“Honest, insightful and revealing. Essential reading for yoga students and teachers alike.”
– DAVID MCAMMOND, AUTHOR OF YOGA THERAPY FOR BACKS AND INTERNATIONALLY SOUGHT-AFTER WORKSHOP LEADER.
The New Yoga: From Cult and Dogma to Science and Sanity.
Where did most of your yoga moves come from? A guru from the annals of Indian folklore? Or were those “thousand-year-old poses” really a twentieth-century invention hidden behind a veil of tall stories? Were they based on movement science–or cooked-up creations with a big pinch of folklore? The New Yoga takes a brutally hard look at these critical questions. It proposes six radical steps to strip away the nonsense and provide common-sense yoga for the future, based on movement science:
- Flexibility is not the primary goal. Really? Yes—more importantly are ten other benefits including proprioception and interoception, our two new buzzwords.
- Mobility tops flexibility. Focus on better control over a safe range of movement.
- “Practice and all is coming.” Not so! Despite the famous guru’s oft-quoted words, we may never achieve certain poses. And trying will lead to injury.
- Avoid repetitive stress and encourage brain health with frequent and varying moves on and off the mat.
- ‘Pretzel yogis’ pushing extreme flexibility leads to injury and misplaced envy. Hyper-mobility is not something to covet; it’s sad.
- Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. Maintain what works but question everything for good evidence.
Rob Walker quotes a wide range of experts and speaks from his own twenty-year yoga teacher-training experience. He dumps accepted dogma behind much current teaching and brings a fresh sparkle of evidence and science to twenty-first-century yoga.
0 comments