through these poses many times. Even if you only practice a few Dog Poses during a practice without the rest of the sequence, the weight bearing can take a toll.

Why Your Wrists May Be at Risk and How to Keep them Happy

Wrist and hand problems arise because we often let our weight collapse into the heels of our hands. One solution is to activate the legs more by sending the thighs, shins and heels back. But activating the legs may not alleviate the problem completely. I like to practice using a multi-pronged approach: activating my legs and practicing common sense alignment in my hands and arms.

The traditional alignment in Dog Pose calls for placing your hands shoulder-width apart on the floor. When the hands are in this alignment, the weight of your body tends to fall into the outer sides of your hands. On the little finger side of your hand, just above your wrist in the bottom corner of your palm is a little bone that sticks out. You can easily feel it on your own palm. This is the pisiform (pea-shaped) bone (in red in the diagram at left). Repeatedly collapsing your weight into this point on the hand could lead to a stress fracture. Spreading the weight evenly throughout the heels, balls and fingers of your hands will help prevent this.

One way to distribute your weight more evenly is to widen your hands, which will tend to center the weight more on the thumb side. Another way—which I prefer—is to spread your fingers and align your hands with each other so that your index fingers are parallel to each other. In other words, you can rotate your hands out a bit. I also like using a yoga wedge (in cork or foam) to train my students’ hands to take the weight evenly.

How to Use a Wedge

Here’s how: Place a yoga wedge in front of you with the narrow side facing you, so that the wedge is sloping down toward you. Place the heels of your hands on the edge that’s facing you and press the balls of your hands and fingers into the yoga wedge as you move into Dog Pose. Continue to press with the balls of your hands and fingers so that the heels of your hands actually begin to raise slightly off the wedge.

When Hugger Mugger first published a graphic of my recommendation for using a yoga wedge in Dog Pose in the Prop Guide, there was a wave of feedback that this was the opposite way it should be done. Most people feel that the wedge should slope down away from them so that they decrease the angle of the wrist. But the angle of the wrist is not generally a problem in Dog Pose. The angle in Dog Pose is actually quite gentle—unlike Chatturanga Dandasana, Up Dog and many others. Check out the photo at the top of this blog and you’ll see what I mean. Even with the yoga wedge, the angle is gentle. The problems come from collapsing of weight onto the heels of the hands. Placing the wedge with the raised edge away from your body only slightly increases the angle of the wrist and allows you to train your hands and arms how to distribute the weight more evenly.

I usually tell students, especially if they already are feeling strain in their hands and wrists, to practice with a yoga wedge for at least a few months. This gives them the time to build strength in their arms and train their hands so that when they stop using a wedge, healthy weight distribution will be a habit.

The yoga wedge is a great tool for teaching your arms how to build strength and stability. Try this and let us know how it works for you!