Yoga may have a soft and peaceful reputation, but the theme at Willow Street Yoga on a recent evening was fear. If I collapse from a handstand, what happens to my face?
The students in Batya Metalitz's advanced class were no strangers to the handstand or other difficult poses, but she still encouraged them to acknowledge that some of the things she would ask them to do in the two hour session would be unnerving.
'I want you to be OK being in that fear. Fear will encourage you to engage those muscles,' Metalitz told the group.
Is yoga just a nice stretch, or will it make you stronger? What about cardiovascular health? How does it stack up to the activities more commonly associated (in the West) with aerobic endurance, such as running or biking?
As with most forms of exercise, the answer is, it depends, on what goals you set and on how you organize your training. Watching the students in Metalitz's class, there was little doubt that yoga practiced at such an advanced level involved serious strength. It also takes a pretty single minded commitment.
For anyone not ready to go that route, the relevant issue is whether there is value in a less intense relationship with 'mindful exercise.'
Practitioners say that regular participation in yoga, regardless of the style or level, is going to produce at least two surefire benefits: It will identify and help strengthen weak points in your body, and it will help reawaken muscles that tend to be underused.
Whether the issue is strength or flexibility, your body's weaknesses become obvious when you start working through yoga poses, even seemingly simple ones. And the further you go, the clearer it becomes what muscle or joint is holding things up.
Clearly, you can't stand on your head unless a whole bunch of things are working right, but even a simple child's pose can be revealing. Although different styles of yoga have different emphases, proper alignment is a common tenet (if for no other reason than to prevent injury). One particular pose was done standing and involved curling the back while the hips remained perpendicular to the floor. That can be a challenge, given that the tendency, when someone says 'backbend,' is to throw your hips forward and start arching the legs.
Which brings us to the other benefit: learning to use the right muscles at the right time. This might sound like something the brain takes care of without a lot of conscious planning on our part, but not necessarily. A sedentary life leads to bad habits: We unlearn how to do things that ought to be natural.
Yoga, as well as such disciplines as Pilates and tai chi, which require similar precision, forces you to concentrate on which muscles are engaged, and leads to more awareness of how we move in daily life.
Working through the body's weak points, retraining muscles, building flexibility, teaching balance: All these flow from yoga practice, even if it's limited to the less intense styles, said Ralph La Forge, an exercise physiologist at Duke University Medical Center's Division of Endocrinology. There are other widely accepted psychological and physiological benefits as well: Yoga's emphasis on controlled breathing and its meditative aspect, for example, can help lower blood pressure and reduce stress.
What's missing? Cardiovascular training.
Different styles of yoga will involve comparatively more or less motion. Some of the more dynamic, like ashtanga and vinyasa, provide 'a hell of a workout,' La Forge said. But in general, he said, yoga won't produce the same elevated heart rate or intense energy expenditure as more standard aerobics.
And La Forge said there can be limits when it comes to strength training.
The styles that involve holding poses for a longer time build static strength, for example, as opposed to other sorts of exercise that require muscles to move weight through a range of motion or that build endurance by repeating motions under weight. In general, the gains in strength from yoga are limited by the type of resistance being used: namely, your body weight. You'll only become as strong as you need to be to hold yourself in a particular pose.
But for a handstand, that would be pretty strong.
BY HOWARD SCHNEIDER
THE LATEST YOGA NEWS, FROM IT IS YOGA
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