Wrists hurt in downward dog after five minutes even with fingers spread Pose Help

Spreading the fingers is only half of it, and the half people miss is where your weight sits. Most beginners are too far forward, so the shoulders end up over the hands and everything lands in the wrist crease. Try these in order:

• Walk your feet back until your ears are between your arms and your hips are the highest point. If you look like an upside down V rather than a plank with a raised backside, weight comes off the hands immediately.
• Press the base of the index finger down deliberately. Most people press the outer edge and the heel, which loads the joint directly.
• Rotate the upper arms outward slightly so the inner elbows face forward. That engages the shoulder to carry load instead of dumping it into the wrist.
• Bend the knees. Tight hamstrings tip the pelvis and push weight forward into the hands, and almost everyone bends the knees far less than they should.
  If it still hurts, spend two weeks doing it on your forearms in dolphin instead and let your shoulders get strong enough to hold the weight where it belongs.

Check the wrist extension itself. Flat palms put the joint at roughly 90 degrees and plenty of people do not have that range yet without compensating somewhere. A wedge or a rolled edge of the mat under the heel of the hand takes 10 or 15 degrees off the angle, and that is often the difference between aching and fine.

Spend two weeks doing dolphin instead — forearms down, same overall shape. It takes the wrists out of the equation entirely and builds the shoulder strength that is actually missing, and when you go back to downward dog the weight ends up somewhere sensible on its own. Two weeks of dolphin did more for my downward dog than a year of doing downward dog.

Two months of four times a week from nothing is a lot of new load on a joint that does very little else in daily life. Some of this is simply that your wrists are not conditioned yet, and it does improve — mine took about three months. Do a minute of wrist prep first: gentle circles, then palms down with fingers pointing back, then the same on the backs of the hands.

Also do not stay in it for five minutes as a beginner. Downward dog gets used as a resting pose in classes, but it is not restful until your shoulders are strong. Drop to a knee or into child's pose whenever you need to.

Get gloves with wrist padding.