The Science of Yoga
show how yoga could result in major benefits for cardiovascular health. It was the kind of thing that Dean Ornish had pioneered in the 1970s and 1980s, and that, over time, had received wide notice and emulation. In the research, scientists typically had subjects adopt not only Hatha yoga but other lifestyle changes as well, such as becoming strict vegetarians. In 1997, for instance, scientists at the Hannover Medical University in Germany reported on a study that examined more than one hundred adults who took part in a comprehensive program of yoga and meditation for three months. The setting was a yoga school that had its own fields, garden, and kitchen, and where the subjects adhered to its regular vegetarian diet. The results showed that participants lost weight and reduced their blood pressure and heart rates, significantly lowering their risk factors for heart disease. That was the study’s main question, and scientists hailed the results as showing yoga’s benefits for cardiovascular health.
But their report also noted that testosterone fell significantly. It was an aside—a minor finding in relation to the main question. But the idea nonetheless got lodged in the scientific literature.
Now, as it turns out, vegetarianism alone reduces the body’s levels of testosterone, and that kind of reduction has been understood for a long time. The vegetarian factor meant that yoga most likely had nothing to do with the reportedtestosterone drops. Even so, the relationship had become cloudy. In addition, the muddle probably grew because of the structural bias in science that favors new findings over old. For whatever reason or reasons, fallacies gained currency.
“You won’t boost testosterone doing yoga,” Al Sears, a popular author and Florida doctor specializing in men’s health, declared in a leaflet. “Try wrestling, boxing or karate instead.”
The confusion meant that testosterone fell off the map for writers of yoga guides and how-to books. Its disappearance was understandable. At best, news of the hormone’s reduction in the body was puzzling given the personal experience of revitalization and, at worst, seemed like something of an embarrassment. How could yoga do that given testosterone’s importance for improving mood, attention, and sense of well-being—not to mention sex?
One way that popular yoga handled the ambiguous situation was by hailing the discipline’s sex benefits while omitting any mention of testosterone. The 2003 book Real Men Do Yoga reported that the discipline “recharges your sex life” with “Viagra-like effects.” But it made no mention of the potent little hormone.
Science kept inching forward, despite the jumble. In Russia, three decades after Udupa, investigators reported new evidence that echoed his findings. The team leader was Rinad Minvaleev, a physiologist who practiced yoga and led expeditions to the Himalayas. Among his interests was the Tibetan yoga of Tummo. It generates inner heat that is said to protect its practitioners from extreme cold. A photograph of Minvaleev in the Himalayas shows him sitting atop a glacier wearing nothing more than a swimsuit.
His team at Saint Petersburg State University and the city’s Medical Academy of Postgraduate Studies undertook a yoga study with a very narrow focus. The subjects included seven males and one female, their ages ranging from twenty-two to fifty. The volunteers were taught how to do the Cobra and to hold it for two to three minutes. The team limited itself to studying the physiological repercussions of just that one posture.
The Cobra, or Bhujangasana, from the Sanskrit for “snake,” is one of Hatha’s oldest poses. It dates from the pure Tantra days before the era of sanitization and takes center stage in such works as the Gheranda Samhita —a holy book of Hatha thatscholars date to the transition between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Parts of Gheranda Samhita , no less than Hatha Yoga Pradipika , read like a sex manual, full of references to the perineum, scrotum, penis, and so forth, as well as acclaim for the goal of stoking “the bodily fire.” Bhujangasana is praised as an igniter. As the yogi performs it, the book says, “the physical fire increases steadily.” The book describes the concluding step of the yogic journey as “pleasures, enjoyments, and ultimate bliss.”
Easy to do, the Cobra is basic to beginning yoga and was one of more than a dozen poses that Udupa’s
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