Chaturanga Dandasana
arm balance asana
Chaturanga Dandasana (Sanskrit: चतुरङ्ग दण्डासन; IAST: Caturaṅga Daṇḍāsana) or Four-Limbed Staff pose, also known as Low Plank, is an asana in modern yoga as exercise and in some forms of Surya Namaskar (Salute to the Sun), in which a straight body parallel to the ground is supported by the toes and palms, with elbows at a right angle along the body. The variation Kumbhakasana, Phalakasana, or High Plank has the arms straight.
Etymology and origins
The name comes from the Sanskrit: चतुर् IAST: catur, "four"; अङ्ग aṅga, "limb"; दण्ड daṇḍa, "staff"; and आसन; āsana, "posture" or "seat".
The pose was unknown in hatha yoga until the 20th century Light on Yoga, but it appears in the 1896 Vyayama Dipika, a manual of gymnastics, as part of the "very old" sequence of danda exercises. The historian of yoga Norman Sjoman suggests that it is one of the poses adopted into yoga as exercise in Mysore by Krishnamacharya and forming the "primary foundation" for his vinyasas with flowing movements between poses. The pose would then have been taken up by his pupils Pattabhi Jois and B. K. S. Iyengar.
Description
In Chaturanga Dandasana the hands and feet are on the floor, supporting the body, which is parallel to and lowered toward, but not touching, the floor. It looks much like the low position in a push-up, but with the hands quite low (just above the pelvis), and the elbows kept in along the sides of the body.
In Ashtanga (vinyasa) yoga, Chaturanga Daṇḍasana is part of the Surya Namaskar (Salute to the Sun) asana sequence, performed on an exhalation. It is the fourth asana of Surya Namaskar A, and the fourth, eighth and twelfth asanas of Surya Namaskar B.
In Iyengar Yoga, the posture is simply held for a period of time (for instance, 30 seconds) with continuous breathing.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Chaturanga Dandasana” as arm balance asana. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5087984. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1896.
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This entry incorporates text from “Chaturanga Dandasana” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.