The Science of Yoga

magazine recounted what happened when, in 2001, she took up Ashtanga yoga. By August of 2002, Millea began to feel numbness and tingling down her left arm and into her first three fingers. The pain grew and hampered her ability to sleep on her left side. The magazine said that, at one point, she thought the problem might be her heart or even multiple sclerosis—which ran in her family. Finally, after one emergency room visit and two rounds of medical imaging, Millea got the diagnosis: One of her vertebral disks had begun to bulge, squeezing a critical nerve. The magazine reported that her doctor wanted to surgically remove the disk and fuse two vertebrae together if the numbness failed to go away on its own.
    “I am sure this is yoga-related,” Millea said in the article, which appeared in 2003 amid her trouble. “It’s at the base of my neck, and I was doing Shoulder Stand a lot. I was doing it wrong, and I was pushing myself too hard.” She blamed herself and her competitive edge rather than yoga and its physical demands. “I am a super-athlete, and thought I could do anything,” she added. “But I took it too quickly. I still needed to take baby steps.”
    A number of stories came down hard on Choudhury and his hot yoga. An article in The New York Times said health professionals found that the penetrating heat could raise the risk of overstretching, muscle damage, and torn cartilage. One specialist noted that ligaments—the tough bands of fiber that connectbones or cartilage at a joint—failed to regain their shape once stretched and that loose joints could promote injury. Another said the mirrored walls of Bikram studios encouraged students to neglect the traditional inner focus of yoga for outer distractions and the pressures of a room full of competitive individuals, also courting injury.
    Not long thereafter, Choudhury came out with his book Bikram Yoga. It said nothing about dislocations or nerve damage, despite the medical warnings and bad press. It also managed to ignore the accusations of his critics. The few references that Choudhury made to the topic of physical damage centered on how hot yoga worked quite beautifully to promote a safe experience. The heat, he declared, lets students “twist and stretch with less chance of injury.”
    The period around 2002 also marked a turning point in that some elements of the yoga community started to move beyond denial and evasion to address the issue of damage. To a degree, the bad publicity left few alternatives. Now, for the first time, a number of experienced yogis and yoga publications engaged in serious debate on how to handle the quiet epidemic and come up with safety guidelines. It marked a period of public introspection—with notable exceptions.
    The famous gurus, for the most part, remained silent. Publicly, at least, it seemed like their objective was to avoid involvement in any particulars that could prove distracting, embarrassing, and possibly litigious. The candor tended to come from the community’s lower ranks.
    A leading forum was Yoga Journal. It ran a number of articles, including one in 2003 in which a teacher revealed her own struggles. Carol Krucoff—a yoga instructor, author, and therapist at Duke University in North Carolina—told of being filmed one day for national television. Under bright lights, urged to do more, she lifted one foot, grabbed her big toe, and stretched her leg into Utthita Padangusthasana, the Extended Hand to BigToe pose. As her leg straightened, she felt a sickening pop in her hamstring.
    The next day, she could barely walk. Krucoff found that she needed rest, physical therapy, and a year of recuperation before she could fully extend her leg again. “I am grateful to have recovered completely,” she wrote in Yoga Journal , adding that she considered the experience “a small price to pay for the invaluable lessons learned.” These included the importance of warming up and never showing off.

    Extended hand to Big toe, Utthita Padangusthasana
    One glossy feature in Yoga Journal devoted ten pages of colorful photos and prickly text to the risks. “Yogi beware: Hidden dangers can lurk within even the most familiar pose,” read the headline. Judith Lasater, a physical therapist and president of the California Yoga Teachers Association, argued that most poses hold subtle menace. The inherent risks can become quite palpable, she wrote, “because you may not have the necessary knowledge, flexibility,