The Science of Yoga: The Risks and the Rewards (11 page)

The team looked at twenty-four men who took up the Ornish program. They ranged in age from fifty to eighty and did yoga for an hour a day, six days a week. The scientists assessed telomerase levels and other physical and psychological measures before the men began their overhaul and did so again at the conclusion of the three-month program. The results were unambiguous. The scientists found declines in cholesterol, blood pressure, and such indicators of emotional distress at disturbing thoughts. More important, they discovered that levels of telomerase shot up 30 percent.

The team reported its findings in late 2008, proclaiming them a first. The eleven scientists said the findings had implications for cellular longevity, tissue renewal, disease prevention, and “increases in life span”—a holy grail of modern science.

The Ornish inquiry was only a beginning, of course. Other investigators would have to zero in on yoga practitioners and do larger and more elaborate studies. But it was a start.

As science over the decades succeeded in promoting health
over the miraculous, some yogis nonetheless managed to cling tenaciously to the past and show a recurring fondness for discredited myths. Major gurus gave up wild declarations. But other authorities were often quick to embrace lesser miracles and trendy fictions.

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Yoga
proclaimed that yogis can “live to be well over 100 years” and can “stop their own hearts (then start them again, of course).”

So, too, Georg Feuerstein, a star of yoga scholarship, concluded that science “lent credibility to many” of yoga’s more astonishing claims, making them “appear far less outlandish than they once seemed.”

Feuerstein’s essay on the topic appeared in his book
Sacred Paths
and was entitled “Science Studies Yoga.” But his enthusiastic tour of the field managed to say nothing about the decades of demystification. Nor did it mention the specific exposés of Paul and von Török, Gune and Bagchi, Gore and Bera. His message was all about supermen.

As it turned out, claims of the fabulous went beyond the rarified world of the advanced yogis. They expanded in time to include everyday practitioners as well.

I
once took a yoga class where the male teacher held up an illustration of a muscular man and proceeded to ridicule the build as childish. His message was loud and clear—yoga produces a better physique and is more advanced than other varieties of body development. The class nodded in agreement. We were all in the same boat headed for the same destination—a place of lithe contours and sculpted abs, a land where physical fitness can reach astonishing new heights.

Of course many yoga teachers honor the field’s spiritual roots with attitudes of humility. Some acknowledge that yoga has its own strengths and limitations. Even so, a number of gurus and teachers have put forth extraordinary lists of particulars to explain why yoga constitutes the ultimate form of exercise.

Consider Bikram Choudhury, the founder of hot yoga, a man famous in the yoga community for his collections of Rolexes and Rolls-Royces. His brand is so popular and uniform that some call it McYoga. He demands that every studio do exactly the same sequence of twenty-six poses and two breathing exercises.

Choudhury grew up in impoverished Calcutta but struck it rich in the United States, opening many hundreds of yoga centers. Uniquely, the exercise room of a Bikram studio is heated to a sweltering 105 degrees Fahrenheit (not unlike Calcutta on a summer day). Gleefully, Choudhury calls it his torture chamber—and indeed, beginners who enter the mirrored halls often experience spells of dizziness and nausea. Some pass out. The underlying theory seems to be that heat loosens the joints, muscles, and tendons and helps intermediate students push themselves hard, giving them a gratifying sense of progress.

“So many Americans,” Choudhury scolds in his book
Bikram Yoga
, “ruin their bodies by blindly running around ‘exercising’ and playing sports. I tell my
students, ‘No barbells, no dumbbells, no racket.’ Games are okay for children, for recreation and to teach them sportsmanship. But after that, you must give up trying to put a little round ball in a hole all the time.”

In great detail, Choudhury explains why his yoga is superior to every other type of physical workout and why it deserves your attention and—perhaps most important—your money. Remarkably, he even rejects all other styles of yoga. A standard estimate for the number of people in the United States who do yoga is twenty million, and Choudhury happily cites that number as representing a world of misguided souls.

“Bogus yoga” is what he calls their practice. He ridicules other approaches as watered down to accommodate American weakness and inflexibility. Among the competition, he scoffs at Kundalini, Ashtanga, and Vinyasa (“which never existed in India”), as well as Iyengar (“he uses so many props in his method that he’s called ‘The Furniture Yogi’ in India”). The newer yoga brands, he added, are even more ridiculous. “You’ve got Easy Yoga, Sit-at-Your-Desk Yoga, Yoga for Beginners, Yoga for Dummies, Yoga for Pets, and Babaar [
sic
] Yoga. It’s all Mickey Mouse Yoga to me.”

The false prophets, he charges, shirk their responsibilities to ancient tradition and cheat students out of “the perfect life,” keeping them from the rewards of “optimum health and maximum function.” In contrast, he portrays his own style in cartoonish superlatives: “You’ll become a superman or a superwoman!”

Is he right? Is there more substance to hot yoga than Bikram’s boastfulness would imply? And what of the other styles? Are there objective measures that can establish the benefits and compare them to regular exercise and sports? In short, is it possible to find out what is real and what is not?

While the scientific investigations of yoga over the decades have tended to be sketchy and idiosyncratic, the subject of physical fitness is one area that has received a fair amount of scrutiny. The reason has to do with the prickly nature of intellectual turf.

The academic world has a number of research fields that lavish attention on questions of fitness. The disciplines include biomechanics, kinesiology, exercise physiology, nutrition, physical therapy, and sports medicine, among others. Today, sports scientists draw on a wealth of instrumentation and software to conduct careful studies of exercise and athletics. Whole businesses do nothing but sell the equipment. Major universities have whole departments
that do nothing but conduct fitness studies and publish the results in dozens of specialty journals, including the
Journal of Exercise Physiology
and
The American Journal of Sports Medicine.
The field’s textbooks tend to be gargantuan in size and extraordinarily detailed in content. The professional societies of the field include the American College of Sports Medicine—the world’s largest organization of scientists devoted to the study of athletics. Its standing is such that governments around the globe routinely adopt its guidelines for physical activity in campaigns meant to promote public health.

Yoga’s fitness claims fall squarely into this whirl. A philosopher would say they fall within an existing paradigm. The situation is very different from the case with yogic declarations about, say, body currents and spiritual renewal.

As a result, a relatively large number of scientists (a growing number of them yogis) have applied the instruments and the techniques of the academic sports establishment to the study of yoga’s fitness claims. The results, as we shall see, raise significant doubts about some of modern yoga’s most prominent declarations.

A complicating factor is that yoga, taken as a singular activity, represents an oversimplification rooted in the discipline’s timeless image. A better word would be “yogas,” denoting the evolution of many styles over the centuries—with new ones appearing all the time. Three phases stand out. First was the original Hatha, which debuted as a forceful branch of Tantra. Then, as we saw in the previous chapter, the yoga innovators of the early twentieth century produced a sanitized Hatha. Today, the newest styles represent another step in yoga’s development, their moves more vigorous than the old. It turns out that modern yoga, by accident or design, has lost much of its contemplative nature and adopted some of the sweatiness of contemporary exercise.

Gune taught a style of yoga that epitomized the slow, tranquil approach. His emphasis was on holding poses for long periods of time and learning how to relax even amid extreme states of bending, flexing, and upending. It was a point he drove home with his measurements of how challenging inversions were gentle on the heart. By contrast, the newer styles tend to be hyperkinetic, some done to the beat of rock music. The objective is to get the heart pounding and the body exhausted. That makes them more aerobic (“requiring air”)—in other words, more focused on reinvigorating the blood. In
contrast to Gune’s style of yoga, the new goal is to maximize rather than minimize the energetic costs.

Brands that focus on aerobics include YogaFit and Power Yoga. To a lesser extent, the vigor extends to older styles such as Ashtanga and Vinyasa. And then there is Bikram. “My classes are so hard,” Choudhury boasts, “you use your heart more than if you run a marathon.”

Fortunately, that kind of pronouncement is open to investigation.

The analytic lens of the sports establishment began to form in the nineteenth century as health authorities struggled to identify universal factors that determine the origins of human fitness. The question was seen as urgent. Around the globe, waves of people were leaving farms and giving up agrarian lifestyles that had kept them physically active from dawn to dusk. Medical experts agreed that the new sedentary lifestyles of the cities were often unhealthy but could achieve no consensus on what forms of exercise to recommend—even as entrepreneurs and hucksters got rich promoting their own methods. It was an age of dumbbells and medicine balls, of weighted clubs and chest expanders, of gimmicks and gadgets. The scientific goal was to develop objective standards that would let investigators cut through the competing claims and document what was truly beneficial. The resulting programs of exercise were seen as important to help city dwellers improve their health, avoid fatigue, and better enjoy their lives and leisure time.

By 1900, investigators had identified a factor that they called vital capacity. It measured a person’s ability to breathe deeply—seemingly a good measure of fitness because breathing is considered a foundation of the metabolism and, in earlier days, was viewed as an expression of the human spirit and soul. Science saw deep breathing as similar to blowing on a fire—in theory it fanned the body’s metabolic flames.

Seeking precision, scientists defined vital capacity as the maximum volume of air that an individual could exhale after a deep inhalation. A sedentary life was found to reduce vital capacity, and an active life to increase it. Scientists quickly developed a refinement known as the vital index, which sought to eliminate differences due to age, size, sex, and other individual factors. It consisted of the ratio of vital capacity to weight. Early in the twentieth century, athletes aspired to a high vital index as an indication of competitive excellence.

Gune became an enthusiastic
fan of the vital index and cited yoga’s impact on the physiologic measure as evidence of the discipline’s power to raise human vitality. Viewed narrowly, his claims were exactly right. Pranayama gave the lungs, the chest, and the abdominal muscles a comprehensive workout and improved the flexibility of the rib cage. The natural result was an aptitude for deep breathing. The big question was whether the pulmonary skills translated into heightened fitness.

Gune had no doubts. In his estimation, yoga, with its proven ability to expand the lungs, outshone all other sports and systems of exercise. And he said so bluntly. Shortly after starting his ashram, he declared that the discipline excels at “increasing the vital index” and improving all aspects of life. Yoga, Gune insisted, let students attain the “physiological perfection of the human body”—not improvement or development but
perfection.
“There can be no other system more suitable.”

Unfortunately, just as the guru was seizing on the vital index as evidence of yoga’s superiority, scientists in Europe and the United States were abandoning the measure as deceptive and potentially meaningless. For instance, they noted that the vital index of a growing child usually fell steadily between the ages of, say, ten and twenty, since body weight during those years increases faster than lung size. Yet common sense suggested that those same years saw great rises in athletic prowess.

So the question arose with new urgency: What did, in fact, define the human capacity for physical vigor and, if such a factor existed, could science find a way to measure its development?

In the 1920s, as Gune was beginning his program of experimentation, some of the world’s best minds took up that question. A star was Archibald V. Hill, an English physiologist who won the Nobel Prize in 1922 for showing how muscles use energy.

Thirty-seven at the time of the award, Hill wore a proper British mustache and was married to Margaret Neville Keynes, the sister of the economist John Maynard Keynes and a social worker who had written extensively on child labor. The couple had two boys and two girls. Hill, as it turned out, was just starting a long, productive career. After his Nobel work, he turned to the related question of how muscles get their oxygen. It was the flip side of the energy coin—focusing on origins rather than ends. His agenda was quite sensible for an ambitious scientist curious about the fundamentals of biology.

Hill brought to his
research an abiding personal interest in sports and fitness. As a young man, he had run competitively, covering two miles in a little more than ten minutes—a fast pace for the day. As an adult, Hill often ran a mile before breakfast. For his studies of oxygen, Hill and colleagues designed experiments meant to reveal the exact dimensions of its invisible uptake. His main venue was a grassy track. His runners strapped to their backs bags into which they would breathe at set intervals. Later, analysis of the contents revealed the quantity of oxygen consumed.