4 Ways to Practice Safe Yoga

By CARRIE GANN

Published: ABC News Online, January 6, 2012;

Many of yoga’s practitioners tout its benefits for strength, flexibility and general health.

But the practice can also cause a range of injuries among beginners and experienced yogis alike, according to a report in the New York Times.

William Broad, author of the Times story and an upcoming book, “The Science of Yoga: Risks and Rewards,” describes gruesome injuries that have happened as a result of the practice – popped ribs, ruptured spinal discs, torn Achilles tendons, even partial paralysis and strokes.

Yoga and sports injury experts say yoga is right for some people, wrong for others and, like any physical activity, carries an inherent risk of injury. But if people approach the practice in the right way, they can do a lot to minimize their risk of injury.

”Yoga is a powerful tool and if you misuse it, you’re going to end up in the emergency room,” said Leslie Kaminoff, a New York-based yoga educator and author of the book, “Yoga Anatomy.”

Here are some ways to keep your yoga practice safe:

No. 1 – Know Your Limits
Experts say the chief culprit in yoga injuries is often overzealousness. Most people don’t think of yoga as a competitive sport but, at times, the need to out-perform others in class can seem irresistible.

“Sometimes, we find ourselves being very competitive with fellow students, especially in physically based classes,” said Judi Bar, a yoga therapist at the Cleveland Clinic Wellness Institute. “Then, we end up getting ourselves in trouble and hurting ourselves by not realizing our limitations.”

Another path to potential pain comes from taking on classes meant for more experienced yogis. Certain types of practices, such as high-heat bikram yoga, can encourage stretching that’s too aggressive. Beginners should steer clear of classes that are too advanced or strenuous.

Karen Sherman, who studies yoga and other complementary medicine techniques at the Group Health Research Institute in Seattle, said it’s important to listen to your body and respect its limits.

“One of the basic tenets of yoga is non-injury and self-honesty,” Sherman said. “When you practice with the idea that non-violence to your body is part of the practice, you’re more likely to avoid those injuries.”

No. 2 – Poses Can Aggravate Injuries
Certain poses, too, can be too much for the casual yoga-phile and create problems if done incorrectly or by people with little experience.

Bar said certain seated, stretching poses can aggravate sciatica or injure spinal discs. Headstands can be risky for the nerves, blood vessels and joints in the neck and spine, not to mention the risk of injury from toppling out of the pose. Even certain breathing practices can exacerbate asthma.
For people who are already injured, yoga can be either a useful therapy or can lead to further injury if students overdo it.

“Lots of patients go to yoga because they have herniations of the neck and back, and they go to yoga and those injuries improve. But at the same, time, I see patients who get these injuries from yoga,” said Dr. Jeffrey Goldstein, director of the spine service at New York University’s Langone Medical Center.

Any sore joints, such as the hips, knees, wrists, shoulders, neck and back, can become more painful if tweaked or twisted in even the simplest of poses. For example, downward dog could put too much stress on an injured shoulder; forward- or back-bending might be too much for a strained back. Also, patients with other health concerns, such as high blood pressure, should steer clear of certain poses or yoga practices.

No. 3 – Let Teachers Help
Injuries don’t necessarily put yoga off-limits. Students should let their instructors know if they are injured or have a medical condition so instructors can tailor a yoga routine to their specific physical needs.

Kaminoff said experienced teachers will get to know their students and ask to hear about any physical problems. Then, it’s up to the student to be honest with the teacher.
“The teacher-student relationship is important,” Kaminoff said. “If the student’s not willing to confront a teacher with a difficulty they’re having, the teacher won’t be able to help them avoid further injury.”

No. 4 – Choose the Right Teacher
More people than ever before are toting yoga mats and regularly practicing their asanas. The number of Americans who do yoga has grown from nearly 4 million in 2001 to 20 million in 2011, according to the New York Times.

As interest in yoga has exploded in the last decade, the number of yoga studios and instructors has grown along with it. But not all teachers have the same level of qualifications and experience to safely teach yoga.

To help choose the right teachers, experts offer this advice:
• Observe a teacher’s class before you participate to see if it’s right for you.
• Be sure a teacher is qualified; the Yoga Alliance certifies instructors as registered yoga teachers at basic, intermediate and advanced levels.
•Avoid teachers that aggressively adjust your poses – they may push your body over its limits.

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How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body

By WILLIAM J. BROAD

Published: Online, January 5, 2012; New York Times Magazine, January 8, 2012

On a cold Saturday in early 2009, Glenn Black, a yoga teacher of nearly four decades, whose devoted clientele includes a number of celebrities and prominent gurus, was giving a master class at Sankalpah Yoga in Manhattan. Black is, in many ways, a classic yogi: he studied in Pune, India, at the institute founded by the legendary B. K. S. Iyengar, and spent years in solitude and meditation. He now lives in Rhinebeck, N.Y., and often teaches at the nearby Omega Institute, a New Age emporium spread over nearly 200 acres of woods and gardens. He is known for his rigor and his down-to-earth style. But this was not why I sought him out: Black, I’d been told, was the person to speak with if you wanted to know not about the virtues of yoga but rather about the damage it could do.

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The piece is adapted from William J. Broad’s book The Science of Yoga: The Risks and Rewards, publishing next month. Mr. Broad found temporary relief in yoga after rupturing a disc. Then disaster struck.

“In 2007, while doing the extended-side-angle pose, a posture hailed as a cure for many diseases, my back gave way. With it went my belief, naïve in retrospect, that yoga was a source only of healing and never harm.”

He argues that several factors have increased injury risks, most significantly yoga’s shifting demographic.

“Indian practitioners of yoga typically squatted and sat cross-legged in daily life, and yoga poses, or asanas, were an outgrowth of these postures. Now urbanites who sit in chairs all day walk into a studio a couple of times a week and strain to twist themselves into ever-more-difficult postures despite their lack of flexibility and other physical problems.”

Mr. Broad cites decades worth of medical journal entries warning about yoga injuries. The lower back is the most common victim, according to a worldwide survey of yoga teachers, therapists and doctors published by Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. He interviews scores of (embarrassed) adherants: students with pulverized hips, teachers with bad backs and those complaining of the terrifying ”yoga foot drop,” a nerve condition that makes it hard to walk.

He also points to Bikram yoga, the heat of which has been known to raise the risk of muscle damage and blackouts.

Mr. Broad interviews Glenn Black, an exceedingly careful yoga teacher who helps people rehabilitate after yoga related injuries: “Today many schools of yoga are just about pushing people,” Mr. Black said, blaming teachers’ egos. “If you do it with ego or obsession, you’ll end up causing problems.”

Commenters on the story seemed to get the picture: “It’s so like us Americans to take a perfectly harmless and even beneficial form of exercise, and turn it into the ridiculous charade that yoga has now become,” wrote Victor from California.

Over at The Atlantic, writer Elspeth Reeve seized on the piece to eviscerate the “purply plum”-swathed masses yoga has attracted in the West.

“Admittedly, yoga attracts some of the worst people on the planet: The image obsessed girls… super-hippies and self-righteous spiritual types. But any human that’s obsessed with a type of exercise is generally intolerable. Talk to a marathon runner lately? Everything in moderation.”

Perhaps Roger, a carpenter commenting on the NYT piece, said it best: “I am sure that I was able to avoid surgery due to yoga. Common sense and the willingness to get in touch with your own body make an enormous difference. I think the danger lies more in the perils of the American ego.”

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How Garbo Learned to Stand on Her Head

OP-ED COLUMNIST By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: October 8, 2011. Op Ed Page, New York Times

SOMETIMES it feels as though I spend half my time working and the other half trying to ameliorate the strain of working.
Ever since one particularly clenched day of columnizing years ago, when I found myself curled up on the floor of my house davening, I’ve tried various remedies for the ravages of stress: better nutrition, caramels, gym, green tea Popsicles, kavakava, kale, kombucha, cupcakes, chocolate, chardonnay – sometimes in concurrent combinations.

The one that works best is yoga.

So I was intrigued to open my mail on Friday and find the galley of an upcoming book by the Times science writer William Broad, who made his name reporting about space weapons and biological warfare, on “The Science of Yoga: The Myths and the Rewards.”

I stopped reading about the Rick Perry supporter who denounced Mormonism as a cult, and started reading about my own cult. I was eager to know the science behind the blissful state of mind produced by savasana – corpse pose. It can’t just be the buckwheat-scented eye pillow.

Broad suggests that only an ancient tradition of centering – “an anti-civilization pill” – may be able to neutralize the “dissipating influence” of the Internet and the frantic information flow.

Once esoteric and exotic, yoga is now so prevalent that in 2010, the city of Cambridge, Mass., began printing soothing yoga poses on parking tickets.

But as I read on, I began to feel a little stressed out.

Does yoga make you fat?

“For decades, teachers of yoga have hailed the discipline as a great way to shed pounds,” Broad writes. “But it turns out that yoga works so well at reducing the body’s metabolic rate that – all things being equal – people who take up the practice will burn fewer calories, prompting them to gain weight and deposit new layers of fat. And for better or worse, scientists have found that the individuals most skilled at lowering their metabolisms are women.”

Broad follows that up with another of yoga’s “dirty little secrets,” writing: “Yoga has produced waves of injuries. Take strokes, which arise when clogged vessels divert blood from the brain. Doctors have found that certain poses can result in brain damage that turns practitioners into cripples with drooping eyelids and flailing limbs.”

Now I was very tense. The next paragraph made me coil tighter.

“Darker still, some authorities warn of madness,” Broad advises. “As Carl Jung put it, advanced yoga can ‘let loose a flood of sufferings of which no sane person ever dreamed.’ ”

Maybe caramels work better than chaturanga.

But finally Broad, who has practiced yoga since he was a freshman in college in 1970, began enumerating benefits.
The discipline that started out centuries ago as “a sex cult,” with rapacious vagabond yogis focused on “the path to the ecstatic union” and enlightenment known as Tantra, maintains its ability to calm and arouse at the same time.

“A small trove of illuminating reports and investigations,” Broad writes, show that yoga “can in fact result in surges of sex hormones and brainwaves, among other signs of sexual arousal.”

New medical scans, he reports, “indicate that advanced yogis can shut their eyes and light up their brains in states of ecstasy indistinguishable from those of sexual climax.” One yogini described it as the best sex she never had.

Fast breathing, the author wryly observes, fans the flames.

Being a vegetarian reduces the level of testosterone in the body, but yoga appears to raise it, as well as lowering fight-or-flight hormones and improving circulation and inner flexibility.

After giving “Sex and the City” a shout-out for coining the word “yogasm,” Broad primly concludes, “The findings may also help introduce into the consumer society a number of practical methods for the treatment of sexual disorders and the revitalization of sex lives – hopefully reducing our dependence on costly pills and potions.”

I started to relax again, especially when I got to the final chapter, where Broad explores the intersection between yoga and creativity.

Artists who got rid of aches and gained inspiration from yoga include the violinist and conductor Yehudi Menuhin, the rock star Sting, and Leopold Stokowski, the conductor best known for leading the Philadelphia Orchestra in the Disney film “Fantasia.”
Stokowski taught yoga to Greta Garbo during a fling in Italy, and Garbo began teaching headstands in Hollywood.
Yoga is a kinder version of alcohol, Broad suggests: “Both do at least part of their mental rejiggering by means of GABA, or gamma-aminobutyric acid. The neurotransmitter slows the firing of neurons, making them less excitable and thus calming the mind.”

He ends by suggesting that political leaders would do well to take up yoga. Herman Cain in corpse pose?

Nah. That would ruin all the fun.

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