January 5, 2012 | 1:22 PM |

The Backlash: NYT On Yoga As A Body-Wrecker

FILED UNDER: Personal Health, fitness, injuries, yoga

Yoga: Panacea or Saboteur?

The backlash was inevitable.

With yoga studios sprouting up on nearly every urban corner and with practically every adult practicing some form of yoga or another (I’m one of them), the scary, anti-yoga stories were bound to emerge.

Here’s the latest: a massive piece in The New York Times Magazine called: “How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body” by science reporter William Broad, who has written a book on the topic.

The article’s nut graph goes like this:

According to Black, a number of factors have converged to heighten the risk of practicing yoga. The biggest is the demographic shift in those who study it. 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. Many come to yoga as a gentle alternative to vigorous sports or for rehabilitation for injuries. But yoga’s exploding popularity — the number of Americans doing yoga has risen from about 4 million in 2001 to what some estimate to be as many as 20 million in 2011 — means that there is now an abundance of studios where many teachers lack the deeper training necessary to recognize when students are headed toward injury. “Today many schools of yoga are just about pushing people,” Black said. “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.”

Although the piece is filled with scary stories (a 28-year-old woman has a stroke doing wheel) and ominous statistics (yoga-related emergency room visits are up) that make yoga sound about as dangerous as jumping off a plane with a cheap parachute, my overall take is this: if you do it in moderation, and listen to your own body, it’s going to be OK. Om.

About the author

Blogger, CommonHealth Rachel Zimmerman worked as a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal for 10 years, most recently covering health and medicine out of the paper’s Boston bureau. Rachel has also written for The New York Times, the (now-defunct) Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the alternative newspaper Willamette Week, in Portland, Ore., among other publications. Rachel co-wrote a book about birth, published by Bantam/Random House, and spent 2008 as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. Rachel lives in Cambridge with her husband and two daughters. View all posts by Rachel Zimmerman →

  • Varyamd

    Unfortunately the word yoga has been misused in the west. yoga does not mean various postures and physical exercises. Yoga is union of soul with God.It has physical , mental and
    spiritual components. Nobody should ever force him/her self into any pose.
    The Ashtang (8 limbs ) of yoga include-yam,niyam,asan,pranayam,pratyahar,dharna,dhyan and
    samadhi.  NY times has a responsibility to publish the facts
    rather than blaming yoga, william broad should have explained what is true yoga is.  

  • Wbhomebrew

    It’s also a bad idea for an obese person to start running five miles a day without working up to it.

    And don’t go kayaking without safety training and a life vest.

    Etc., etc., etc.

    It’s like anything else. You need to be reasonable in your expectations. Common sense is an under-utilized tool sometimes: don’t blame yoga for people doing dumb things.

  • Deanacavan

    Finally got to sit down and read the whole NYT article. It is definitely well researched, but also quite bias.I think that this article brings up important points. There are many unqualified teachers out there that treat yoga as an aerobics class. Any form of exercise (repetitive or competitive) can cause injury and so is this article saying that we should avoid exercise entirely? That would be preposterous. I agree a ten minute headstand or shoulderstand is not appropriate for someone who has not built the foundation for it. I feel like I have a strong enough body for those poses, and yet I still go thru “yoga pain” almost constantly. It moves from one area to the next. The only thing is, to me, this pain is not bad pain. It is more of an awareness, emotional blockages, opening. And it teaches us how to deal with other forms of suffering off the mat. Granted, I did tear my meniscus doing yoga, and that is not good pain. Mostly because of hyperextension, which should always always be avoided. But truthfully, I lock out my knees when not doing yoga (much less now than before), so that might have happened to me without the practice. As for those having strokes (as mentioned in the article), I am just not convinced that these people would not have had strokes by not doing yoga. These are rare cases and I don’t think you can deem something unsafe or inappropriate for the masses based on limited evidence like that. In my opinion, the more people doing yoga, the better the world will be. The problem lies in our western egos, in poorly trained teachers, and in the misunderstanding of the philosophy of yoga.  What they fail to report is that perhaps extreme twists and backbends and inversions are not safe enough for the average person, learning to breathe, humbling the ego, opening the heart, and yes, physical exercise are aspects of yoga that everyone can benefit from. As an ashtanga yoga teacher, I always remind all students that 80% effort and accepting limitations will prevent injury and create a sustaining life long practice. 

  • Guest

    The article’s points are valid though.  It’s very easy to say “listen to your own body”, but we are all subject to peer pressure, real or perceived.  No on wants to be the person in the class that can’t or won’t do a pose. So many people push harder then they should, and in fact don’t listen to their body. The reality is that we are, generally speaking, poor decision makers, which will lead directly to many people injuring themselves.

  • Guest

    Every yoga instructor I’ve ever had (and I generally do Hatha yoga) has said, “Listen to your body.” In other words, do as much as you feel comfortable doing, and push yourself only a tiny bit at a time. I’m not familiar with all forms of yoga by any means, but if a “yoga instructor” ever said to me, “you should be able to do this by now,” I would leave the class immediately. Yoga is not a competition.

  • schplyn

    Though slightly alarmist, Broad’s article brings up incredibly important points. Yoga is not a cure-all and has some serious side effects.  I have been practicing hot yoga (both Bikram and Baptiste) for close to 6 years now. Last year, I sprained my ankle quite badly. The yoga I practiced to help with the healing actually created more problems.  Locking my knees in standing poses in Bikram classes caused my calf to hyper-extend, creating serious and constant pain in my knee and ankle.  I believe that locking my knees in my practice actually might have contributed to the sprain in the first place. I didn’t realize that this was causing serious problems until I saw a physical therapist, who showed me how I could safely hold certain poses and explained what was happening. However, in the yoga studio, I was often singled out and humiliated by certain militant teachers who demanded that I hold a pose the way that their gurus had taught them, rather than the way that my medical professional had showed me.  I think that Broad is right about the extreme and dangerous ego of yoga teachers, who know very little about the human body, but are very confident in their ignorance.

    Of course, I will still practice yoga.  But, I appreciate the research and the warnings of Broad’s article.