Move Aware.

Incompetent Yoga Teachers

The subtitle of this article is “Inexperienced teachers and overeager students behind rise in injuries”, and that’s exactly the combination that left me with an injury in my left hamstring that has persisted for almost 3 years now.

I tried out the Beginner class at the Madison Yoga Co-Op back in Oct. or Nov. 2005. The teacher asked me what I was hoping to accomplish with yoga, and I told her that I wanted to increase my lower body flexibility — that my tight hamstrings were a major annoyance for me. The first class or two were about what I had expected: basic yoga poses, some strenuous, some gentle. Then, on what became my last class there, she hurt me.

We were doing a pose facing a wall with the left leg extended in front, right leg extended in back, both knees straight, bending at the hips toward the wall with the torso. I have barely any hip flexion when my knee is straight, and without asking my permission, this teacher “assisted” me by pulling my pelvis away from the wall. My left hamstring was already uncomfortably overstretched, and when she pulled, I felt pain and a popping sensation near the ischial tuberosity. It was the sound and sensation of my left medial hamstring tearing.

My hamstring has never fully recovered. I had persistent pain and reduced ROM for weeks. I finally undertook some physical therapy for it about 9 months later, when it was obvious that the problem wasn’t going to go away on its own. Thankfully, I now know more about soft tissue restrictions as well as my current flexibility limitations… I know how not to overstretch, and I know that stretching with myofascial adhesions present is unproductive and can even be harmful.

It’s too bad the yoga teacher didn’t know that. Too bad for me.

Too bad she didn’t know that it is not appropriate to touch someone in a yoga class without the student’s consent. And it is certainly not appropriate to apply a manipulation like that so quickly that the student doesn’t even have time to react and make it obvious that they are already stretched to their limit. This irresponsible behavior, combined with the fact that I had heard her authoritatively state, during a hamstring stretch, that this particular pose was good for stretching both the back and front of the thigh. A physiological impossibility. I knew that continuing on with this teacher would be neither productive nor safe.

“In my practice, I’ve seen a significant increase in yoga injuries in the past five years,” says orthopedic surgeon Jeffrey Halbrecht, M.D., medical director for the Institute for Arthroscopy and Sports Medicine in San Francisco and a specialist in knee and hip problems. And it’s not only those in the recent wave of newbies who are getting hurt, Dr. Halbrecht says: “I’ve treated more experienced yogis than rookies.”

[...]

No certification or specific training is required before a person is allowed to teach yoga. Yoga Alliance recommends teachers get a bare minimum of 200 hours of training and has built a registry of teachers and schools that meet its standards. But participation is voluntary; teachers can just as easily get certified in weekend or online courses. “If you are a Spinning teacher and you want to tack on yoga, then you can take a two-day training,” Kennedy says. “You may think you are qualified, but that has its challenges.”

These quickie courses teach poses but not necessarily the nuances of proper alignment nor the ideal, noncompetitive mind-set. And they likely won’t train teachers how to suss out previous injuries and medical problems that yoga could worsen. A preexisting arterial tear, often signaled by dizziness and neck pain, puts you at risk for a stroke; leg pain could warn that a bulging disk in the back is putting pressure on your sciatic nerve. If you have undiagnosed glaucoma, you can go blind doing headstands or shoulder stands.

Like the cases in the article above, I was definitely an overzealous student. I was pushing myself. But I never became injured until this yoga teacher laid her hands on me. Her resume in the brochure described several years of training, some of which had been under the tutelage of BKS Iyengar, a huge name in the yoga world. I bought one of his books and was disappointed to see that it was filled with vague anatomical descriptions and pseudoscientific nonsense. It just goes to show that years of experience doesn’t necessarily make a teacher or practitioner competent; they also have to be willing to abandon the dogma within their field when modern clinical evidence refutes it. Yoga teachers ought to know anatomy backward and forward and be aware of conditions that predispose students to injury.

[MSNBC via Eric Cressey's Blog]