Yoga is known for being a relaxing and rejuvenating exercise. But even though there are many health benefits to practicing yoga, some have said that yoga can cause serious injuries. Last year the New York Times published the article How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body, which caused a lot of debate in the yoga community.
The article highlighted Glenn Black, who has been a yoga teacher for over 40 years. He recommends that the majority of people who do yoga should give it up because it’s too likely to cause them harm. He says many injure themselves because they have underlying physical weaknesses or problems that make serious injuries like back or brain injuries easy to occur.
He recommends yoga for people in good physical condition, or people can use it for therapy. Since the number of Americans doing yoga has risen from about 4 million in 2001 to around 20 million in 2011, Black said there are now many teachers who lack training in recognizing when students are headed toward serious injury.
The first reports of yoga injuries appeared decades ago and were published in medical journals such as Neurology. The problems ranged from relatively mild injuries to permanent disabilities.
A neurophysiologist, W. Ritchie Russell, published an article that argued that while rare, some yoga postures threatened to cause strokes even in young people. He discovered that brain injuries could come from quick movements or excessive extensions of the neck, such as occur in certain yoga poses. If you do enjoy doing yoga, it’s important to know your body well to prevent injuries.
If you have sustained a brain or spinal cord injury due to the negligence of someone else, you deserve justice. Contact the Dallas brain injury lawyers at Crowe Arnold & Majors, LLP today and set-up your free consultation.
