'Hot' Yoga May Be Harmful
U.S.
doctors are beginning to question the potential for injury among those
who practice Bikram yoga, the New York Times reported.
Participants
typically spend 90 minutes doing 26 yoga postures -- positions that some
physicians worry are harmful -- in a very hot room.
" Heat increases one's
metabolic rate, and by warming you up, it allows you to stretch more,"
said Dr. Robert Gotlin, director of orthopedic and sports rehabilitation
at the Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan.
"But once you
stretch a muscle beyond 20 or 25 percent of its resting length, you begin
to damage a muscle."
Each week, he
sees as many as five yoga-related injuries to the knees or the lower back.
Postures that require extreme bending of the knees -- squats and sitting
backward on folded legs, for example -- are the most likely to cause tears
in knee cartilage.
In Bikram yoga,
students practice the "toe stand pose," a single-legged squat and the "fixed
firm pose," sitting backward with bent knees.
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