Fight Fat on Your Mat?

By Andrea Ferretti

There's no question that yoga practice builds body awareness and acceptance, but yoga as a sure-fire path to weight loss? Until now, doctors and scientists weren't convinced. But a recent study from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle may make them sit up and take notice.

Researchers queried healthy men and women about their weight history and physical activity from the ages of 45 to 55. It turned out that study subjects who were overweight and did yoga at least once a week had lost five pounds over the 10-year period, while their non-yogi counterparts had gained eight. (Yoga practitioners of normal weight did tend to gain weight over the years, but people who didn't practice gained more.)

The reason? Lead researcher and Anusara Yoga practitioner Alan Kristal believes that it's not the number of calories that yoga burns, since only the most vigorous yoga practice will burn enough to trigger a weight loss. "But yoga builds mindfulness," says Kristal, who is also a professor of epidemiology at the University of Washington School of Public Health. "You learn to feel when you're full, and you don't like the feeling of overeating. You recognize anxiety and stress for what they are instead of trying to mask them with food."

Can I do yoga when I have period?

by Alicia King

Of course you can! Yoga is a great way to prevent menstrual cramps, stop cramping, and relax and rejuvenate the mind to take the edge off any mood swings you may experience. Centering and breathing exercises as well as practicing grounding poses are recommended.

Part of the joy of yoga is the reality-check it provides. On the mat, we land squarely in our bodies – whatever they are doing – and we begin to participate in our own internal processes.The dissociation women suffer from their sexuality and reproductive system happens in part because of Western culture’s social response to menstruation. Culturally speaking, this natural cleansing process is considered a disease, “unclean” or, at best, a grim fact of life.

Perhaps next month, you can try to allow your yoga practice bring you into a greater sense of harmony with yourself and your entire body.

Home Practice 101

If you can't afford to take a class, what is the best path to take in beginning a practice at home?

—Janet from Lawrence, Kansas

Read Natasha's reply:

Dear Janet,

Establishing a home practice is a wonderful way to create a very direct and personal connection to your yoga. The downside is that, without a teacher who can make hands-on adjustments, you are in danger of developing habits that may not be beneficial. This is why I think it is crucial to find a tape, DVD, or CD that provides a wealth of information, and to be sure that the information is delivered in a variety of forms that complement each other.

The good news is that there is a wealth of fine products to choose from when developing a home practice. Go to your local library or video store and check out a handful of videos by different instructors. Shop around until you find someone with whom you connect, the way you would if you were trying to find the teachers that you liked at a new studio. As you try different tapes or DVDs, try to find a teacher who instructs in a way that makes sense to you. This may sound self-evident, but what I mean is that he or she communicates information in a way that helps you understand the form, structure, and spirit of the practice, and that provides additional material to support your understanding of his or her explanations and directions. Sometimes we can hear an instruction over and over again and it doesn't register, but if we see a picture or read something that emphasizes the same instruction, it suddenly clicks.

Finally, I recommend that you do periodically try to take a class, just because it is always useful to be around a live person who can give feedback about alignment and make specific suggestions about ways to enhance your practice.

Reclining Big Toe Pose

by Yoga Journal

Supta Padangusthasana

(soup-TAH pod-ang-goosh-TAHS-anna)
supta = lying down, reclining
pada = foot
angusta = big toe

Step by Step

Lie supine on the floor, legs strongly extended. If your head doesn't rest comfortably on the floor, support it on a folded blanket. Exhale, bend the left knee, and draw the thigh into your torso. Hug the thigh to your belly. Press the front of the right thigh heavily to the floor, and push actively through the right heel.

Loop a strap around the arch of the left foot and hold the strap in both hands. Inhale and straighten the knee, pressing the left heel up toward the ceiling. Walk your hands up the strap until the elbows are fully extended. Broaden the shoulder blades across your back. Keeping the hands as high on the strap as possible, press the shoulder blades lightly into the floor. Widen the collarbones away from the sternum.

Extend up first through the back of the left heel, and once the back of the leg between the heel and sitting bone is fully lengthened, lift through the ball of the big toe. Begin with the raised leg perpendicular to the floor. Release the head of the thigh bone more deeply into the pelvis and, as you do, draw the foot a little closer to your head, increasing the stretch on the back of the leg.

You can stay here in this stretch, or turn the leg outward from the hip joint, so the knee and toes look to the left. Pinning the top of the right thigh to the floor, exhale and swing the left leg out to the left and hold it a few inches off the floor. Continue rotating the leg. As you feel the outer thigh move away from the left side of the torso, try to bring the left foot in line with the left shoulder joint. Inhale to bring the leg back to vertical. Lighten your grip on the strap as you do, so that you challenge the muscles of the inner thigh and hip to do the work.

Hold the vertical position of the leg anywhere from 1 to 3 minutes, and the side position for an equal length of time. Once you have returned to vertical release the strap, hold the leg in place for 30 seconds or so, then slowly release as you exhale. Repeat on the right for the same length of time.

Monkey pose

by Yoga Journal

Hanumanasana

"It was the greatest leap ever taken. The speed of Hanuman's jump pulled blossoms and flowers into the air after him and they fell like little stars on the waving treetops. The animals on the beach had never seen such a thing; they cheered Hanuman, then the air burned from his passage, and red clouds flamed over the sky . . ." (Ramayana, retold by William Buck).

This pose then, in which the legs are split forward and back, mimics Hanuman's famous leap from the southern tip of India to the island of Sri Lanka.

(hah-new-mahn-AHS-anna)

Practice this pose on a bare floor (without a sticky mat) with folded blankets under the back knee and front heel.

Step by Step

Kneel on the floor. Step your right foot forward about a foot in front of your left knee, and rotate your right thigh outwardly. Do this by lifting the inner sole away from the floor and resting the foot on the outer heel.

Exhale and lean your torso forward, pressing your fingertips to the floor. Slowly slide your left knee back, straightening the knee and at the same time descending the right thigh toward the floor. Stop straightening the back knee just before you reach the limit of your stretch.

Now begin to push the right heel away from your torso. Because we started with a strong external rotation of the front leg, gradually turn the leg inward as it straightens to bring the kneecap toward the ceiling. As the front leg straightens, resume pressing the left knee back, and carefully descend the front of the left thigh and the back of the right leg (and the base of the pelvis) to the floor. Make sure the center of the right knee points directly up toward the ceiling.

Also check to see that the back leg extends straight out of the hip (and isn't angled out to the side), and that the center of the back kneecap is pressing directly on the floor. Keep the front leg active by extending through the heel and lifting the ball of the foot toward the ceiling. Bring the hands into Anjali Mudra (Salutation Seal) or stretch the arms straight up toward the ceiling.

Stay in this pose for 30 seconds to a minute. To come out, press your hands to the floor, turn the front leg out slightly, and slowly return the front heel and the back knee to their starting positions. Then reverse the legs and repeat for the same length of time.

Can You Prove That Yoga Works?

By Timothy McCall M.D.

As yoga moves more into the mainstream and yoga therapy grows in prominence, advocates of the practice are under increasing pressure to explain exactly how it works. It is natural to reach for scientific terms in an attempt to legitimize yoga's therapeutic benefits; thus we hear, for example, that backbends fight depression by stimulating the adrenals. My response to claims like this is, "Maybe."

From our direct experience as practitioners and teachers, we have observed that backbends are energizing and seem to help people suffering from depression marked by lethargy and inertia. (They are thought to be too stimulating for those with more agitated depressions.)

When you come down from Urdhva Dhanurasana (Upward-Facing Bow Pose), for instance, your heart is pounding and you may feel like you've just downed a double espresso. It feels as if adrenaline, one of the hormones secreted by the adrenals (the glands that rest just above the kidneys), is coursing through your body. But as far as I know, nobody has actually measured adrenaline levels before and after someone has done a backbend. And even if scientists did document a spike in adrenaline after backbends, we still wouldn't know for sure that it's adrenaline that alleviates the symptoms of depression.

Science supports several possibili-ties for how yoga helps with depression. Studies have found that it reduces levels of cortisol (a stress hormone that's also secreted by the adrenals), which is often elevated in people with the disease. And a study in India found that a yoga program that included asana, pranayama, and meditation raised levels of serotonin and lowered levels of monoamine oxidase—two neurochemicals involved in depression.

Yoga is known to induce the relaxation response—to lower the activity of the sympathetic nervous system's "fight or flight" mechanism and increase the work of the more restorative parasym-pathetic system; this characteristic could help with depression. But if that were the whole story, then poses that seem to rev up the sympathetic side—such as backbends and Sun Salutations— as well as rapid breathing techniques might be counterproductive to fighting stress and depression. The reality is that some yoga practices stimulate the nervous system and some are relaxing. It is the combination that in some complex way is beneficial.

One of the fruits of yoga practice is the realization of interconnections. Our bodies, minds, and emotions interact in complex ways that science is only just beginning to understand. In this dense web of interconnections, nothing we do has a single effect. In Urdhva Dhanurasana, you bring more oxygen into the bottom of the lungs (an area that usually gets less than the upper regions), your blood pressure and heart rate rise, pressure increases in the head and neck, and you stretch the muscles and organs in the front of the body as you compress those in back, where the adrenals are located. It's my guess that the interrelated actions of this pose—along with other elements of a complete yoga practice—are what create the therapeutic benefit.

When we don't know precisely why something works, it's best to admit it, rather than dress it up in the language of science to make it sound more impressive. The easiest thing to do is acknowledge your sources: This comes from my teacher, this from Patanjali, this from my own experience, and this from a trial study done at the Mayo Clinic.

From Patanjali's perspective, the most reliable knowledge is derived from direct experience. The irony is that when we try to explain yoga in scientific terms when the science just isn't there, we risk undermining our attempts to persuade others of yoga's benefits.

Yoga Really Can Heal Your Back

by Kelly Golden

When you know something is right, you don’t require mountains of proof, but validation sure is nice every once in a while. So, when the news blasted through the popular media that yoga has a positive effect on chronic lower back pain, the validation train arrived.

Sometimes it seems monotonous to continue to respond to the multitude of reports that tout all the ways that yoga is of benefit to our physical, mental, emotional and spiritual health. It can feel if you are responding to the same things over and over again. But, when it’s right, it’s right. Yoga, in particular Hatha Yoga, when practiced correctly does help heal our physical bodies in a profound way. It also eases our minds lifting us out of the secondary effects of our physical ailments. The more studies that are done the more we find that yoga truly is a panacea for so many physical, mental and emotional ailments.

Hundreds if not thousands of dedicated yoga practitioners stepped on this path through an effort to address physical pain, often low back pain. Chronic low back pain currently plagues our Western society. In this country, we are spending $50 billion each year on low back pain related treatments. Low back pain is the most common cause of job-related disability, and is the one of the most common neurological ailment in the United States, second only to headaches.

The experience of chronic low back pain can be so uncomfortable and debilitating that it often has mental and emotional side effects, leading to depression and sometimes drug abuse. Low back injury and pain is one of the most common causes for missed work, which can snowball into a lot of other difficult life situations. The study that followed 90 people for six months concluded that the participants who were practicing yoga twice a week experienced both a significant reduction in discomfort and increased functionality at both the three and six month marks. The participants who were practicing yoga also reported decreased symptoms of depression.

It is sigmificant to note that the style of yoga that was practiced by participants in the study was Iyengar yoga. Iyengar yoga is a style of hatha yoga that concentrates heavily on principles of alignment and safety. It incorporates the use of props and modifications to create safety and comfort in a wide variety of asanas that may have seemed inaccessible to people with low back pain otherwise. For the asanas to have a sustainable effect on the source and effect of pain, it is important that they be practiced correctly. Iyengar yoga teaches correct alignment and safety within asana which can be of great benefit therapeutically.

Conversely, when done incorrectly or without awareness, the effect of asana practice can either help or exacerbate existing low back pain. Depending on the individual and the source of the pain, some yoga asanas might be counterindicated. So, it is important to find a knowledgeable and well-trained yoga teacher to guide you if you are embarking on a yoga practice specifically to address low back issues. All styles of yoga can be beneficial, if the instructor is has a strong understanding of the principles of safety and alignment. Has the practice of yoga had an effect on your low back pain? We would love to hear your story.