I like yoga as a form of exercise, I
really do. I first got into it some years ago, when I was doing a lot
of cycling and not a lot else, and my body was becoming terribly
unbalanced as a result – huge chunky thighs, weedy arms, and very
little flexibility at all. I was lucky enough to be working with
someone at the time who was a qualified yoga teacher, and she
introduced me to Ashtanga yoga.
For those unfamiliar with yoga, just as
the term “cycling” can cover anything from “popping to the
shops on a bike” to “hooning downhill on a full-suss MTB” to
“riding a 600k audax”, there are many different forms of yoga.
Ashtanga is a very active aerobic form of fitness which exercises
almost all the muscle groups. None of this
sitting-around-contemplating-one’s-navel. Each posture should flow
into the next, via a vinyasa (a very elaborate push-up/plank/set of
bends move), and it’s a lovely workout. I’ve tried other forms of
yoga (Iyengar, Hatha), and not enjoyed them half as much as I do the
flowing sequence of Ashtanga.
What really does hack me off though, is
the fact that seems impossible to find somewhere that does the yoga
without the hippy bullpoo and complete lack of understanding as to how
the body works. I’ve been to classes where teachers insist on
starting with breathing “exercises” which involve sticking your
fingers up your nose and your thumbs in your ears and breathing in a
peculiar rhythm in order to “detoxify”. I’ve had teachers
belligerently insist that menstruating women mustn’t do
inverted poses (headstands, shoulder stands, full back-bends etc)
because it would do untold damage to one’s insides as the flow
reversed (fortunately my first yoga teacher took the more sensible
attitude of “What’s it going to do: come out of my ears?”
and ignored this superstition). I’ve been told by
otherwise-sane-sounding people that a certain pose is good because it
“massages the liver and releases nutrients into the blood”. I’ve
been instructed to “breath deeply into the kidneys”.
My current studio is lighter than many on the bullpoo quotient, but nonetheless there's still an underlying trend. It’s so disturbing that so many
rational and reasonably-educated people believe all this and worse
that I’m tempted to leave a copy of Ben Goldacre’s Bad Science
lying around the studio I currently attending. But I won’t – this
stuff is close enough to a quasi-religious belief to some people that
I fear trying to persuade them to think rationally about what they’re
saying will upset them. And most of them are nice enough people that
I don’t want to do that. But the problem is that there’s a
self-perpetuating cycle of irrationality around the yoga industry.
Anywhere offering yoga classes will invariably also offer
aromatherapy, homeopathic nutritional supplements, chakra
realignment, and half-a-dozen other half-baked ideas which keeps yoga
firmly in the Hippy Woo camp, and makes it unattractive to scientists
and rational-minded people just looking for a form of exercise. Which
is a shame, because I think yoga is great.
