The Science of Yoga

physiology and quite another for an individual to feel good about themselves. It was the difference between improved fitness and outlook. The subjects who did yoga felt they had received a wealth of benefits even though the Duke scientists found no indication whatsoever of aerobic gains. Their discussion of the research findings hinted at their fascination. The improvements in attitude, the scientists said, “are worth noting.”
    The Duke team—unknowingly—had stumbled on one of yoga’s secrets. The next chapter will explore the science of how the discipline lifts the human spirit.
    Yoga fared slightly better in subsequent studies of aerobic conditioning. One reason was a subtle change in the discipline that put growing emphasis on energetic poses and styles. The new forms downplayed stationary postures for ones that required a much greater level of movement and physical activity, creatinga more athletic experience and increasing the aerobic challenge.

    Sun Salutation, Surya Namaskar
    To a surprising degree, the new vigor centered on a single activity— Surya Namaskar, Sanskrit for “salutation to the sun.” Today it is one of yoga’s most popular poses. The student, rather than remaining motionless in a fixed posture, moves through a fluid series of up to a dozen interconnected poses that go from standing to bending to lying prone to standing back up and to stretching backward. If done rapidly—and repeatedly—the sequence can leave the heart pounding and the lungs gasping for air. It therefore has elements of a cardiovascular workout.
    The Sun Salutation and its relatives are, by nature, quite malleable. They can be sped up or slowed down to suit individual preferences. In their adaptability, they are quite different from yoga’s static postures. The situation is similar to what we experience in terms of gait. When standing motionless, we are, by definition, stationary. But once in motion, we can move forward in a number of ways: walking, jogging, running, or racing ahead as fast as we can. It depends on what we want to do.
    The Sun Salutation appears to be fairly recent in origin. The Encyclopedia of Traditional Asanas —published in India by the Lonavla Yoga Institute, founded near Gune’s ashram by one of his students—draws on nearly two hundred books and unpublished manuscripts to describe many centuries of pose development but says nothing about the Sun Salutation. So, too, the asana makes no appearance in the how-to guides of Gune (1931), Sivananda (1939), and other early teachers.
    The pose most likely arose in the early twentieth century as the Mysore palace and Krishnamacharya mixed traditions of British gymnastics and native wrestling. Whatever its exact origins, the Sun Salutation debuted as an important new feature of Hatha yoga in the 1930s, spreading slowly through India and the world. The idea behind the pose and kindred postures was what Krishnamacharya called Vinyasa ( vi denotes “in a special way” and nyasa “to place”). It stood for the flowing movements that he developed to join the individual poses into a new kind of graceful activity. The result was a kind of yoga ballet.
    In the West, students of yoga learned about the pose in a number of ways. Krishnamacharya’s student Sri K. Pattabhi Jois played an important role in popularizing the series of movements and the Vinyasa system, calling it Ashtanga(or eight-limb) yoga, after the sutras of Patanjali and their eight rules. Starting in the late 1960s, Westerners began traveling to Mysore to study yoga with Jois. Slowly Ashtanga grew in popularity, especially among the physically ambitious in the West who were seeking yoga’s most athletic expressions. The aggressive style required skill and power, and could leave a student bathed in sweat.
    Science looked into Ashtanga as the style gained in popularity and found that, compared to traditional yoga, it posed a greater challenge to the heart. One study examined sixteen volunteers. The human heart beats about seventy times per minute. On average, the hearts of the yogis quickened to ninety-five beats while doing Ashtanga, compared to eighty beats during conventional Hatha. The Ashtanga factor represented a rise of roughly 20 percent.
    The more difficult question was whether the increased thumping of the heart that resulted from faster poses and faster styles translated into measurable improvements in cardiovascular fitness. That soon became the question.
    Ezra A. Amsterdam