Why yoga wrecks your body

Unfortunately, my labrum and gluteal tears might have to be fixed surgically, which will also come with a bonus package of 5—12 months of rehab. Like myself, Jill Miller and Melanie Salvatore August have suffered from major hip injuries due, in our opinion, to overuse. Jill recently had a hip replacement. Erika Trice healed a back injury using yoga, but ironically feels too much asana created repetitive stress injuries in her shoulders and lower vertebrae. Sarah Ezrin recently had shoulder surgery for an injury that she also believes too many Chaturangas and binds contributed to.

Similarly, Kathryn Budig assumes years of repetitive movement, vinyasas, and emotional stress led to the shoulder labrum tear she just recovered from. Jason Bowman had surgery for a knee injury that he attributes partially to the regular practice of poses requiring external rotation paired with deep knee flexion like Lotus Pose. Meagan McCrary thinks it was 10 years of hyperextension and nerve entrapment around her joints in practice that short-circuited her nervous system and caused her severe chronic pain.

I also know many teachers who have had to reduce the intensity of their practice or focus more on strength training due to non-yoga-related injuries. In the classroom, I see shoulder injuries most often.

Normally I find students experience shoulder pain when they practice too often, do too many Chaturangas incorrectly , or try to get into arm balances when their alignment is off. On a brighter note, if you are injured, your life is not over by any means. I discovered that I love writing articles and blogs, mentoring teachers, experimenting with yoga props, swimming, and having a simple, yet satisfying yoga practice.

I still take yoga photos some of which have been published in Yoga Journal Italy and Singapore. My injury has given me an opportunity to step back and create a different life for myself. That being said, I would do anything to go back in time, to have listened to my body, and to not have pushed so hard in my practice.

I wish I would have avoided ending up in my current limited state, having to constantly monitor and be cautious with my body.

These stories are not to scare you, but to encourage you to be careful, listen to your body, and not to push past your God-given limitations! You can have a healthy practice that is extremely beneficial to your body if you can get real with yourself about it.

I was also struck by how many of the poses put your joints seriously out of alignment. It seems that every rule — particularly of knee and ankle alignment that dancers hold in high regard to avoid injury, is broken in yoga.

In most stretches on the floor, ex. Yet yoga poses seem to love supination and pronation of the joints. This causes overstretching on one side and eventual weakness. Again, overstretching and undue stress on one side. My result? Two months of yoga and my knee which I never had problems with through all the dance training starts to get twingy.

Now, to defend how yoga has changed yours and countless of others lives, I have no argument with. Hi Laura, great response! Your point is very well taken. Just because yoga has a psycho-spiritual aspect does not let teachers off the hook for careless alignment and dysfunctional cuing.

The body houses the soul after all. I hope that over the next ten or fifteen years we see increasing bio-mechanical integrity in the practice. Thanks for sharing. Thanks for this. As a person who has suffered injuries, from yoga and otherwise, I can speak to the fact that it can happen anywhere. It does take a lot of courage though to do this, especially in a group environment.

I think this message from teachers is very important, as well as moving into and out of poses in a way that allows you to notice what you are doing. Injuries can, and do happen anywhere. Thanks very much for your response! Yoga is not how open your hips are or how perfect your hand stand is. The west is guilty of turning yoga into a PE class. I disagree that the article was not well-written, or that it was somehow making an obvious point that was already common knowledge.

For those of us who are not in the elite echelons of the yoga or from other comments, the general athletic hierarchy, it was a good article. Not all of us are elite dancers, triathletes or yoga instructors. Furthermore, the interviewing of experts like Glenn Black is certainly a technique that would suggest diligent research. In fact, interviewing experts and quoting case studies generally trumps anecdotal evidence.

The main point of the article is that the practitioners of yoga tend to talk your ear off about why yoga is so good, but rarely point out the dangers. For the layperson, and probably many yoga instructors, this information is good to know.

Hi Rachel Really well put! I am both a Physio and a yogi. Yes I see yoga injuries. I also see injuries from every other form of activity and probably more so from doing nothing. As yoga people, we know that yoga is both wonderful and risky.

We need to play that edge with playfulness, a sense of exploration and respect. We know that what we do is amazing! As a community we can handle a bit of questioning and criticism. I think the point is that when the ego takes over and you want to show how good you are at a pose you have lost the real yoga.

It is aerobics. Another teacher at a local studio encourages us to cheat to make it doable for us without injury and encourages us to not be competitive. It is very important that this be taught in yoga classes but I find that it rarely is. Self-acceptance is one thing I learned from yoga. Hi Rachel, Thank you for sharing. I am 41 and have hyper-mobile shoulders and hips. The bone heads slide right out of the shallow hip and shoulder socket. I was teaching asana practice in a way that caused alot of problems in my body over time.

I was frustrated and sad that I could no longer do an asana practice let alone teach one. My body and my practice have been completely transformed.

Proper alignment is critical. Doing asana with the breath one movement to one breath and with proper alignment is far more challenging than popping in and out of poses with crappy alignment and panting as if running a marathon. Their are 8 limbs on the Yoga tree and Asana physical poses and Vinyasa a series of poses encompass only one limb. My contribution is this: Take personal responsibly for your practice. Respond with ability to your body, your pain , your fears. They belong to you and you have the power to transform them.

Everything is a risk with dangers. Done properly with awareness, of course, yoga is the ultimate antidote to the NYT and other mind-clogging institutions that build the ego, separate ourselves from ourselves, and ultimately separate ourselves from reality!

Those are clearly advanced postures and not for beginners or Western desk jockeys like myself. Let's work together to keep the conversation civil.

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Find out now! Samantha Ruth Prabhu's revenge dressing game is on point. When I started working with Amanda, I noticed that although she was flexible, her capacity for proprioception and interoception were limited, in other words, she had a lot of difficulty slowing down, moving mindfully, and noticing feelings and sensations in her body. She was irritated and impatient. She wanted to skip over the touchy-feeling stuff and get to the burn.

So I started to help her gently develop those skills and to her credit, she put up with the process. She realized she was holding some deep psycho-emotional patterns in her body and she was able to shift them. She talks about her subtle practice as not only improving her pain, but also opening up a new awareness about herself and her life.

What scientists are beginning to discover is that slow, mindful movement is just as important as cardiovascular exercise. While exercise is great for many systems of the body, slow, mindful movement helps to build other skills and confers other benefits like:. Fifty years ago our culture launched an Aerobics Revolution — now we are starting to understand the need to balance that striving, pushing and achieving mindset with a more subtle revolution.

Everyone needs to learn to slow down. We live in a stressful, increasingly speedy world. Find out more about the Neurobiology of subtle practice April in Asheville.