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Fetishisation of flexibility, yoga (asana) and injuries.

Writer's picture: Karolina MannsKarolina Manns



I’m so tired of yoga teachers saying that yoga is a tool for injury prevention.

 

I know, these days, if you are in the fitness industry, it almost feels imperative to list all the benefits why one should come to your class. But I beseech you, if you only have your first 200 hrs where hardly any anatomy and physio-related areas are covered; please leave the topic of injury prevention alone.

 

Let’s be honest, when you play sport and push your body and test your limits, injuries are bound to happen. That’s part of the game.

 

What’s really infuriating is usually those yoga teachers who do not exercise, are the ones who have a lot to say about injury prevention! Surely, we are not talking about getting injured in a freak accident walking from the sofa to the kitchen to get a bag of crisps?!

 

Don’t get me wrong, I love yoga as a spiritual practice. And I do cherish a well taught non faff asana class. And yes, yoga has a lot of physical benefits, particularly around proprioception which can be of great help if you play sport that’s quite technical where concentration is key. In fact, there are countless benefits to why we should practise yoga. However, injury prevention is not one of them.

 

I’ve been practising yoga for more than a decade and from where I stand right now, the countless hours of passive stretching and pushing my muscles to get a bigger and bigger range of motion might have contributed to my injuries.

 

Obviously, why injuries happen is certainly a complex topic and will depend on oh so many factors. But certainly, years of stretching and streeeetching and teaching my nervous system to relax at the end range might have fuelled my streak of unnecessary pain and injury.

 

When I started practising yoga, I thought I had caught God by his feet. And in fact, maybe I did because yoga (I don’t care how clichéd it sounds) did change my life (more on this another time).

 

However, I stopped any other form of exercise that I used to do. Bad idea. The fact that I’m probably more flexible than a lot of people might look great on Instagram. However, when I started doing Olympic Weightlifting 2 years ago, which is an explosive movement, the flexibility especially around my hips and ankles means that in both Clean and Squat, at the bottom position, I literally slam all the way down using all the passive range of motion.


If it wasn’t for my skeleton there to stop me, I’d be going through the floor.


But you don’t need to do explosive movement to see that too much flexibility might be detrimental to your joints. I’ve seen countless yogis doing squats slamming all the way down. Just thinking about it hurts my knees. Mostly because I was there too. I literally had to re-learn how to do squats and instead of relax at the end range, contract contract contract!

 

Equally, every time I do heavy deadlifts, I can feel my hamstrings attachments giving me a red light. So yes, I can “touch my toes” but after 10 years of stretching, they’re like an old used pulley belt.

 

The glorification of flexibility for the sake of being flexible must end. Now.

 

Having muscles like chewing gum is not ideal. Of course, having very little mobility will have implications too, but fetishising flexibility, especially when we push this narrative in those ridiculously hot yoga studios where participants “suddenly” feel more flexible, this is where the fertile ground for injury is at. (I personally pulled my QL doing a twist in a hot yoga class being assisted by a teacher, thinking that I was more flexible than I was, ending up in ER a couple of hours later. Very painful. I do not recommend it.)

 

What we want is to work on an active range of motion, which by definition will be shorter than the passive range of motion (where we are passively pushing our joints to a new range by using props such as the floor, straps and sometimes (God forbid!) teachers pushing us!

 



Because of that, many yogis often "sit" in their joints which becomes problematic if you start adding load.


But there is often little strength or control in this new range because we have not trained the muscle spindles & the stretch reflex to access the USABLE (active) range of motion. If you're only doing passive stretching as a way of mobilising, you may have a much higher risk of injury because you have a lot of range of motion in your joints that you may not be able to control. [1]


Especially after training your muscles to relax at the end range as opposed to creating tension, contraction, and the ability to get there without using gravity, other people or props.

 

The fetishising of flexibility is so prevalent, it’s unfortunately not inclusive to the yoga industry. You even hear it on Personal Training courses, the same repeated narrative: flexibility prevents injury.

 

As I was researching for this blog, I came across this gem:

 

“Yoga helps to prevent injury from a flexibility perspective because it gives you more leeway to move in unexpected ways. For example, you may slide down a small hill and end up backward on your butt while hiking or stretch out to block a pass in basketball. You reduce the risk of injury in both cases by being more flexible.”  

 

Ha ha ha

 

Thinking alongside the same lines would be: Yoga can be useful for when you slip on a banana skin forcing your legs apart doing you an injury… but if you can do Hanumanasana (front splits) then you mitigate this.

 

Ha ha ha

 

Okay, putting sarcasm aside, I don’t know why there is that obsession with flexibility and ‘injury prevention’ whilst really the focus should be on making us stronger and anti-fragile.


Of course, you might choose to exercise simply for the pure joy, health and longevity, trying to minimise the risks.


But if you want to perform to the best of your abilities, the trade-off is that by pushing the envelope you’ll probably get injured at some point.


However, pushing the passive range of motion is not going to help you avoid injuries, it might make it worse.






[1] Elliot Meeten, EMPOWERED

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