The Science of Yoga

outlandish than they once seemed.”
    Feuerstein’s essay on the topic appeared in his book Sacred Paths and was entitled “Science Studies Yoga.” But his enthusiastic tour of the field managed to say nothing about the decades of demystification. Nor did it mention the specific exposés of Paul and von Török, Gune and Bagchi, Gore and Bera. His message was all about supermen.
    As it turned out, claims of the fabulous went beyond the rarified world of the advanced yogis. They expanded in timeto include everyday practitioners as well.

II
FIT PERFECTION
    I once took a yoga class where the male teacher held up an illustration of a muscular man and proceeded to ridicule the build as childish. His message was loud and clear—yoga produces a better physique and is more advanced than other varieties of body development. The class nodded in agreement. We were all in the same boat headed for the same destination—a place of lithe contours and sculpted abs, a land where physical fitness can reach astonishing new heights.
    Of course many yoga teachers honor the field’s spiritual roots with attitudes of humility. Some acknowledge that yoga has its own strengths and limitations. Even so, a number of gurus and teachers have put forth extraordinary lists of particulars to explain why yoga constitutes the ultimate form of exercise.
    Consider Bikram Choudhury, the founder of hot yoga, a man famous in the yoga community for his collections of Rolexes and Rolls-Royces. His brand is so popular and uniform that some call it McYoga. He demands that every studio do exactly the same sequence of twenty-six poses and two breathing exercises.
    Choudhury grew up in impoverished Calcutta but struck it rich in the United States, opening many hundreds of yoga centers. Uniquely, the exercise room of a Bikram studio is heated to a sweltering 105 degrees Fahrenheit (not unlike Calcutta on a summer day). Gleefully, Choudhury calls it his torture chamber—and indeed, beginners who enter the mirrored halls often experience spells of dizziness and nausea. Some pass out. The underlying theory seems to be that heat loosens the joints, muscles, and tendons and helps intermediate students push themselves hard, giving them a gratifying sense of progress.
    “So many Americans,” Choudhury scolds in his book Bikram Yoga , “ruin their bodies by blindly running around ‘exercising’ and playing sports. I tell mystudents, ‘No barbells, no dumbbells, no racket.’ Games are okay for children, for recreation and to teach them sportsmanship. But after that, you must give up trying to put a little round ball in a hole all the time.”
    In great detail, Choudhury explains why his yoga is superior to every other type of physical workout and why it deserves your attention and—perhaps most important—your money. Remarkably, he even rejects all other styles of yoga. A standard estimate for the number of people in the United States who do yoga is twenty million, and Choudhury happily cites that number as representing a world of misguided souls.
    “Bogus yoga” is what he calls their practice. He ridicules other approaches as watered down to accommodate American weakness and inflexibility. Among the competition, he scoffs at Kundalini, Ashtanga, and Vinyasa (“which never existed in India”), as well as Iyengar (“he uses so many props in his method that he’s called ‘The Furniture Yogi’ in India”). The newer yoga brands, he added, are even more ridiculous. “You’ve got Easy Yoga, Sit-at-Your-Desk Yoga, Yoga for Beginners, Yoga for Dummies, Yoga for Pets, and Babaar [ sic ] Yoga. It’s all Mickey Mouse Yoga to me.”
    The false prophets, he charges, shirk their responsibilities to ancient tradition and cheat students out of “the perfect life,” keeping them from the rewards of “optimum health and maximum function.” In contrast, he portrays his own style in cartoonish superlatives: “You’ll become a superman or a superwoman!”
    Is he right? Is there more substance to hot yoga than Bikram’s boastfulness would imply? And what of the other styles? Are there objective measures that can establish the benefits and compare them to regular exercise and sports? In short, is it possible to find out what is real and what is not?
    While the scientific investigations of yoga over the decades have tended to be sketchy and idiosyncratic, the subject of physical fitness is one area that has received a fair amount of scrutiny. The reason has