Can Yoga sometimes do more harm than good. NY Times weighs in

Can Yoga sometimes do more harm than good. NY Times weighs in

Many of our patients do Yoga and believe it helps them stay healthy. Others do it because it is time away so they can concentrate on themselves. Sometimes people do visit us with Yoga induced injuries like the occasional popped rib, the lower back issue, etc. It is recommended that what feels tight is usually straining and what does not feel tight is, many of our patients use this information to avoid problems due to Yoga class.

The NY times weighs in with this excellent article. Check it out here:

How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body

By WILLIAM J. BROAD
Published: January 5, 2012

On a cold Saturday in early 2009, Glenn Black, a yoga teacher of nearly four decades, whose devoted clientele includes a number of celebrities and prominent gurus, was giving a master class at Sankalpah Yoga in Manhattan. Black is, in many ways, a classic yogi: he studied in Pune, India, at the institute founded by the legendary B. K. S. Iyengar, and spent years in solitude and meditation. He now lives in Rhinebeck, N.Y., and often teaches at the nearby Omega Institute, a New Age emporium spread over nearly 200 acres of woods and gardens. He is known for his rigor and his down-to-earth style. But this was not why I sought him out: Black, I’d been told, was the person to speak with if you wanted to know not about the virtues of yoga but rather about the damage it could do. Many of his regular clients came to him for bodywork or rehabilitation following yoga injuries. This was the situation I found myself in. In my 30s, I had somehow managed to rupture a disk in my lower back and found I could prevent bouts of pain with a selection of yoga postures and abdominal exercises. Then, in 2007, while doing the extended-side-angle pose, a posture hailed as a cure for many diseases, my back gave way. With it went my belief, naïve in retrospect, that yoga was a source only of healing and never harm.

Read the full article here