Slow Your Roll, Bitches: My Yoga IS Healthy Yoga
It happens all of the time. New people attend my class, and they are experienced yoga practitioners. You know the type, usually younger, lithe, and so full of yogi zen you just want to slap the yoga off of their fucking faces. They have no idea the yoga they’ve been practicing isn’t healthy yoga. I always frontload these people with my background in Viniyoga, my atypical cueing, and my history with yoga as a kinder way of saying, “Slow your roll, bitches. This is healthy yoga.” Yoga (modern transnational physical yoga, MTPY for short) as typically taught can cause serious injuries. Yes, yoga is the bomb diggity, and I wish…
Take Your BMI And SHOVE IT
The BMI was invented by a Belgian scientist around 1830 in a pseudoscience he called, “social physics” to determine the ratio of the measurement of the human body. Because if it’s a good enough measurement tool for planets, why not use it on humans? WTF?! It was widely adopted in practice in 1972 without any modification or efficacy study despite being considered “inappropriate for individual evaluation.” And then, in a fuckwad move the NIH and CDC LOWERED overweight cut-off guidelines in 1998 effectively redefining almost 29 million people considered previously healthy as overweight. Bastards. So now, a 150-year-old pseudoscientific measurement never studied for validity has been adopted by the NIH,…
Yoga Inversions: Why I Don’t Fucking Teach Them
Something came up in class this week, no pun intended. Yoga inversions. I don’t teach full inversions, sarvangasana, shoulder stand, sirsanasa, headstand, or sandasana, wheel pose. Go ahead, Yoga nazis, fire up your torches and sharpen your pitchforks. I’ll wait. I’m even going against my Viniyoga background on this one. Inversions belong to a set of yoga poses I consider Ego Poses. There is ZERO scientific evidence proving any physical benefit to practicing these poses. There are plenty of scientific studies supporting the many benefits of practicing yoga without propagating the bullshit. Aren’t inversions good for you?