The crow pose is a great bang-for-your-buck exercise when it comes to building strength in the wrists and upper body, learning to breathe in difficult positions, and improving balance and awareness of your body in space.
Though the crow pose is primarily known as a yoga posture, its benefits are far reaching. The strength, balance, and body awareness you’ll build with the crow will help you reach your other goals, like handstands, elbow levers, and other hand balancing skills.
In this article we’ll go over:
- Detailed benefits of this fun and challenging skill
- The steps to learn and get comfortable with the crow pose
- Troubleshooting
- Practice recommendations
- What comes next?
Whether you’ve been working on nailing the handstand, or you’re looking to gain strength and control throughout your body for your other goals, the crow pose will give you tremendous benefit, while also helping you zero in on your weak areas.
Benefit #1 – Builds Flexible Wrists, and Strong Shoulders and Core
Like many skills, having a good level of strength in these areas will make it easier to advance with the crow, but practicing the crow will build strength in those areas – so you could approach it from both angles, really.
Further down, I’ll give you some additional exercises for shoring up your strength and flexibility if those are lacking and getting in the way of your success with the crow pose. But really, if you were to just practice the crow consistently as recommended, you’d see drastic improvements in your wrist mobility and strength, and in how strong your shoulders and core feel.
You’ll have to work up to the full crow pose gradually and carefully because it can place quite a bit of strain on the wrists. The flip side of that is the more you practice, the stronger and more mobile your wrists will become.
As you get better with the crow, you’ll not only be putting more and more pressure through the hands and wrists, but you’ll also be putting more weight through your shoulders, which will strengthen them.
Finally, though the crow is certainly not what you’d think of as a “traditional” core exercise, the core is a vital part of keeping you balanced and stable. You might be surprised by how much you feel your core contracting to keep you steady.
Benefit #2 – Improves Hand Balancing Skills
Hand balancing is a great, enjoyable way to improve your upper body strength, whole body coordination, and awareness.
Acrobats, gymnasts, dancers, and other athletes show incredible grace, strength, and skill in hand balancing for their performances, but the benefits of hand balancing exercises go way beyond looking cool.
Practicing hand balancing is a unique stimulus to your system with strength and coordination improvements that surpass your typical gym workouts, but just jumping into handstands can be a bit much for people.
This is where the Crow Pose comes in, as it serves as a great introduction to hand balancing practice.
In fact, at our seminars, we use the crow pose, along with Double and Single Arm Levers, to ease people into the feeling of balancing on their hands.
Benefit #3 – Gain Better Body Awareness
Better body awareness will help you do everything better.
Any balancing exercise requires a tremendous amount of body awareness and understanding of where you are in space. The crow is no different.
As you practice the crow and get better with it, you’ll learn to pay attention to the small details that help you balance better – pointing your toes, gazing forward, using your fingers to shift your weight as needed.
This practice is a good way to almost “force” yourself into awareness and introspection.
You’ll also learn the importance of breathing evenly and steadily as you balance yourself. Learning to breathe properly is a skill you can apply to any exercise or activity, so spending time learning that with the crow will help you in the long run for any activity you love.
My favorite trick for breath control is simple: Smile! It’s pretty much impossible to hold your breath while you’re smiling, so that little trick will help keep your breath in check.
Crow Pose Technique – Step-by-Step Tutorial
It will help for you to understand the technique details needed for success with the crow pose. In this video, I’ll show you the step-by-step process to make it happen.
| Step | Details |
|---|---|
| #1 - Set Up | • Sit down on your knees. • Make a diamond with your hands. • Move your hands out, until they are shoulder width apart, maintaining the diamond shape. |
| #2 - Create a Shelf with Your Elbows | • Bend your elbows. • Flare your knees out to put them on your arms, just above the elbows. • Keep strong tension at your elbows for a stable base. |
| #3 - Lean Forward | • Lean your head and shoulders forward over your hands to find that crucial balance point. • Try rocking forward and back to find where that point is for you. |
| #4 - Point Your Toes | • Point your toes and push your feet back. • Think of pointing your toes instead of lifting your feet, and you will maintain that balance point. |
| #5 - Lift Your Chest | • Lift your chest up. • Flatten your back for the optimal position. • Work on bringing your head up to gaze forward. |
Troubleshooting the Crow Pose
The crow can be a tough exercise!
Especially if you’ve had little or no hand balancing experience before, you might find you really struggle to get a feel for this position.
Most people who run into trouble with the crow can benefit from addressing tightness or weakness in the wrists and/or shoulders. The exercises below will help you address those issues if that’s where you’re running into problems.
Wrist Extension Exercises
In this video, Jarlo and Amber demonstrate some fundamental exercises for working on wrist extension, an integral part of any hand balancing practice.
- For a flexibility emphasis: Do 10 pulses, followed by a 30-second hold, for a total of 3 sets each. Rest for one minute between sets.
- For a strength emphasis: Do 3-5 sets of 10-15 repetitions (adding a bit more pressure through the hands), with a minute of rest in between sets.
Wrist Flexion Exercises
When working on improving wrist mobility it’s important to incorporate wrist flexion as well.
- For a flexibility emphasis: Do 10 pulses, followed by a 30-second hold, for a total of 3 sets each. Rest for one minute between sets.
- For a strength emphasis: Do 3-5 sets of 10-15 repetitions (adding a bit more pressure through the hands), with a minute of rest in between sets.
Work on these exercises as often as you can and within a couple of weeks you’ll have drastically improved wrist flexibility and strength.
For more help with improving your wrist strength and flexibility for hand balancing, click here.
Shoulder Strengthening Exercises
The best way to work on strengthening your shoulders while working on the crow is to spend some extra time on pushing movements.
Work on slow push-ups, adding in a 5-second pause at the bottom, the midpoint, and again at the top – for each repetition. If you need help with your push-up form, this video will give you some important tips:
And for even more ways to improve your push-ups and use them to strengthen yourself further, see our full tutorial by clicking here.
Practice Recommendations
If you’ve never practiced the crow pose before, I recommend starting with the first step and going from there. Work on holding each step for a good amount of time (about a minute will suffice) before moving on to the next step.
Measure your work in two ways:
- Keep track of the amount of time you can hold each attempt to see your hold progress.
- Set a timer for a certain amount of time (e.g. 30 seconds) and practice as many attempts as you can until the timer goes off. When the timer goes off, take a break and then repeat again for additional sets, as tolerated.
When you first try this, you’ll either get the move right away or you’ll start to discover what is holding you back from achieving it.
If you need to add in the supplemental exercises, do so before your main crow practice.
So, for example, if your wrists feel tight and uncomfortable when practicing the crow, spend a few minutes working on the wrist flexion and extension exercises for flexibility, then start your crow practice.
What Comes Next?
After you’ve got your crow pose down, you’re probably good and ready to move on to work on just about any skill you want. But here are some common next steps:
Exploring the Crow Further
Before jumping into advanced variations, there’s room for a lot more exploration of this great balancing exercise.
Here’s just one example of how I play with the crow:
This is a fun way to take your practice further, and get REALLY strong and stable in this position.
Crane Pose
The crane is a lot like the crow, except your arms are straight. This puts a lot more pressure through the wrists, so it’s a good idea to get comfortable with the crow before moving on to the crane.
One thing I love about the crane pose is it helps you build strength and flexibility in your wrists and shoulders so that you can eventually work your way to planches if that’s a long-term goal of yours.
Click here for a video tutorial on the crane pose.
Handstands and Other Hand Balancing Exercises
Of course, the crow is a great hand balancing exercise, so it makes sense a good next step would be to go deeper into that practice.
There are countless variations of handstands but start with the basics and don’t rush it.
Click here for our very detailed handstand tutorial.
Get Better at (Almost) Everything Through This Practice
As you can see, there’s a lot more to the crow pose than just being some fancy yoga move. Practicing this skill will help you:
- Make your wrists flexible and strong
- Build strength in your shoulders
- Gain better control and balance
- Improve body awareness and breath control
And getting better at those things will set you up for success with just about any skill you want to take on and put the work into.
One way to improve your crow pose while doing further work on all these attributes is through locomotive exercises, which help increase wrist mobility, shoulder strength, and balance. Our Elements program teaches fundamental locomotive patterns, and is the perfect complement to a crow pose practice.
Improve Your Strength, Balance, Mobility, and Control
With Elements, you’ll build a foundation of strength, flexibility, and control helping you go further with the Crow Pose or whatever other skills you want.
