Bad karma: When yoga harms instead of heals

By Jennifer Wolff Perrine

updated 8:34 a.m. ET July 15, 2008

I remember only one pose from my first yoga class seven years ago: a modified seated forward bend known in Sanskrit as Paschimottanasana. I sat on a mat with my legs slightly bent in front of me, my arms wrapped beneath my thighs as my forehead reached toward my toes. It was about an hour into class, and my body felt like a stuck door slowly easing open.

A warm current of something — call it blood, call it chi — coursed from shoulder to shoulder. I felt the muscles unfurling from my spine; then, in the other direction, the vertebrae unsticking from each other — click, click, click. It was a sensation of freedom and release I remember as vividly as the first time my husband touched me. This was how I was supposed to feel.

Years of hunching over my computer had left me stiff, almost breakable. One false move — getting out of bed too quickly, tying my shoe — could lay me flat on a heating pad for days. Friends and family commented that my shoulders were rounding, my back curving, my chin protruding beyond my chest. Sometimes I'd see little old ladies hobbled over canes, their tiny bodies twisted and contorted, and I'd wonder, Will that be me?

Now I knew it wouldn't. After a series of yoga classes, I gradually began to stand up straighter and move through the world more easily without hurting myself. If the hunch in my back was a measure of how hard I was working at my job, my new upright alignment served as testament to how hard I was working on myself. Yoga had become my salvation.

Until it became my damnation.

In 2005, I was at my first yoga class in quite a while, as my busy life had been getting in the way of my routine. I took a class open to all levels; after all those years of doing yoga, I didn't think to reenter with a beginner class that took things more slowly. That would have felt like a demotion of sorts, as if I'd been put back a grade in the middle of the school year.

The class went fine until we neared the end. The teacher directed us into Plow pose (Halasana): on your back, balancing hips over shoulders while your toes touch the floor behind your head. If done properly, Plow pose has the power to straighten your shoulders and lengthen your neck; at least, that's what it always felt like to me. I remember exalting in the tension release across my upper body, the liberation of muscle from bone that through my practice I had grown to depend on, almost addictively.

Then I felt the throbbing. It started at the base of my skull, like a slow burn crackling down my neck. Within a week, I couldn't toss a tennis ball before a serve or pick up one of my baby cousins. My husband had to carry my weekend bag. After a few weeks, I went to a sports medicine specialist to see what I'd done to myself. We looked at my MRI together. “This mass right here is a bulging disk. It's pinching your nerve, which is why you're having pain down to your fingers,” said Jordan Metzl, M.D., a sports medicine physician at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York City. That Plow pose was likely to blame. “Your disk could have been bulging before,” Dr. Metzl said, noting that premature osteoarthritis (something I'd had no idea I had) was weakening my neck and spine. “But hyperextending your neck while putting weight on it most likely made it bulge even more, which pinched your nerve.”

Several weeks of physical therapy later, my arm was functioning normally and painlessly. Still, I felt disillusioned. How could my beloved yoga have turned on me?

As it happens, I'm not the only one feeling done in by my practice: Nearly 4,500 people ended up in the emergency room after yoga injuries in 2006, slightly fewer than the year before but still up 18 percent since 2004, according to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (which tracks sports injuries even when they don't include equipment). Most often, the damage includes strained muscles, rotator cuff tears in the shoulders, exacerbated carpal tunnel syndrome in the wrists, torn cartilage in the knees, and lower-back and neck injuries such as herniated disks.

“In my practice, I've seen a significant increase in yoga injuries in the past five years,” says orthopedic surgeon Jeffrey Halbrecht, M.D., medical director for the Institute for Arthroscopy and Sports Medicine in San Francisco and a specialist in knee and hip problems. And it's not only those in the recent wave of newbies who are getting hurt, Dr. Halbrecht says: “I've treated more experienced yogis than rookies.”

Overall, yoga has far more potential to heal than to hurt: Studies suggest it can help relieve chronic lower-back pain, depression and anxiety. And students tend to think of yoga as gentle and healing, even when done rigorously. But the fact is that the most basic of yoga poses — as with dance, gymnastics or any type of physical activity that requires strength and flexibility — call for a certain amount of skill and training to do properly.

And when strength isn't a necessity, proper alignment is; sometimes the most benign-seeming poses, or asanas, can cause injury if hands, arms or legs are placed incorrectly. Devotees are even more vulnerable if they go through poses more quickly than their body can handle or push themselves too hard in an effort to keep up with the teacher or compete with other students.

“Yoga is marketed as such an innocuous thing,” says Loren Fishman, M.D., assistant clinical professor of rehabilitation medicine at Columbia University in New York City. “But without care, injuries can absolutely happen.”

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