How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body & Free ebook

I want to share an article with you called, ‘How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body‘ (NYTimes Magazine), which I believe holds some (not all) important points about how yoga postures are potentially dangerous!

As a Musculoskeletal Therapist, I have first hand experience with treating many practising yoga teachers, yoga students and first timers who have injured themselves while practising what is generally perceived as a gentle stretching class. Recently I had a client needing treatment who tried a yoga class for the first time, loved it, went again and injured his lower back taking 8 months to recover. My client addmitted he didn’t know what he was doing but assumed because it was yoga it would be good for him anyway.

Injuries occur in all sporting and exercise activities such as running (calf, hamstrings and hip overuse injuries) or gym and swimming (knee, lower back, rotator cuff injuries). Often these people come to me needing treatment and say “I am probably better off doing some yoga because I have lost flexibility and that’s why I got injured!” I suggest NO, practicing yoga will likely cause you more damage, IF, you don’t learn how to use your body CORRECTLY.

There are many factors as to why our bodies lose correct functionality i.e. postural issues from work, extreme exercise, mental beliefs and attitudes, emotional trauma, chronic pain, addictive behaviours – just to name a few. The result is the brain talks to our body through the nervous system in a dysfunctional way resulting in incorrect neural firing patterns to our muscles. What this means is our muscles stop working in the right order and this negatively impacts on our entire body, particularly when put under physical stress such as yoga and almost every other forms of exercise.

Changing the dysfunctional patterns to our voluntary muscles is relatively easy to do – you just need the knowledge and practical experience to know how. Most mainstream therapists such as physiotherapists do this every day when providing rehabilitation techniques to people who are injured or for those who simply need to rectify poor postural habits, which often lead to injury in the first place. But often these exercises are boring and tedious, and therefore people don’t do the exercises. This is where yoga becomes a great healing tool.

Due to the fact that is takes time and many repetitions to change the neural patterning of your body, practising something you enjoy such yoga means you can balance and heal your body while having fun, which rapidly speeds up the process. The other aspects essential to any yoga practise ensure greater success of this transformation, which are known as the five elements – correct alignment, flowing movement, correct breath work, internal heat and focus.

So where do I get this experiential knowledge?

Our Yoga Personal Instruction Workshops offers the basic fundamental requirements you need in order to use your body correctly in any exercise situation. This yoga workshop is derived from Musculoskeletal Therapy rehabilitation techniques and Psychosomatic Therapy principles, which have been applied to yoga postures.

I have developed this workshop to ensure everyone can have access to this knowledge when practising potentially dangerous exercises such as yoga. With this you can ensure any exercise including yoga is a great healing, balancing, stretching and strengthening tool for your mind and body.

You are welcome to download our Yoga Personal Instruction ebook from our website to get a glimpse as to what it is you will learn in this workshop. Also take a look at our short video providing basic information about our Yoga Personal Instruction Workshop.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 19th, 2012 at 3:38 pm. It is filed under Yoga and tagged with Chris Knight | Musculoskeletal Therapy | Yoga Personal Instruction | Yoga Brisbane | Psychosomatic Therapy | Yoga New Farm |. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.