How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body

By WILLIAM J. BROAD

Published: January 5, 2012On 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.

Danielle Levitt for The New York Times

Salazar: I would say I’m a 7 out of 10 on the flexibility scale.

approach to teaching yoga — the emphasis on holding only a few simple poses, the absence of common inversions like headstands and shoulder stands. He gave me the kind of answer you’d expect from any yoga teacher: that awareness is more important than rushing through a series of postures just to say you’d done them. But then he said something more radical. Black has come to believe that “the vast majority of people” should give up yoga altogether. It’s simply too likely to cause harm.

Not just students but celebrated teachers too, Black said, injure themselves in droves because most have underlying physical weaknesses or problems that make serious injury all but inevitable. Instead of doing yoga, “they need to be doing a specific range of motions for articulation, for organ condition,” he said, to strengthen weak parts of the body. “Yoga is for people in good physical condition. Or it can be used therapeutically. It’s controversial to say, but it really shouldn’t be used for a general class.”

Black seemingly reconciles the dangers of yoga with his own teaching of it by working hard at knowing when a student “shouldn’t do something — the shoulder stand, the headstand or putting any weight on the cervical vertebrae.” Though he studied with Shmuel Tatz, a legendary Manhattan-based physical therapist who devised a method of massage and alignment for actors and dancers, he acknowledges that he has no formal training for determining which poses are good for a student and which may be problematic. What he does have, he says, is “a ton of experience.”

“To come to New York and do a class with people who have many problems and say, ‘O.K., we’re going to do this sequence of poses today’ — it just doesn’t work.”

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.”

When yoga teachers come to him for bodywork after suffering major traumas, Black tells them, “Don’t do yoga.”

The Importance Of Research For ICT Teachers

The Importance Of Research For ICT Teachers

BY TERRY FREEDMAN | TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 8, 2011 AT 10:00AM | PERMALINK

How important is research for teachers in general, and ICT teachers in particular? One might be tempted to say that people learn in the same way now as they did thousands of years ago, so research, apart from keeping abreast of the latest developments in technology, is pretty redundant.

I think there are problems with that attitude.

First, we don’t know what we don’t know. Research can shed light on issues we didn’t even know existed, and can raise questions we hadn’t realised even needed asking. Second, I’m not convinced that people do learn in the same way as they did thousands of years ago. Technology has meant that we can make mistakes that would have been fatal in the past, through the use of simulations and modelling. Social media has meant that we can canvass, or be exposed to, views from a much wider range of people than would have been possible hitherto. This happens by accident almost. For example, I recently wrote an article about how school districts in the USA are spending their money on computer hardware. This led to comments by John McLear, Michael Pickett and someone called Hamish. All their views are interesting, especially as two of them (John and Michael) seem to feel the same way as I do about tablets vs netbooks (article on that subject is already in the works). Moreover, Michael has provided a couple of links to articles on his website which I am looking forward to reading, and provided a further reference in Twitter this morning. Perhaps in a sense the actual mechanisms by which stuff enters our brains, stays there and then becomes useful in a practical way really hasn’t changed for millennia – which may or may not be true, but in a sense that is irrelevant.

I’d also say that, if you discovered that your doctor hasn’t read a medical journal article since he or she qualified, you might consider changing your doctor! Hopefully, research is not a life or death issue in education, but  I do believe that what makes a professional a professional is keeping up-to-date with the issues and thinking that are pertinent to that subject. That’s why it’s quite right that the powers-that-be believe teachers should continue to do research, although I agree with Christina Preston (see below) that such research doesn’t have to be at Masters level.

What is research? On the one hand you have the highly academic stuff that universities and other institutions engage in. On the other hand you have Freda Bloggs keeping a note of what happens in her classroom when she introduces a new application into her teaching. And somewhere in the middle are people like myself, who carry out research via online surveys or in Twitter. The methodology may not be scientific in the true sense of the term, but I like to think that at the very least it can act as a catalyst for discussion and flag up issues for further exploration.

But enough of this persiflage! Take part in a free  online discussion, which takes place at 7pm UK time on Tuesday 8th February, under the auspices of Vital. Christina Preston, founder of the teacher-centred research organisationMirandanet, and its seminar programme of Mirandamods, discusses the importance of research for ICT co-ordinators. This is important because we don’t have to rely on anecdotes to show people how important technology can be in the learning process. Join Drew Buddie and me for an online discussion here. Please note that the discussion and chat will be recorded.