SAFER YOGA: ENHANCING YOUR PRACTICE WITH BIOMECHANICS

As we celebrate International Yoga Month, we are filled up on things to love about yoga. The practice offers profound benefits for the mind, body, and spirit. For me personally, it’s been a lifeline and best friend, teacher, and lover. ;)

However, it's crucial to prioritize safety in our practice.
Many yoga practitioners report having an injury due to yoga, and many more have injuries that the practitioners don't realize are due to yoga. As teachers and practitioners, it’s important we admit to this unfortunate trend, and take action to reverse it.

As I write about in my book, I sustained a yoga injury after a decade of preferring stretching over strengthening, favoring poses I found easy, and not knowing or practicing good alignment and biomechanics.

I’m grateful for that injury though, because it prompted me to take a year-long biomechanics training and learn the ways that yoga poses, as they’re often taught in teacher trainings in the west, can cause more harm than good.

In a future blog entry, we will delve deeply into biomechanical concepts such as joint mechanics, alignment, load distribution, and movement patterns, and learn how, by applying this knowledge, we can make informed choices, modify poses, and adjust movements to suit our individual needs.

For this blog, we’ll provide more of a high-level overview of the ways we might harm ourselves in yoga, whether enhanced with cannabis or not, - and how to avoid it. Starting with an obvious one….

Keeping Yoga Safer #1: Avoid Overstretching

Many people, yoga teachers included, do not realize that tightness, or lack of range of motion in a joint, is usually not related to muscle length at all.

When we can't stretch further in a pose, it isn't our short muscles limiting the range, but rather our nervous system putting the kibosh on movements that take the joints into positions we don't put them in regularly. This is called the Stretch Reflex, and it’s a restriction that comes from the brain, not the tissues.

When people are given anesthesia, they are able to perform stretches they were unable to do before. This means it isn't hamstring shortness preventing you from moving the tailbone higher in Downward Dog, but your nervous system resisting new (read: scary) movements that could cause injury. Because of habituation, that stretch feels outside our daily movement-range. (Thanks for doing that, nervous system!).

The problem is, we as a highly-sedentary culture don't put our bodies into very many different shapes, so that wise little the nervous systems of ours develops increased intolerance for new movements. The less we move, the less we can move.

Read that sentence again and then take a ten-second stretch break.

… Hi, welcome back. ;)

Now Get This: When We Ignore Our Nervous System And Over-Stretch In Yoga, The Muscles We're Trying To Lengthen, Like The Hamstrings In Downward Dog, Actually Respond To The Nervous System Intolerance By Contracting Against The Stretch.

That means when we push ourselves in yoga, our muscles end up more contracted than before the practice. Ouch.

Our culture doesn’t like to hear this, but “more” is not always better.

“More” means we end up shorter and tighter, not longer and freer.

Keep this in mind the next time you feel the sensation of tightness as you practice. Instead of pummeling the tissues to where you think they should be, gently coax yourself, over a lifetime, into greater ranges of motion in the places you feel limited, stiff, tight, and sore.

This respects your body's hardware (the tissues) and the software (the nervous system).

Once more, the mantra is, “Don’t overstretch!”

Keeping Yoga Safer #2: Know The Difference Between Pain And Sensation

Another way we might hurt ourselves in yoga is ignoring our pain cues.

Sensation is a part of being embodied and mindful. It’s a part of being human. Sensation can become strong when we move the body into shapes it doesn’t usually take. Stretching can feel good, weird, even slightly intense, but there should never, ever, be anything even close to pain.

Notice if you are becoming tense in your body or mind as a result of the poses.

Observe if you’re clenching or wincing, or if your breathing is compromised.

These are markers that you might be ignoring pain signals.

Be sure to breathe deeply through the nose in each pose. If you can’t, back off the stretch. Holding the breath may mean you’re pushing through pain. And at any time in your practice, feel free to back off from the instruction and rest, even when in a conventional yoga studio class where everyone else is working hard.

Respect your body and over time, you'll develop open communication with your body and will immediately know if your body would be better served by doing something else.

Keeping Yoga Safer #3: Realize Our Limitations 

Our sedentary, stressful lifestyle can make us susceptible to yoga injuries.

Many of us sit in the same general posture throughout the day: driving, eating, working at the computer, playing on our phones, watching TV.

As a result, we carry a tremendous amount of tension through the neck and shoulders. If we then go to a yoga class with lots of repetitions of Chaturanga Dandasana, where we move from a push-up straight down to the floor several times, this can place even more stress on the vulnerable joints and cause injury, even if our alignment is perfect, (which, let’s face it, is often not the case).

Think about the movements you do a lot already in day to day life, and instead of pushing and repetitive style yoga flows, see if you can find a restorative yoga practice that balances the poses you most often take in life.

In fact, it’s the double-whammy of making a point to move your body in new positions as often as you can throughout the day AND mixing up your yoga routine that will bring the most mobility.

Move more, off the mat, and find how your ability to do poses increases in turn.

In the meantime, there are countless modifications and variations if the traditional postures are not available. Do not be too cool to use a yoga block or strap to maintain good alignment, and if you’re not sure how, do some research or consult a private teacher.

Knowing what we can and cannot do brings a sense of acceptance and humbleness. It’s great for the soul.

Keeping Yoga Safer #4: Watch The Ego 

“Yang” is a word from China that describes the exterior, directed, and forceful aspects of reality. The internal, non-goal oriented, and receptive aspects of life are called “yin.” Most people’s yoga practice, and in fact our entire Western culture, is heavily yang.

As Such, We Think Of Yoga As Something To Be Performed, Not Something To Be Experienced.

We are a visual culture, a performance-based culture. Instagram and social media celebrities thrill us with athletic, impossible seeming poses, reinforcing our in-class fixation on how we look.

As such, the practice has become extraordinarily body-oriented in the past thirty years, with a focus not only on posturing (as opposed to meditation and breathing), but also with a specific focus on the attainment of challenging and visually interesting postures.

I get it, these poses look cooler on social media. But when we bring our cultural heritage of being acquisitive to yoga, we usually end up overdoing it and injuring ourselves (and, quite possibly appropriating yoga while we’re at it).

Practice the art of focusing inwards, - slowing down, and staying present. If your ego wants to compete against other students, or against what you were able to do last week, or against what you think you should be able to do, bring in the element of mindfulness.

If you're able to practice mindfulness, - even a little bit, then you can do yoga, … and if you're able to practice these while high on cannabis, then you can do Ganja Yoga.

Remember, Ganja Yoga is about cultivating balance and harmony, not perfecting an arm balance or going further into a pose than the person on the next mat over. If you feel yourself getting pushy on the mat, perhaps take some Ganja Yoga CBD (our relax blend has adaptogen mushrooms to aid in soothing the mind), find a restful pose, and breathe.

Like I said, I’m grateful for my yoga injury, for the pushing and lack of awareness of biomechanics, because I could learn so much to share at the Ganja Yoga Trainings! Enrollment for the November 2023 hybrid training is now open! Click here to join our waitlist!

APPRECIATE YOU!
XO D.