How to perform Eagle Pose Arms
Spread your arms apart. Bring one arm over the other, joining them at the elbows. Cross your arms over, bringing your palms together. Make sure both your pinkies are facing forward. Keep your shoulders open as you lift your hands up to capacity. Change the cross of your arms and repeat.
What is Garudasana Arms?
This is a modification of the full Eagle Pose (Garudasana). Here, most of the focus goes to opening the shoulders and waking up the upper back muscles.
Most typically, you will start in Tadasana or Virasana, with your arms spread at the side. Bring one arm over the other, joining them at the elbows, and then cross them over so that your palms are pressed firmly together, your pinkies facing forward. Focus on your shoulders, make sure they are open, feel the muscles in your upper back get activated. Maintaining this feeling, slowly lift your hands up to capacity.
In order to ensure you are getting the full benefits of this shoulder-opening exercise, change the cross of your arms and repeat.
When to use Garudasana Arms?
Most of the time this pose comes at the start of your practice, as a way of warming up and activating your upper body, namely the shoulders. However, it can also be used at the end of the sequence in order to consolidate all the positive effects your practice has had on your upper back.
When used as part of your warm-up, it is most typically coupled with other shoulder-opening poses, such as Urdhva Hastasana, Urdhva Baddhanguliyasana, Gomukasana Arms, and Paschima Namaskar.
It is a universal pose in the sense that it can be used as part of your everyday yoga practice, but also separately from it: when getting out of bed, while sitting at your desk at work, or whenever you have a moment to spare.
