A recent article, "How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body" focuses on the risks of bending and twisting, and injuries that can come from yoga. Hip replacements! Fractured ribs! Strokes! And, yes, it is all very scary. Even I clicked on it because obviously if I'm doing something that's going to kill me, I want to know about it. I might decide to go ahead and roll the dice on it, but hey, informed consent and all that.
Scary headline aside, the gist of the article is that doing yoga WRONG can harm you:
In one case, a male college student, after more than a year of doing yoga, decided to intensify his practice. He would sit upright on his heels in a kneeling position known as vajrasana for hours a day, chanting for world peace. Soon he was experiencing difficulty walking, running and climbing stairs.Hours! Of course he hurt himself. There are also examples of people straining necks and backs by "throwing themselves into twists." What!
I'm no expert, but I'd hazard a guess that idea of yoga injuries is big news because we don't consider yoga a "real workout." And by "we," I mean that I bow to the divine light that is in all of us but you jerks know who you are. There's this notion out there that yoga isn't real work, and doesn't need an appropriate warm-up. We aren't so cavalier about other forms of exercise: we know that we need to take care of ourselves just as much as push ourselves or risk injury. Health clubs post signs all over the place reminding you to see a trainer if you want to try a new piece of equipment. Would you walk up to the 100-lb weights on your first day in the gym? And if you did, you fool, would you be surprised when your arm fell off?
Take the mention of the yoga pose out of that example above, and replace it with any other exercise: he ran on the treadmill for hours a day. He lifted weights for hours a day. He did jumping jacks for hours a day. See what I mean?
This quote from veteran yoga teacher Glenn Black sums up what's going on pretty nicely, I think:
“Today many schools of yoga are just about pushing people. You can’t believe what’s going on — teachers jumping on people, pushing and pulling and saying, ‘You should be able to do this by now. It has to do with their egos.”Again, no expert, but if a yoga teacher ever tells you you "should be able to do something by now," you should throw a block at them. And then take your mat and leave, and probably call the yoga police. Because he's right, it's all the ego. It's what some of the other people in the article mean when they say it's not yoga that's hurting people. It's people hurting themselves because they feel obligated to push harder, farther, deeper, and they stop listening to their own bodies.
The only thing I've ever heard, in all of my yoga classes with all of my teachers at all of the different studios I've ever gone to, is exactly the opposite of that. One of my teachers likes to say, "find your edge." Meaning, first, that YOUR edge is different than everyone else's, and second, finding the edge implies not going over it. That doesn't mean that you'll never progress, because the edge is always moving: sure I can do splits now, and backbend all the way down a wall, but I didn't force my body into doing those things, and when I eventually discovered I could do them, it was almost a surprise.
I'll admit I'm guilty of being competitive with myself sometimes. I've been bummed that I couldn't get into one twisty pose or another that I was in the day before, so I've tried to get myself into it even though I knew I wasn't warmed up the same way (I'm sorry, elbows, lesson learned). I tried a handstand even though my arms don't straighten and I fell on my head. But I'm getting better: I know when I do handstand prep and I feel my arms go out to the side that I shouldn't try to do a full handstand. I was at a detox workshop this weekend for two hours and I was in direct sunlight and couldn't move my mat, and it was so intense that I thought I was gonna die a little bit. And you know what I did? I sat out an entire core section and jumped back in when my heart rate went down a little and my muscles relaxed, and I did not die, nor did anyone harangue me about not pushing myself hard enough. I listened to myself, just like the teacher told us all to do at the beginning of class. THAT is yoga.
Have fun out there and don't die. Especially don't die in deaf man's pose, it's not as fun as it looks.
Image: Ambro / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
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