Yoga Can Help Your Life. This Is The Science To Back It Up
A yogi is a person who is proficient in yoga. I have practiced yoga, not very consistently for many years, but I don’t consider myself a yogi. Yoga has made me feel better and more aware of my inner self. It has helped me sleep and lower my anxiety from dealing with personal and financial problems.
A headline on the science of yoga caught my attention a few months back but it’s now when I decided to share my thoughts. Procrastination, you may say, but I’ll say other priorities. I just hope to educate those who are curious to learn more about yoga by providing an unbiased scientific perspective.
What science has found and research supports
Yoga helps relieve lower back pain, increase strength and flexibility, and reduce inflammation in the body. Yoga can increase body awareness, and body awareness can improve the way you take care of yourself. There is no evidence it can help to expel toxins, unless you count sweating, or stimulate digestion unless you count being hungry after a workout.
What’s not known
It’s not known whether some forms of yoga are better than others. For example, here are eight styles described. It is not known whether yoga can be considered an alternative treatment for various health conditions, or how yoga compares to other forms of exercise or natural remedies in improving your health
What this means to you
If you practice yoga, keep doing it. It’s not harmful and has many health benefits. Depending on your goal it’s important to find an appropriate style — gentle Hatha or athletic Ashtanga — for example. If you don’t like yoga try other physical activity. But let it be clear, I have experienced the benefits of practicing yoga, so it would be wise to be informed about yoga as just a physical activity.
It’s popular
Over 20 million Americans practice yoga, making it one of the most popular forms of exercising. There are even postures inspired by the practice of Vladimir Putin.
What is the state of the science of yoga?
The first experiment using yoga as the subject under study was published in 1975 in The Lancet. It demonstrated that yoga was more effective than relaxation to reduce high blood pressure. But it only involved 34 participants.
Since then, the number of yoga studies has increased, but with the same problems as this initial study. Yoga studies still involve only a small number of participants. They lack a control group. They aren’t comparisons with other activities or alternative medicines. Studies are short term. No long term studies have been done on mortality or incidence of disease.
From a scientific perspective, yoga is difficult to study. Double-blind studies produce the highest quality research, where participants don’t know what they are getting. Therefore, their prejudices and perceptions can’t influence the outcome. But no researcher has figured out how to hide doing yoga from a participant.
Lorenzo Cohen, head of the Integrated Medicine section of the Anderson Cancer Center said:
“Many studies don’t describe in sufficient detail what they mean by “yoga”. “What was the experience level of the yoga instructors, how did they chose different postures or breathing exercises?”
“And there are so many components in a yoga class it’s difficult to know what might have an effect on health. If people say they feel better after a class, was it due to the experience of being part of a group? Was the style of the teacher? Or the breathing exercises?”
For scientists, these factors are difficult to isolate and therefore the ways that yoga helps people is difficult to measure.
Seven things that yoga can or can’t do for you
1Is Yoga going to hurt me?
No, probably not. Unless you are an unsupervised beginner trying to do a headstand.
This question first arose in 2012 when the New York Times published an article suggesting that yoga can ruin your body. The piece suggested that yoga caused damage — broken bones and cerebrovascular accidents with brain injuries.
But that piece was based on anecdotes, exaggerated to suggest that cases were representative of practicing yoga. A summary of many injury reports from practicing yoga have found that yoga is as safe as any other activity, not a 100%, but nothing is. Lesions were mainly reported after trying to do a headstand or positions that required to put one or both feet behind the head.
As a matter of practical advice, beginners should avoid advanced postures and never under the influence of psychoactive drugs.
2 Is yoga a good exercise?
It depends on the style of yoga. The breathing exercises aren’t going to tighten your muscles or get you fit. But strenuous Ashtanga yoga styles are as effective as other forms of vigorous exercise.
Some studies have shown that certain styles of yoga can indeed make you stronger. A small study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research showed that eight weeks of Bikram yoga in 32 young adults.increased their weight lifting strength.
Another study, in the Journal of Clinical Nursing, found that hatha yoga improved aerobic fitness in older people.
Research the style you want to practice. If your focus is on relaxation, select a style that won’t raise your heart rate, increase the number of calories burned, or strengthen your muscles. If you want to be stronger, then select an athletic style which tires your muscles and makes you gasp.
3 Will it help lower my stress and anxiety?
While this is the most common perception of yoga, studies are inconclusive.
Karen Pilkington, a researcher at the University of Westminster, knows about this more than anyone. She made a systematic review of yoga studies targeting anxiety and depression.
“There are indications that it might be useful,” says Pilkington. “But many of the studies are very small and there’s definitely a need for more studies.There’s no conclusive evidence that yoga works for depression and anxiety” she said. “We’re still exploring yoga and the best ways to prove it can help.”
Here’s the complication from all these studies; to establish cause and effect. With anxiety and depression, it’s difficult to find out if yoga is helping, or if it’s the act of joining a group or study that supports you. As for stress reduction, yoga is as effective as other relaxation programs but more useful than doing nothing.
4 Will it benefit my long term health?
Maybe. There is no direct evidence, only anecdotal, on the long term benefits of yoga. Researchers have not done those 20 years or more studies to see if yogis contract diseases at a lower rate than non-yogis.
But yoga can improve the quality of life of patients with diabetes, reduce risk factors for cardiovascular disease, and help people control high blood pressure. Some health insurers are covering combined conventional therapy with yoga as alternative medicine.
Yoga is particularly useful for reducing inflammation of the internal body. A 2014 meta-analysis on the effects of mind-body therapies in the immune system found that yoga reduces inflammation markers measured in the blood.
Michael Irwin, at UCLA School of Medicine, one of the authors of a 2015 review on inflammation and mind-body exercises, said:
“When you look at the aerobic exercise needed to reduce swelling, people have to keep it up to vigorous levels. But not with yoga. Even practices with minimal levels of physical activity [such as stretching Iyengar style] can have large effects.”
Researchers don’t know why, but it’s believed that the meditation part of yoga may have something to do with it. Yoga increases awareness of your body. As you focus on your body internal sensations, you become more aware, noticing when you’re stressed, in pain, or tired, leading you to take positive action.
5 I have lower back pain. Does yoga will hurt me or help me?
Yoga will help. Yoga helps reduce back pain, both short and long term. Evidence about this is the best research done on yoga. A 2013 meta-analysis reporting the correlation between yoga and lower back pain is summarized here.
As it explains:
“There is strong evidence of effectiveness in the short term and moderate evidence of long term efficacy in patients practicing yoga to reduce chronic low back pain. Given the low number of adverse events, yoga can be recommended as an additional therapy for patients who don’t improve after education options are used to take care of themselves.”
Keep in mind, this research was done only with the Viniyoga style. Researchers haven’t discovered why yoga helps with back pain. One assumption is that it improves flexibility and muscle strength, with relaxation and body awareness as additional factors that can also help.
6 Will yoga improve my flexibility and balance?
Research on this issue is limited. Some studies suggest that yoga can help increase flexibility in healthy older people and young computer users. A small study of patients who had suffered strokes showed that practicing yoga improved their balance.
7 Can my yoga stimulate digestion and remove toxins?
Many people who have taken a yoga class have probably heard claims that certain poses remove toxins by stimulating the colon and relieving constipation, but there’s no science to back it up. Lorenzo Cohen, head of the Integrative Medicine Section of Anderson Cancer Center, explained:
“[yoga teachers] rely on personal experience and anecdotes that have been passed in the lineage of practice,” he said. “No analytical techniques and Western style controls have been used in a trial”.
I hope that the answers to these seven questions will give a new perspective on yoga and help you make a decision. Yoga has benefited my mind and body, but from a scientific perspective, it’s irrelevant. It’s just an anecdote.
