Why 'Hug Your Elbows In By Your Ribs' May Be the Wrong Cue in Chaturanga

Most yoga teachers learn to cue elbow tracking in chaturanga early in their training. Most come in to a teacher training thinking that your elbows have to be by your ribs because it's "correct" alignment.  Hug your elbows in by your ribs. Keep the elbows close to the body. Draw them toward your midline as you lower. The intention is right. Elbow flare is a real problem in chaturanga and it does load the anterior shoulder in ways that accumulate over time.

But here's what most teacher training programs don't cover: elbow flare doesn't start at the elbow. And cueing the elbow without addressing where the problem actually originates can create a different problem in the same joint complex or make the original one worse.

This is not a chaturanga problem. It's a diagnostic problem. It's a teacher problem. And understanding the difference will change how you teach this pose.

The Problem With Symptom-Based Cueing

Yoga teacher training does a reasonable job of teaching cues rooted in alignment. What's more limiting is that alignment assumes a certain aesthetic and body type- making it inaccessible for many of the people actually in our rooms. Very few teachers are trained to observe what's actually happening in a practitioner's body before deciding what to say.

The result is a profession that inherits corrections without always understanding the mechanisms behind them. A cue gets passed from one generation of teachers to the next because nobody has questioned it with enough anatomical precision to know when it doesn't.

Symptom-based cueing means seeing a problem- elbow flare, shoulder collapse, spinal rounding and addressing it at the location where it's visible. This works when the visible location is also the source. It fails when the visible problem is a downstream consequence of something happening elsewhere in the chain.

Elbow flare in chaturanga is a downstream consequence. The source is two joints upstream.

Understanding this distinction is the difference between a cue that solves a problem and a cue that moves it somewhere less visible.

What's Actually Happening in the Shoulder During Chaturanga

Chaturanga is the most repeated loaded shoulder movement in a vinyasa practice. A practitioner doing two vinyasas per sun salutation in a 60-minute class may lower into chaturanga 20 to 30 times. Across a week of regular practice, that's hundreds of repetitions. Across years, it's thousands. The cumulative load of a misdirected correction at that volume is significant.

To understand why the elbow cue can fail, you need to understand three things about how the shoulder works in this movement.

1. The Hand Position Sets the Mechanical Line

The forearm, elbow, and upper arm function as a linked mechanical chain. The orientation of the hand on the mat determines how that chain tracks as the body lowers.

When the hands are set with internal rotation  with your fingers angled inward or wrists turned slightly (a common cue that leads to this is to bring your middle fingers parallel to the sides of your mat) the mechanical line of the forearm runs outward from the elbow. The elbow will flare to follow that line. This is not a weakness or a lack of effort. It is the arm doing exactly what the hand position requires of it.

Cueing the elbow to track differently without changing the hand position is asking the arm to override its own mechanical alignment. The body does this one of two ways: it forces the correction and creates torque at the wrist, or it produces internal rotation at the glenohumeral joint to bring the elbow inward - which is the anterior shoulder loading pattern you were trying to prevent.

2. Internal Rotation at the GH Joint Loads the Anterior Capsule

The glenohumeral joint which is the ball and socket- depends on rotator cuff co-contraction to maintain centration during loaded movement. Centration means the humeral head is optimally positioned in the glenoid socket, distributing load across the maximum available contact area.

When the elbow is forced inward via internal rotation of the humerus, the posterior rotator cuff ( infraspinatus and teres minor) is placed under stretch load while the subscapularis and anterior capsule absorb the compressive force of the descent. The joint loses centration. The anterior shoulder structures -the structures already under the most stress in the lowering phase - take on additional load.

This is the mechanism behind the chronic anterior shoulder pain that is common in regular vinyasa practitioners. It is not usually the result of one bad chaturanga. It is the result of a loading pattern repeated hundreds of times.

3. Serratus Anterior Must Stay Active Through the Entire Descent

Serratus anterior is the primary scapular stabilizer in closed-chain shoulder loading. Its job is to hold the medial border of the scapula flat against the ribcage -maintaining the scapula as a stable platform for the glenohumeral joint to work from.

In chaturanga, serratus must maintain scapular protraction which is slight spreading of the shoulder blades, through the entire eccentric lowering phase. Not at the top. Not at the bottom. Through the whole movement, against increasing compressive load.

When the serratus fails during the descent, the scapula tips anteriorly, the glenoid faces downward and forward, and the glenohumeral joint loses the stable platform it needs to centrate against body weight. This is a different failure mode from the elbow flare pattern described above, but it produces a similar visual result at the shoulder, and it requires a different intervention.

The most important cue you can give in chaturanga is not about the elbows at all. It is: keep pressing the floor away as you lower.

The Fix: What to Do Instead

The replacement strategy has three parts and a specific sequence. The sequence matters because each step creates the conditions for the next one to work.

STEP 1: Set the hands before anything else

Index fingers pointing straight forward or even slightly rotated out, weight distributed through all five fingers including the fingertips. This establishes a neutral forearm position so the mechanical line from hand to elbow to shoulder runs in the right direction before any load is applied. The elbow will track correctly as a consequence of this. You do not need to cue it.

STEP 2: Hug your upper arm gently into the socket

This is a rotator cuff centration cue. It produces co-contraction of the muscles surrounding the glenohumeral joint -compressing the humeral head into the glenoid before the descent begins. The joint is now actively stabilized rather than relying on passive structures to absorb the load of lowering.

STEP 3: Keep pressing the floor away as you lower

This maintains serratus anterior activation through the eccentric phase. The scapulae stay slightly apart and flat against the ribcage. The glenohumeral joint retains its stable platform. The anterior capsule is not absorbing load it wasn't designed to handle. This is the single most important shoulder cue in chaturanga.

In practice: Set your hands. Index fingers forward, all five fingers pressing. Hug your upper arms into the joints. Keep pressing the floor away as you lower. Notice what happens to the elbows. They track. You didn't cue them once.

What This Means for How You Teach

The elbow cue isn't wrong because the intention behind it is wrong. It's wrong because it addresses a symptom at the location where it's visible rather than at the source where it originates. That's a subtle distinction but a clinically significant one.

The teachers who make the biggest difference to their practitioners' bodies are not necessarily the ones with the most cues. They're the ones who understand the mechanism well enough to know which joint to address, in what direction, and in what sequence. That understanding doesn't come from memorizing corrections. It comes from learning to see the body the way a clinician does.

Once you understand why the hand position determines elbow tracking, you don't need to rely on inherited cues. You have something more precise to say and the clinical reasoning to back it up.

That's the shift. And it applies to every pose you teach, not just chaturanga.

Go Deeper on Shoulder Mechanics

This post covers one mechanism in one pose. The shoulder complex has four joints, a primary stabilizing muscle that yoga almost universally undertrains, and a set of commonly taught cues that consistently produce the opposite of their intended effect when applied without anatomical context.

Teacher Tune Up is a shoulder anatomy and movement module built specifically for yoga teachers. It covers:

• Scapulohumeral rhythm and the 2:1 ratio that governs everything overhead
• Serratus anterior and why standard cueing shuts it off
• Why "shoulders back and down" sets up impingement under overhead load
• How to observe scapular winging and what it tells you about what's actually failing
• The clinical framework for choosing the right cue for what you are actually looking at

The course is self-paced and evergreen. You can move through it on your own schedule and return to it as a reference as you teach.

[Find it here - link in bio]