It’s Not Too Late to Become a Yoga Believer
By JANE E. BRODY
One morning, a well-meaning swimming buddy called out for all in the Y locker room to hear: “I can’t believe Jane Brody doesn’t do yoga!”
She was right: I didn’t do yoga and, not knowing what it might offer me, I was loath to try it. I also feared that the meteoric growth of yoga had outpaced the training of quality teachers able to protect my aging body parts.
Now, it seems, my thinking and schedule may be due for a change. After reading my colleague William J. Broad’s new book, “The Science of Yoga,” and observing a class at my local Y, I see there may be a lot more to this centuries-old activity, more to its benefits and its risks, than I had ever imagined.
And if the science recounted in this book is correct (knowing Mr. Broad, I have every reason to think it is), my creaky joints and muscles may reap some important rewards from an individualized yoga prescription. I’m especially concerned about my back, which is riddled with narrowed vertebral spaces and prone to spasms and sciatica.
Mr. Broad said decades of yoga has helped protect his back from excruciating pain initially caused by a ruptured disc. Yet in 2007, even he succumbed to a yoga-induced back injury as he was coming out of a pose called the Extended Side Angle.
“Recovery took weeks,” he wrote. “But the humbling experience gave me a deeper appreciation for yoga safety.”
Not all yoga poses are beneficial or safe for everyone, and enthusiasts are hard put to know whether the teacher and class they select are more likely to help than to hurt them.
Safety First
Safety First
What I need is yoga therapy, and I can only hope to benefit from it if the teacher is well-qualified. And therein lies the rub.
As I learned from Mr. Broad’s book, “the United States has no regulatory body for yoga therapy. The field is, on the whole, completely unlicensed and unregulated. There is no such thing as a Registered Yoga Therapist. Applicants for registration usually face no requirements to establish their education credentials, to pass national exams, or to show other evidence of expert proficiency. Registration, in short, bears no comparison to the rigorous world of health-care certification.”
Anyone who chooses to can hang out a shingle and call himself a yoga therapist. Licensing requirements exist for beauticians and hairdressers, but not for yoga therapists.
The Yoga Alliance, a national organization for yoga in the United States, fills in this gap with specific training standards that, if met, earn the title registered yoga teacher. The standards involve either 200 or 500 hours of instruction and supervised practice, with specialized training for children’s and prenatal yoga.
To be sure, the yoga world is rife with true believers, many of whom bombarded Mr. Broad with complaints about an article he wrote in The New York Times Magazine last month chronicling a raft of devastating yoga-induced injuries. But he was also deluged with dozens of personal injury stories that included strokes and ruptured discs.
Among them was that of a 39-year-old man who said in an e-mail that he’d “always been very active,” having “skied, boxed, climbed, surfed, etc.” The man began practicing yoga in 2000 and said he reveled in the meditative aspects of it, in contrast to his more “brutal sports.”
Then, in 2010, he enrolled in a new class and developed “severe spinal stenosis” with debilitating back spasms when the teacher “literally forced me into maintaining an extremely painful Downward Dog.” This is a classic pose in which hands and feet are flat on the floor, knees are straight (though not locked) and the body is bent at the waist at a right angle.
In a more serious injury resulting from the Downward Dog, a woman in Washington, D.C. suffered a spinal cord infarction, a blockage that caused sudden leg paralysis. She has since regained only partial use of her legs.
Mr. Broad concluded, based on his research, that the benefits of yoga “unquestionably outweigh the risks. Still, yoga makes sense only if done intelligently so as to limit the degree of personal danger.”
Thus, it is critical to choose your class and teacher carefully. Grace Grochowski, a registered yoga teacher at my local Y who has been teaching for 20 years, recommends that prospective students ask about an instructor’s formal training, tell him or her what they hope to get from the discipline, and report any injury, ache or health condition that might affect their participation.
The teacher should be willing to suggest changes in the moves you attempt or even say that the class may not be right for you.
“A good teacher listens and makes appropriate suggestions,” Ms. Grochowski said. Though her popular class is large, she regularly walks among the participants, correcting and modifying their poses and suggesting alternatives.
Most important, Randi Baker, one of her students, told me, is to “never go for the burn. If something hurts, don’t do it.”
Real Benefits
Many of the oft-touted virtues of yoga have yet to be established in well-designed clinical trials, Mr. Broad wrote, and some popular claims have been shown to be bogus, like the belief that yoga breathing suffuses the body with extra oxygen or that it revs up metabolism and can foster weight loss. (Yoga actually slows metabolism, though its relaxing effect may reduce stress-related eating.)
Good scientific studies, including many supported by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine, an arm of the National Institutes of Health, have demonstrated that regular yoga practice can improve cardiovascular risk factors like elevated blood pressure, blood sugar, bloodcholesterol and clot-inducing fibrinogen, and it can raise blood levels of protective antioxidants.
Yoga was shown to improve balance in elderly women and thus may reduce their risk of falls, a leading cause of injury-related death in older people. And, I was pleased to learn, perhaps by enhancing blood flow and the production of growth factors, yoga can counteract the deterioration of spinal discs, a plague of millions of Americans, young and old.
Possibly through its stimulation of the vagus nerve, yoga appears to counter inflammation throughout the body, and may reduce the effects of diseases likelupus and rheumatoid arthritis. And by relieving physical and mental stress, which can erode the tips of DNA, which are called telomeres and program cell death, yoga may slow biological aging and prolong life.
A more immediate benefit, to which Mr. Broad devotes an entire chapter, is yoga’s apparent ability to revitalize a person’s sex life by producing surges in sex hormones and the brain waves associated with sexual arousal. Just don’t try to act on this stimulation in class.
45 Comments
These true believers are quick to dismiss injuries - anybody who hurts themselves following their guru's instructions must have been misunderstanding or doing it wrong - there is no possibility that the instructor was simply following a pre-scientific prescription which might not have been suitable for the situation.
Folks, yoga (like tai chi) is a form of exercise. It's not magic. It does not "purge toxins" any more than comparable physical activity. Its instructors are not mystically enlightened, and more importantly, are not doctors. Nobody has ever been able to conclusively demonstrate the existence of "prana" or "qi" or "bio-energy" - and for anyone who can, there is a sweet $1M prize available from of jref.org !
Exercise can certainly have positive effects, and coming up with systems that make the exercise more interesting, offer low-impact training for the elderly or infirm, or provide for cultural studies is great - I practice Asian martial arts because it's far more fun than simply doing cardio. I'm not suggesting yoga is *bad*. But this is the 21st century, can't we dispense with the pseudo-scientific baggage already?
Om :)
It has taken us hundred of years to finally make yoga mainstream and I hope that its counterpart - ayurveda, makes its way to our lives sooner rather than later. An ancient indian health system, ayurveda is an amazing supplement to yog and our health by assessing our bodies make, type, and problem and integrating the roots of nutrition into our every day. Through change in diet, herbs and balance (yoga and meditation) we begin to renew ourselves on a cellular level.
Unfortunately, the drug companies would never touch this because it isn't synthetic.. That's an oxymoron if i've ever seen one.
-Brian
http://www.progressivetransformation.blogspot.com
If you (or anyone else) can demonstrate these claims of "cellular renewal" or "toxin cleansing" in an objective manner, I suggest they apply immediately for the JREF $1M prize. If these are real effects, winning the prize would be incredibly easy.
http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/1m-challenge.html
Is postural yoga really centuries old? If you think so take a look at http://www.openthemagazine.com/article/living/not-as-old-as-you-think and http://www.amazon.com/Yoga-Body-Origins-Posture-Practice/dp/0195395344/r...
They assert that postural yoga is a very recent development and that the only physical aspect of the centuries old yoga was breath control.
Which is that lying and thinking (imagining) you are doing a pose, is just as good as really doing it. _just as good_.
All the analysis of specifics means not as much as that simple truism which students should always always keep in mind.
However, not all yoga teachers may be methodical enough to do a complete study of the student's status of health. A national accreditation agency may go someway in standardizing yoga therapy, but not enough to avoid avoid injury, I am afraid.
Even if you are not in doubt as to what might suit you best, it is good to go slow, one posture at a time. If yoga is so good that it helps cure disease, then the wrong use of it can just as well have serious undesirable consequences.
So, do your due diligence: search, read, ask and try...and I'm positive you'll find the perfect one for you!
Mike
www.theironyou.com
I have never met a yoga person (and there are millions of them here in Southern California) or an Apple person who admits the shortcomings of their product. This lack of objectivity is suspect; I would be more open to trying something if I was given a rational list of the pros and cons, rather than a overly exuberant one-sided gush fest of platitudes.
What most people dont realize is that stress is the biggest issue that causes health problems because we are not getting breathe deep into our lungs. We are so stressed out that most people do "short breathing" so oxygen is not getting into our blood cells. Ever hear of a "runners high"? Thats because they are high on oxygen!
How truly wonderful that your respect for your colleague helped to open your eyes to yoga. I hope that your journey brings joy, good health, gratification. And relief from suffering.
Nonetheless, I am almost speechless with incredulity and astonishment to read that you were formerly"loathe"to know about yoga. It is almost a topic of discussion, possibly worthy of a memoir in itself.how an editor on the desk of PERSONAL HEALTH for no less an institution than the NY TIMES, somehow managed to be oblivious to one of the biggest PERSONAL HEALTH TRENDS of the past decade.
With ask due respect: that is a fascinating disconnect.
Among the many great pleasures, and challenges, of yoga, is to observe how many people begin their practice of yoga with mostly physical and secular conceptiona, such as you enumerate. But yoga is far more than just the body. I genuinely hope that you stay with your practice long enough to begin to access, and appreciate, those other rewards. I sense that patient practice may help you understand better why you had a"blind spot"to yoga for so many years, and reveal other things you did not see before.
Enjoy the ride.
I look extremely forward to reading future columns and hearing how you evolve. I hope and trust that all of us will be better for it.
You write:
"The Yoga Alliance, a national organization for yoga in the United States, fills in this gap with specific training standards that, if met, earn the title registered yoga teacher. The standards involve either 200 or 500 hours of instruction and supervised practice, with specialized training for children’s and prenatal yoga."
And I would respectfully point out that you are incorrect about that statement.
Yoga alliance has only recently changed their legal status, but more importantly, John Matthews, Lynn Bushnell, Gyandev McCord spent $336,325.00 on NOT fighting yoga regulation, but to promote their own greed.
It is Yoga Alliance's intention to inspire fear and complicity surrounding their loose non-legal credentialing.
So before you make statements about credentialing entities of yoga, please do your homework and know the facts.
John Matthews (who resigned after I printed their tax returns), Lynn Bushnell (who works for YogaWorks) and Gyandev McCord (who represents Ananda Yoga) all represent a legal threat to the education standards of yoga.
Yoga Alliance has not acted with integrity, makes all their employees sign non-disclosure agreements, and really has not added anything to yoga education that wasn't there in the first place.
Brian Castellani
Yoganomics.net
As an off and on practitioner (now off) I know that at the 1st whiff of a competitive atmosphere in a class, run away (before you have to limp away ...) The teacher is key- in experience, understanding of anatomy as well as practice, and attitude.
I think that Kripalu up in the Berkshires does provide excellent introduction for newbies, as well as those with experience.
Then when I talk to physical therapists, they say they see the same in their patients who come because of yoga injuries. The same factors apply to yoga. It was inconceivable when I started out with yoga in the late 1970s that anyone could teach after 200 hours.
It's never too late.
Here is a link to Phoenix Rising Yoga Therapy, a member of the Yoga Alliance. They may be able to assist you in locating a certified yoga therapist in your location.
http://www.pryt.com/directory/directory.html
There are many schools and styles of yoga, each with its own quality or defining characteristic. I have been practicing yoga for 20 years and am a certified teacher through the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health.
http://www.kripalu.org/
I am in middle age, have hernatied spinal discs (not yoga induced), and am able to lead a functional life with no medication as a result of my yoga practice. Yoga's benefits are holistic. However in my case, yoga asanas (postures) strengthen the lumbar muscles to keep the discs in place, and limit the pinching on the spinal nerves and associated pain.
"Yoga and Stretching Equally Effective for Back Pain"
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/24/yoga-and-stretching-equally-eff...
Yoga breathing (pranayama) can be both energizing and relaxing. There are different types of pranayma depending on the condition or desired outcome in the mind and body. Pranayama is fundamental to the practice of yoga:
A couple of Kripalu-isms:
"If you are not breathing, it's not yoga."
"When the student is ready the teacher will appear."
I anticipate your next article about your salutary explorations and encounters along the yogic path.
Namaste