News Analysis
Wounded Warrior Pose
Published: December 22, 2012
MEN are
famous for ignoring aches and pains. It’s macho. Men get physical exams less
often than women. They tend to remain silent if worried about their health.
When hurt, their impulse is to shun doctors and rely on home remedies, like
avoiding heavy lifting to ease backaches. Male athletes play through injuries.
It’s all about virility and manliness.is Mukai
Kris Mukai
The stereotype has exceptions, of course. But denial of
injury and ill health — from the relatively inconsequential to the grave — is
common enough that physicians seek ways to encourage men to be more
forthcoming.
So it pays to listen carefully when guys start talking
about intolerable pain and upended lives. Doing so led me to an unexpected
finding that I have confirmed in a trove of federal data. It suggests that yoga
can be remarkably dangerous — for men.
Guys who bend, stretch and contort their bodies are
relatively few in number, perhaps one in five out of an estimated 20 million
practitioners in the United States and 250 million around the globe. But
proportionally, they are reporting damage more frequently than women, and their
doctors are diagnosing more serious injuries — strokes and fractures, dead
nerves and shattered backs. In comparison, women tell mainly of minor upsets.
Men who are breaking the code of silence are doing so
with physicians in hospital emergency rooms, who in turn report their findings
to the federal government.
Their outspokenness reveals much about modern yoga and
suggests ways it can be made safer. As a practitioner since 1970, I know some
of the guy hazards personally and have learned through painful experience how
to live with my inflexible body.
The male disclosures help explain one of the central
mysteries of modern yoga — why it is largely a feminine pursuit. As Yoga
Journal, the field’s top magazine, put the question: “Where
Are All the Men?”
Science has long viewed the female body as relatively
elastic. Now the new disclosures suggest that women who tie themselves in knots
also enjoy a lower risk of damage. It seems like common sense.
Surprisingly, evidence of the male danger has, to my
knowledge, never before been made public. Nor has its flip side — that women
seem less vulnerable. The subject of male risk merits discussion if only
because the booming yoga industry has long targeted men as a smart way to
expand its franchise.
Informal observations hint at possible explanations. Yoga
experts say women tend to see classes as refuges while men see challenges —
their goal at times to impress the opposite sex.
Women say men push themselves too far, too fast. Men
admit to liking the intensity but say the problem is pushy teachers who force
them into advanced poses while urging them to ignore pain.
I stumbled on the issue after my book, published in
February, laid out a century and a half of science and, in its chapter on injuries, contradicted the usual
image of yoga as completely safe. The yoga establishment makes billions of
dollars by selling itself as a path to healthy perfection. Predictably, it
responded with sharp denials.
I also received a surprising number of moving replies
from injured yogis — male and female — including stroke victims.
A letter initiated my inquiry. In April, a man told how
an agonizing back injury had turned his life into “a living hell.” Too many
instructors, he wrote, are “pushing us too hard and having us do dangerous
poses.”
The “us” resonated.
Suddenly, I realized his cry sounded familiar.
I raced through a correspondence file and saw that many
of the letters about serious damage had come from men.
Tara Stiles, a yoga teacher who runs a popular studio in
Manhattan, told me that guys have more muscle (one reason for their relative
inflexibility) and can thus force themselves into challenging poses they might
otherwise find impossible. It seemed a plausible explanation for blinding pain.
Other teachers echoed her analysis and cited supporting
anecdotes.
Yoga poses are unisex. But in my research, I found a
world of poorly known information on gender disparity.
“Science of Flexibility,” by Michael J. Alter, explained
how the pelvic regions of women are shaped in a way that permits an unusually
large range of motion and joint play. In yoga, the pelvis is the central pivot
for extreme bending of the legs, spine and torso.
First, I needed a baseline that would let me compare the
guy admissions to males doing yoga in the United States. Figures in the yoga
literature described men as making up some 10 percent of practitioners at the beginning
of the period and 23 percent at the end. So the middle ground
seemed to be roughly 16 percent.
Then I dug into the medical data. The analysis took
weeks, but the results spoke volumes.
If men were getting hurt in proportion to their numbers,
the rate of injury would have been about 16 percent — my estimate for the
fraction of practitioners who were male. But the rate was higher. Over all, I
found that men accounted for slightly more than 24 percent of the admissions to
hospital emergency rooms.
Kris Mukai
To deepen my analysis, I focused on specific
injuries, especially ones inside the body. Guys, it turned out, accounted for
20 percent of the torn muscles and damaged ligaments, which result in swollen
joints. Dislocations of the knee, shoulder and other joints came in at 24 percent.
The figure for broken bones and fractures was
30 percent. The injury sites ranged from the toe to the tibia, the bigger of
the two bones in the lower leg.
For nerve damage, which can result in pain
and lost muscle control, the male figure jumped to more than 70 percent. The
cases included sciatica, where compression of a spinal nerve
in the lower back can result in pains that race down the back, hip and leg.
I found the trend in women’s admissions to be
just the opposite. The major injuries were few proportionately, and the minor
traumas quite abundant. Women, for instance, accounted for a vast majority of
the fainting episodes.
None of this means that women go unharmed, as
my letter files and the admission records show. But men seem to get it worse.
In August, I shared my analysis with Loren M.
Fishman, a doctor in Manhattan who uses yoga in his rehabilitation practice and
whom I profile in my book. “It’s men’s strength turning against them,” he
remarked.
Some yoga practitioners will surely see my analysis
as unconvincing. That’s O.K. It’s the kind of topic that can only benefit from
thorough discussion — as well as rigorous new studies that can rule out the
possibility of false clues.
Skeptics may argue that the injured guys are
simply wimps who are inflating the male-injury figures.
That seems unlikely. A new book, “Hell-Bent,”
by Benjamin Lorr, evokes the contrary ethos in its subtitle: “Obsession, Pain,
and the Search for Something Like Transcendence in Competitive Yoga.”
Happily, the field is evolving in ways that
may enhance safety.
All-male classes, by definition, avoid the
flexibility gap between women and men and instead play to masculine strengths.
The classes tend to emphasize muscle building and fitness moves like squats, as
well as poses. Their developers tend to avoid talk of injuries, a marketing
no-no.
The styles include YoGuy (“be comfortable”)
and Broga (as in bro yoga, “where it’s O.K. if you can’t touch your toes”). A
number of studios offer what they call yoga for dudes.
I’m a yoga enthusiast, not a basher. I do my
routine every day and want the practice to thrive — but to do so honestly, with
public candor about its real strengths and weaknesses.
From reader mail, I know that many yogis are
working hard to make the practice safer. The male risk factor seems an
important consideration in the redesign of poses and routines. And I’m sure
instructors of mixed classes will find many ways of reducing any danger. A
first step would be frank discussions with students.
In time, it seems likely that the myth of
perfection will give way to the reality of better yoga — for everyone,
including guys.
William J. Broad is a science reporter for The New York
Times and the author of “The Science of Yoga: The Risks and the Rewards.”
A
version of this news analysis appeared in print on December 23, 2012, on page SR4 of the New York edition with the headline: Wounded
Warrior Pose.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/23/sunday-review/the-perils-of-yoga-for-men.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&emc=eta1
