How to Prevent Yoga Injuries?

The more we move, the more we are capable of moving – from Pete Egoscue book “Pain Free”.

A common question I often hear as a posture alignment specialist  is why cannot one do yoga, or Pilates, or Zumba, or weight training, etc, to improve one’s posture? Why special posture fitness is needed?

Exercising is essential for our health. I am a huge fan of yoga – I’ve been practicing it personally for more than 15 years (my favorite type being Kundalini yoga with Ana Brett and Ravi Singh). I am totally convinced everybody should be doing some yoga practice daily - not only for physical health but for peace of mind, mood improvement, and spiritual enlightenment.

However, I hate to admit that I could not achieve the same postural alignment results with yoga as with a posture fitness program called the Egoscue method. More so, after practicing the Egoscue method, I can now do many of the yoga postures easier and better and I enjoy doing yoga more than ever before.

So why could not I see the same results by just doing my daily yoga practice? The reason is I started doing yoga when my posture was seriously compromised. Even though my posture has initially improved with yoga, I still had a number of postural deviations that affected my ability to do yoga postures correctly and I did not even know that I was misaligned!

Many people heard of the New York Times article How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body.
It points out that yoga is not always the magic cure for all physical and mental ailments, but can and quite often does cause physical harm in the way of injuries to both novice and experienced yogis. While I don’t like the article scaring many people away from yoga, there is something that I agree with. Yoga is extremely beneficial for people in good postural balance and might hurt a person with a compromised posture.

That is why the phrase “Straighten Before You Strengthen” has a mantra quality for every Egoscue method practitioner. If your posture is out of alignment, many activities you do will strengthen your imbalances and may cause more harm than good in a long run. It is never an activity itself (whether it’s yoga, running, weight training, skiing, basketball, etc.) that causes the damage but the misaligned posture that allows damage to occur. For that matter, yoga in the title of the above mentioned article could have been replaced with any other activity.

When yoga practice started thousands of years ago, people lived in very different environment and motion was never scarce. Nobody spent hours in front of the computers and nobody was driving cars instead of walking and running. Today, there are simply too many people who just don’t get enough movement. When the body stops moving, and more importantly, moving properly, muscles quickly deteriorate, joints get misaligned, posture suffers, and the musculoskeletal pain will follow.

When humans are faced with new challenges, they find new solutions. When Pete Egoscue (who was seriously injured during the Vietnam War) tried yoga for his pain issues, he could not figure out why his yoga postures looked so different from the postures of other people and did not bring any relief. After a lot of studies and by trial and error, he figured out that his postural alignment was the culprit and he needed to find a way to fix his posture first. He succeeded, and eventually the Egoscue method was born.

Even though many yogis will dismiss the notion that there might be some other type of exercise that will help with yoga practice, I believe that passing this information along might prevent some people from yoga related injuries. Don’t wait, take an action! One thing that yoga taught me was the flexibility of mind – we have to be open to new knowledge that comes our way. 

If you are at all curious what Egoscue method is all about, find an Egoscue practitioner in your area. Or at least, pick up the Pete Egoscue Pain Free book and do exercises he recommends. If nothing else, it will give you a very different perspective on the importance of proper movement and good posture. Egoscue method might change your life as it changed mine.

Like sharks that constantly swim to breathe, we move to build and retain muscular and skeletal functions – from Pete Egoscue book “Pain Free at Your PC”.

Realign. Move. Breathe. Enjoy your injury free yoga.

To learn more, please visit my website: www.uprightposturefitness.com.