Press the tip of your fingers and your upper palm firmly into the ground. This helps you avoid collapsing on your wrists.
Rotate your arms so that your inner elbows look forward.
Push your hips back so that your knees lift off the mat and your bum touch your heels. Imagine you’re squeezing a hazelnut between your upper legs and lower belly, just where the front part of your hips are.
Bring your head between your arms (look towards your knees). Lengthen your shoulders. Imagine you want to pull your arms and upper-back away from each other. Shoulders are tying to touch your ears. Then rotate your shoulders to make space between your ears and shoulders. Imagine your armpits looking towards your nose. Feel the shoulder blades moving away from each other.
By now you might have forgotten about the elbow (and shoulder) rotation! Think about it again!
Lift your hips up while continuing to push them back. Here we’re trying to find length in the upper body. Imagine your elbows moving away from your wrists, your shoulders moving away from your elbows, each vertebra moving away from the previous one, until your tailbone is as far from your hand as possible. A beautiful diagonale. Keep squeezing that hazelnut, don’t let it fall! Those legs don’t need to straight and those heels don’t need to touch the floor.
Straighten one leg. Bend it again. To the same with the other leg. Repeat as many time as needed to lengthen the back of your legs. Every time you straighten a leg, imagine your heel trying to not only touch the mat, but touch the floor behind your mat, as far away as possible.
Another way to lengthen the back of your legs is to lift your heals and come to the tip of your toes and back down again. Again imagine your heels wanting to get down and out of your mat.
Try not to move your upper body. Shoulders stay at the same place (not over the wrists!)
Now that the back muscles have lengthen a bit more, find your dog. Imagine your knees slightly looking at each other. Don’t move your feet. This should rotate your hips to squeeze the hazelnut even harder and make your tailbone look higher.
Think about everything again. Finding length, the elbows and shoulders, head, hips, knees and heels .