"Indian practitioners of yoga typically squatted and sat cross-legged in daily life, and yoga poses, or asanas, were an outgrowth of these postures. Now urbanites who sit in chairs all day walk into a studio a couple of times a week and strain to twist themselves into ever-more-difficult postures despite their lack of flexibility and other physical problems. Many come to yoga as a gentle alternative to vigorous sports or for rehabilitation for injuries. But yoga’s exploding popularity — the number of Americans doing yoga has risen from about 4 million in 2001 to what some estimate to be as many as 20 million in 2011 — means that there is now an abundance of studios where many teachers lack the deeper training necessary to recognize when students are headed toward injury. “Today many schools of yoga are just about pushing people,” Black said. “You can’t believe what’s going on — teachers jumping on people, pushing and pulling and saying, ‘You should be able to do this by now.’ It has to do with their egos.”
-William J. Broad
It's so true.The worst teachers are the younger ones who are clueless about how easily bombes and ligaments can snap when you get into you 40s-30s even.Everyone is different. But it makes you realize why it takes a rare special persona to truly be a great yoga teacher. Not these attractive long legged model types who decided this would be a "fun job" solely...
I disagree with some of what he says however. In our Bikram training they very much teach us about injury. Bikram's schtick "kill yourself" was more meant as a battle cry against the hippie mindset that equated yoga with incense burning and prematurely teaching people who weren't really ready tricks to fake "meditate" etc etc .
Read on:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/magazine/how-yoga-can-wreck-your-body.html?pagewanted=all
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