Before jumping into the yoga trend and hitting the mat to stay on top of modern tendencies and embrace that proverbial balanced lifestyle, first, consider the flip side of yoga. Right, everything has its pluses and minuses, and yoga is not an exception.
Surely enough, yoga has a lot of benefits helping people improve both their physical and mental state. However, as with any other practice that involves exercising, it has some disadvantages and limitations that are worth taking a look at.
Major Yoga Risks and Concerns
Initially, yoga is an ancient study with Indian roots that emerged thousands of years ago and was brought to the West at the end of the 19th century. Since then, its popularity has been only growing.
Yoga is the whole philosophy of how to make a human body and mind sync and work like a charm. It’s about grasping the highest level of both physical and mental consciousness.
In the modern world, though, yoga is rather perceived as one of the fitness practices aimed at bringing the body into a more fit and toned state by doing the following:
- Improving overall flexibility;
- Enhancing muscle stretchiness and strength;
- Increasing the joints’ range of movement;
- Practicing special breathing techniques.
Whether you are going to use yoga as a holistic practice or make it a body-shaping tool, there will be an exercising part to it. This is where the majority of yoga risks are hidden. Diving into yoga without an appropriate approach and certain knowledge, you might even hurt yourself. So, considering major yoga risks in advance won’t go amiss.
Injuries
Despite being rather about static than active movement, yoga still could be traumatic. The most common types of injuries associated with yoga include:
- Wrists: Weight-bearing yoga poses like Downward-facing dog or Plank expose wrists to stress that might potentially lead to tension, pain, and more serious injury;
- Lower back: Such yoga postures as Triangle, Cobra, Wheel, Pigeon, or Camel pose can place a lot of stress on the lower back causing pain and irritating vulnerable spine discs;
- Hamstrings: Asanas involving stretches and engaging hamstrings (such as Standing forward bend or Forward fall) might cause hamstring strains or tears when done incorrectly;
- Neck: Shoulder stand or Plow pose puts pressure over the neck and can trigger painful cramps in the neck and shoulder areas;
- Knees: Postures like Lotus or Hero can cause strains and tension or even compression and fractures in the knees.
Basically, yoga is among low-impact exercises. Most often than not, muscle strain, tendon tears, and painful tension result from the incorrect execution of asanas and poses and from improper preparation.
Similar to any other active training, it’s necessary to get your muscles and joints prepared for workloads before you start. Before the session, you need to stretch and warm up the muscles to turn your body on.
When doing stances and postures, you should listen to your body and avoid tolerating pain. Should you feel pain or discomfort, it’s better to stop to prevent injuries.
Age Concerns
While yoga is good for all ages, it’s vital to remember that all bodies are different and they change with age. Hence, the age of the practitioner matters a lot when choosing a yoga style to master and hone your skill in.
Thus, teenagers are full of energy and prone to hyperactivity. Yoga helps them cope with anxiety and manage stress while improving their physique. At the same time, though, it’s vital for growing bodies to avoid overstretching or applying too much pressure to their joints.
In their 20s and 30s, people are in good health and in their best physical shape. They can further improve body strength and boost their energy levels by doing active training and positioning postures intensively engaging the torso and hip muscles.
Growing older, in our 40s, we have extremely busy lives full of routines and responsibilities both at work and at home. We strive to find balance and yoga practices that help restore harmony and strengthen body-to-mind connections to withstand life’s complexities.
In the 50s, we are still focused on maintaining balance, and in the 60s, attention shifts to health concerns. Bones and joints become more fragile and vulnerable, so any postures that bring the risk of injuries should be omitted. Relaxed and slower yoga styles should be prioritized.
Health Issues
In fact, yoga helps relieve many health states and conditions and doesn’t cause diseases per se. However, it can worsen some already existing medical conditions, especially if you choose the wrong style or disregard your health problems or chronic conditions.
The following health issues might be further aggravated by practicing inappropriate yoga techniques:
- Cardiovascular problems: Certain breathing techniques and inversion poses might cause blood pressure increase, which can be dangerous for practitioners who have blood pressure problems, proneness to strokes and headaches, and any other cardiovascular issues that might be affected by blood pressure jumps;
- Glaucoma: First and foremost, yoga alone doesn’t cause glaucoma. Yet, those who have a glaucoma history in the family are in the risk group. They should discuss this with their yoga teacher to customize the exercise program that will allow minimizing the risk of complications;
- Osteoporosis: All in all, yoga helps improve joints’ mobility and can even treat arthritis. However, people who suffer from osteoporosis are at risk. A whole range of postures exposes muscles and soft tissues to high pressure and tension that can cause joint and bone injuries. So, those who have osteoporosis should do yoga with care and tailor sessions to their health state.
Discouragement
While there is a lot of good about yoga for our bodies and minds, it’s a complex practice. In fact, the gist is in spiritual growth via getting full control over your body. The latter is possible through struggling with your weaknesses, training your body, and fostering endurance. That’s why many asanas and postures are quite complicated.
It often happens that even physically fit people who already have some training experience fail to quickly embrace difficult yoga poses. They might feel discouraged, demotivated, and unconfident. Some might even quit doing yoga when they don’t achieve progress as fast as they expect.
The trick here is practice. The skill will come with practice. You should simply be patient and move on. Listen to your body and live in the moment. No need to push yourself into timeframes. It’s not a competition.
Incorrect Techniques
Though there are tons of video lessons and online yoga classes allowing people to train at home, any expert would tell you that visiting offline sessions and learning yoga poses under a supervision of a professional is a much better option.
Self-training often entails practicing wrong techniques that might have negative health effects. With an experienced instructor on your side, you have much better chances to get good at yoga without the risk of injuries.
Dangers of Hot Yoga
Yoga is a multi-faceted practice embracing multiple techniques, styles, and approaches. Some of them are rather intensive and strength-focused while others are more relaxing and gentle.
Hot or Bikram yoga is one of the most demanding and challenging yoga styles that expose practitioners to potential health risks. As the name suggests, the postures are done under the heat of over 40 degrees Celsius and humidity exceeding 40%. These are pretty heavy conditions to train that might cause:
- Overheating: High temperatures promote intensive sweat. Yet, due to extreme humidity levels, it doesn’t evaporate as quickly as it’s generated, which leads to overheating;
- Dehydration: Heat and sweat are very exhaustive and might cause dehydration, especially if you haven’t drunk enough water before the session and don’t have fluid to cool down;
- Strokes: Nausea, headache, dizziness, and muscle cramps are the first signs of overheating and dehydration that can trigger a blood stroke, brain attack, or heart stroke.
Apart from heat which is a great challenge alone, Bikram yoga is a high-intensity practice built around rather complicated poses that will put even more pressure and strain on your body.
Yoga and Meditation Going Unsafe for Mental Health
The spiritual part of yoga is no less important than exercise. In fact, the final goal is rather a spiritual elevation and enlightening than a strong core and toned-up bottom. Hence, starting with stretches and stances and acquiring more knowledge over time, many people tend to add meditations and breathing sessions to their yoga programs to go to the next level.
Normally, meditations help calm down, neutralize negative thoughts and anxiety, cope with stress, and turn on a positive mindset. So, basically, spiritual yoga practices work to improve mental health and maintain emotional and psychological balance.
However, who says it’s a smooth and problem-free process? Meditations might reveal bad memories and bring some traumas to the surface that weren’t handled and were simply pushed into the backburners of your mind instead. You should be ready to deal with such challenges since they are a part of your route to healing and balance.
Yet, incorrect meditation techniques or too much meditation done sporadically can have a negative impact on your mental health causing the following:
- Panic attacks and anxiety;
- Negative, irrational, or paranormal thoughts;
- Delusions and hallucinations;
- Loss of control;
- Lack of confidence and motivation;
- Change of sensory perceptions;
- Headaches, fatigue, and depressive states;
- Social interaction problems.
Who Should Not Practice Yoga?
In general, yoga is for everyone, no matter their gender, age, or physique. At the same time, though, as any other physical practice yoga does have some contradictions. Before starting your yoga journey, it’s essential to look back not only at your overall fitness level but also at your health state and chronic conditions if any since certain asanas and pranayamas might do you harm.
Here are a few states and conditions that are not recommended for practicing yoga or require additional attention when doing postures:
- Pregnancy: While many moms-to-be use yoga to get ready for labor and relax, they should avoid high-intensity styles and rigorous poses including inversions, core exercises, and extreme twists;
- Sciatica: Only gentle stretches and relaxing poses can relieve sciatic nerve compression. Forward bends and complex back bends can aggravate your state and are strictly contradicted;
- Hypertension: Inversion poses and any asanas that might increase blood pressure should be avoided at all costs while meditations help neutralize stress and reduce tension;
- Back, hip, ankle, wrist, and knee injuries or pains: Any asanas and posture that might add strain, flex, and tension to areas that were exposed to traumas or injuries or suffer from some painful states should be avoided. Such conditions as frozen shoulder, spine immobility, or carpal tunnel syndrome place certain limitations on yoga practice;
- Ulcers and hernias: If you suffer from peptic ulcers or hernias, extreme twists, and core-strengthening poses are not for you;
- Surgeries: Yoga is forbidden in a post-surgery period. You should refrain from exercise for at least 3 months and consult your doctor before coming back to practice.
Bottom Line
Though yoga is one of the most popular ways to stay in shape and stick to healthy living, it’s not a 100% safe practice. However, you can keep most side effects, dangers, and risks of yoga at bay by using the right approach.
Wrong techniques, incorrect practices, and lack of knowledge are among the most common causes of negative yoga impacts. When treated with diligence and practiced with care and attention, yoga is a great tool for improving your physical and mental state. Just keep your body, age, and health limitations in mind.