If you are new to yoga, one of the first things that you probably learned to do was a sun salutation. Interestingly, a couple of the poses in sun salutations aren’t for beginners. Cobra being one of them.
When most people do cobra, they end up with a bend just in the lower back, and then it’s straight up to the head.
You see, in order to properly execute cobra, you have to have great spinal flexibility. Chances are if you’re a beginner, yours is not so flexy. So you need to modify it, a “cobra for beginners,” so to speak.
Now, I have been working on my upper back flexibility for almost a year (as of the picture you see here) and I’ve been practicing yoga for almost 5 years. So I’m far from a newbie. And although I do have fairly good flexibility in my limbs, you’ll even see in the photo of me in cobra, that I don’t have a great full expression of cobra.