Surely there's a way to combine yoga with working out, writes Jennifer Keegan
Many years ago, when yoga was an uncool hippy thing, I taught a small yoga class in a busy city gym. We did our best, to the body-jolting beat of Eye of the Tiger, to ignore the baleful stares of the running-machine junkies at the other end of the room and draw our attention inwards. Those who ever ventured over, red-faced and bulky, from the far side would depart quickly, snorting in derision at what they considered our whimsical efforts. No yogic union of energies was going to take place there.
In fact most people, whether or not they practise now-fashionable yoga, still see gym work and yoga as being at opposite ends of the physical spectrum. Most yogis regard gyms as lacking the holistic perspective to integrate mind, body and spirit. Gym bunnies see yoga as too flimsy, gentle and esoteric to be worthwhile.
A gym workout may well give you the kind of muscular power that allows you to punch somebody's lights out, but a yoga practice will offer you the muscular stamina to carry your supermarket shopping home. Both useful in their own ways, but maybe also reflective of the gaps in both disciplines. Gym programmes often skip breath work, body awareness and proper stretching. And a yoga practice frequently lacks muscular power, strength and cardiovascular oomph. Muscular strengthening and cardio challenge are to a certain degree accessible in a strong and flowing yoga practice, but probably not quite as effectively as in a gym.
As part of my research for this article, I walk into a gym to see what it's like and whether I might enjoy going there. The first thing I notice is the blare of bad music. I haven't used a gymnasium since my pre-yoga days, when I worked out in a London leisure centre with a gang of Afro-Caribbean body builders, and they had better taste in music. I am struck by the sophistication of the machinery - like huge cappuccino makers - by how freezing and unatmospheric the rooms are: no dimmer switches, candles or incense here. This is a factory; an assembly line for the body beautiful. But most of all I am afraid of the gleeful grin of the instructor. "We'll whip you into shape," he says "and have you doing chin-ups in no time." I flee.
"I don't really like gyms myself," says Dave Cohen, a personal trainer with a martial-arts background who also teaches yoga and gym work, "but they are a useful tool . . . I encourage all yoga people to do some weights, but also gym people to do yoga . . . Even if you are a muscle head you need to release tension and tightness and to relax a bit - not only physically but mentally, too," he says. "The inverse is also true: if a yoga class, say, is gentle it's very valuable for relaxation, but it doesn't increase strength or bone density. You need a balance of flexibility and strength for a sense of well- being in the body . . . And there's no harm in trying a new discipline. The more ways you experiment with the human body, the more you learn about yourself."
Dr Ethel Brady agrees. She is a physio who specialises in gym work for people with weaknesses in their bodies, using a Scandinavian system called MET, or medical exercise therapy. It's like a stepping stone to the gym. "It's only really people with a problem in their body that need to come to me," she says, "but often sportspeople or even yoga people will come if they feel like they've hit a plateau. So, for example, if someone is not making progress in their practice of choice, then that probably means there's an imbalance in the way they are using their body. They won't necessarily be able to figure out where the weakness is themselves, because they can't see it, but the chances are that they are overusing and exhausting some muscles and neglecting others, so their overall ability becomes restricted. If you are into yoga you can use weights for a bit of cross-training, to work weak areas to help you in your yoga. If you are more of a bulking-up type you need to work on your flexibility."
Brady targets my areas of weakness and injury and gives me a set of gym exercises. I do some of them under her eagle-eyed supervision and others as homework. I discover that a few muscles feel underused; Brady seems to have pinpointed the right ones. I enjoy the challenge of using other "new" muscles differently, and it feels a lot safer than throwing myself into a gym. "For a lot of people, joining the gym right away is fine if they've no injuries," she says. "Some fitness instructors in gyms are brilliant, and some have a very limited range of knowledge, so you just have to be careful.
"One of the things I see with yoga people is over-stretching, as well as too much repetition in sequenced-type practices, so they are bendy but there's not enough strength, or they are overly flexible in one place, like the lower back, but are stuck or stiff somewhere else, like the mid-thoracic [ area], especially if they are doing the same postures in the same order every time they practise."
Repetition is not a necessary evil, as there are not many gaps in yoga - although, with more than 1,000 postures, it's tricky to remember and find time to practise them. Yoga takes more time than going to a gym, where things move faster. So most people end up doing a few basic postures, to keep the body up to par. Frequent repetition, especially if combined with poor technique, degenerates the body. So awareness is paramount; it's about feeling how your body is with what you are doing to it.
What about cardiovascular exercise? "You need a bit of it, but not too much," says Stephen Ward, a personal trainer at the Fitness Dock gym, in central Dublin, whose girlfriend teaches yoga. "It raises your cortisol levels, and a lot of people have enough stress in their body, so you don't want to overdo it. I make sure that people training with me don't do more than an hour of exercise in the gym at any one time."
According to eastern beliefs, traditional pranayama, or yoga breath control, is all you need to exercise your heart. Yogic breathing practices are said to give you plenty of oxygenation without the need to run for miles on a treadmill. "The great thing about yoga is that you can use its philosophy and concepts everywhere in the gym," says Cohen. "I teach yoga breath work in weight training. If you work weights slowly, and with the breath, not only is it more effective for the muscles but it also calms the nervous system. It's very hard, though, to get people to surrender a little to what they are doing and to force a little less. Most people work aggressively and too fast in the gym, using too much weight, and this is where the yoga concept of ahimsa [ or nonviolence] comes in - an understanding that less is sometimes more."
Ruth had been doing yoga for two years when she decided to join a gym for cardiovascular work and to lose weight. "I found that the flexibility and the higher level of awareness I had gained from yoga were really useful, and I was able to do all sorts of things, like squats, that others couldn't do. I tried something called BodyBalance. It's a supposed mix of yoga, Pilates and other stuff, but it had nothing to do with yoga. I hated it. I think that the gym and yoga can be compatible, but not in the same session," she says. "It's a really glamorous gym, but it's about muscles and looking beautiful, which is kind of superficial. The gym gives me an adrenaline rush, and that's it, whereas yoga makes me feel at peace. I actually enjoy the class, and something deep in my mind switches over, and that's more important for me in the long run."
Godfrey Devereux, a yoga instructor with 30 years of experience, is training fitness professionals in the UK to become yoga teachers. (He'll do the same in Dublin next year). "The problem with gyms," he says, "is that they are goal-oriented rather than well-being focused. They are propelled by a kind of warped approach that comes from culturally-imposed aesthetics of what people should look like rather than a simple sense of feeling well. So what doesn't work about the gym is that it doesn't necessarily help you to become comfortable with yourself. They are anxiety-driven: driven by goals and a belief that you are not okay as you are. Changing the way you look through hard work might give you a superficial satisfaction, but, deep down, it doesn't necessarily help you to feel good about yourself.
"Yoga, if it is properly done, will bring you peace on many levels, which is ultimately very satisfying. Some people don't recognise that they are looking for peace, of course, but if they are overly concerned with having a killer body, fame or a great car, they are possibly inadvertently looking for peace because they are not happy with what they are and what they have."
It's easy, too, in these days of quick fixes, for people to take up yoga because it makes them look good - and so it becomes like going to the gym. "In the fitness industry," says Devereux, "at least people are honest about that. They want to look good, and maybe they are vain, but at least they admit to it. Yoga is often wrapped up in mystical language and esoteric rubbish, but it will boil down to the same thing: that the people doing it want to look good, so it's not honest."
Devereux hopes to bring the two worlds together more positively. "The mind-body connection is becoming a big selling point in the UK fitness industry. The gym has not satisfied them, so they are looking for something else, something deeper. Yoga is being dragged into the fitness world anyway - the gap is closing - so why not at least bridge that gap with quality yoga? That's my aim in teaching it to fitness people: to try to save it from turning into just another form of competitive exercise. I want to make sure that the essence of genuine yoga does not become diluted and lost forever."
For information on the MET system, or to contact Dr Ethel Brady, call 01-6685048. You can contact Dave Cohen at 085-7125540 or Stephen Ward at 01-4053777/8. For more information on Godfrey Devereux's Dublin 2008 teacher training see www.dynamicyoga.info or call 01-6688225