I had an interesting talk with my yoga teacher tonight. He gave me an article from TIme Magazine from October, 2007. The article summed up in a nutshell says that yoga is not the best for building cardiovascular health, muscle strength or bone density. It may appear that this is terrible news for yoga as an exercise. However, my teacher said that it is a great article. Basically he thinks that yoga is about the integration of body, mind, breath and spirit. In the west we have boiled yoga down to "good for the body". This is an incorrect way to look at yoga. In Yoga Sutra Chapter 3 verse 9 it says that yoga is about creating a new pattern or habit in the body that is calming and healing. I wonder how many of us have yoga practices that do this? Often times we go to a group class and if we don't feel that our butt has been kicked, we feel that we did not get our money's worth.

So why did T. Krishnamacharya say that "Running is for horses, not humans"- suggesting that exercises that increase the heart rate are not good for us? It boils down to this. A healthy person that is not over-weight and eats a balanced diet of small nutritious meals probably does not need cardiovascular exercise in addition to yoga. They are is a sattvic state already and do not need to add bramhana (heating and expanding) or langhana (cleansing and reducing) to their body, mind and spirit. However, if someone is in a state of Tamas (lethargic, body and mind are like sludge), then yes- they need to add some bramhana and get the system moving again. The chosen tool might be to jog 40 minutes a day to bring the person into sattva. But this would be a choice based on the fact that the excess weight is causing health problems and something needs to be done quickly to help the person in poor health. Once the person has lost weight and is in a good state of health- it is not good to keep up this bramhana exercise because it tends to overwork the systems and eventually causes problems like injury and extra stress on the body systems. Then they would go back to a more balancing practice like yoga and daily walking to maintain the health with little risk of injury and over stress for the body and the mind.

This is why my teacher does not consider this article to be bad news for yoga. The article is simply saying that yoga needs to be done correctly and that as a general rule, other exercises might be better for a specific goal like weight loss or building muscle mass. But yoga, done correctly, is the best for good body, mind and spirit health.

Check out the TIme Magazine article but copying the following link into your browser:

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1668470,00.html