I’m currently on a writing sabbatical, book writing, not blog writing. That means little-to-no time on social media, extended periods of time staring at my computer, a lot of typing, even more deleting, and few tantrums. But it has come to my attention, through an email from a friend, that a 3-year-old blog of mine has been circulating around social media. As a result, I’m taking a moment off book writing to write this blog, which is long overdue.
This blog started as a conversation between me and Charlie Reid. We were talking about how important it is for educators to say they were wrong. We spoke about how everyone who writes a blog should have at least one post saying they don’t know everything and that they have been wrong before. That is this post for me.
When I started my biomechanics blog, I was new to blogging, podcasts, and other online forms of education. I had also just finished grad school and was still developing my message and creating content that I thought would be useful for yoga teachers. At that time, I had a pretty strong bias toward yoga having the potential to cause injury. It was around the time of the William Broad book and my social media feeds were filled with all the things wrong with yoga. Plus, I had my own personal experiences with yoga and injuries.
You guys know it’s really easy to find research supporting your bias, right?
I mean, yoga is the cause of a whole variety of soft tissue injuries (including tendon and cartilage tears) [here] and spinal fractures in older women [here]. Never mind that these observational studies only look at imaging after the subjects reported a painful experience. It hurt after yoga, therefore, the injury must have happened in yoga.
But we know that tissue damage and pain are poorly correlated – we can experience pain when tissue is normal and healthy [here] just as we can find abnormal/injured tissue in asymptomatic individuals [here]. We even know that using less threatening language can improve optimism regarding imaging results [here].
Could it be possible that the subjects in the yoga injury studies above already had the injury and it became aggravated in yoga? We’ll never know because we don’t have imaging results prior to the complaint.
But I’m not writing this to discuss the complicated dilemma around injury, pain, and diagnosis – interesting as that topic is [here]. I’m writing this to share with you what happens when you challenge your own bias.
- What I used to think was dangerous, I now see as an opportunity to increase capacity.
- I used to see the body as fragile, now I see it as robust.
- I used to think I knew something, now I’m pretty sure I know nothing.
- I still think yoga can cause injury, just as every other sport or movement can, but I no longer push that agenda. Instead, I support exposure over avoiding, participating instead of worrying, and challenging without provoking.
- Instead of worrying about how yoga may be injurious, I celebrate how yoga may contribute to our resilience. Incidentally, isometrics are great for reducing painful symptoms [here] which is awesome because we already hold poses in yoga.
- I lay awake at night worrying about how I can make it up to those of you who studied with me 3 years ago when I was unfocused, overly enthusiastic, and full of assumptions.
- I wake up in the morning and remember that 3 years from now I will think what I’m teaching today is unfocused, overly enthusiastic, and full of assumptions.
- Every day I fight to overcome the sense of paralysis that comes with realizing how little I know and replace it with awe for how much there is to learn.
- I am keenly aware that as I evolve, I am developing a new bias, one that warrants the process of challenging my own work to begin again.
So what now? Should I take down all my old blogs since I’ve changed my position as I’ve continued to research, teach, write, and learn? Someday, after I turn in the manuscript for my book, I’ll go back and edit those old blogs. Until then, I’ll keep them because I actually think old blogs have value.
- I reference my own old posts when I’m teaching live courses to show that I’m as much a student as a teacher and I’m allowed to keep learning.
- Many of the posts still have really good information about compression, tension, shear that we don’t learn about in YTT.
- Blogs aren’t research (even if they cite research) but they can still be useful for improving visibility through those lenses tinted by 20 years of yoga instruction.
- Reading old material and comparing it to new material is a great exercise in critical thinking.
- I find that the more sensational and fear-mongering posts tend to go viral (even 3 years later), which is a great opportunity to question the integrity of the content.
In conclusion, I believe that we need more biomechanics education for yoga teachers. I think a lot of our alignment rules and safety tips are lacking biomechanical explanations, therefore, we learn what is right or wrong instead of how, when, and why something is useful or not. I am committed and passionate about providing this education to our yoga community and will continue to do so. I invite you to question what I teach, disagree with me, and provide me with evidence to the contrary. I only request from you to offer me the space to learn alongside you and the support to question my own work.
Extend Your Learning: Advanced Yoga Teacher Training with Jules Mitchell
This program is ideal if you have an interest in biomechanics, principles of exercise science, applications of pain science, neurophysiology, and stretching. These themes are combined with somatics, motor control theory, pose analysis and purpose, use of props for specific adaptations, pathology, restorative yoga, and intentional sequencing.
You will learn to read original research papers and analyze them for both their strengths and their biases. Critical thinking and intellectual discourse are central components in this training, which was designed to help teachers like you navigate through contradictory perspectives and empower you with education. Learn more >
You are a wonderful, humble teacher. You are an inspiration. One of the ideas that kept me from blossoming as a yoga teacher was always being worried about not having all the answers and thinking that I had to memorize the right and wrong rather than learn ideas that would allow me to reason things through. I’ve been blossoming since I started learning from you, Beth Learn, and Kelly Dean. My students are as well. Your statement “therefore, we learn what is right or wrong instead of how, when and why something is useful or not” is powerful and liberating. I am grateful for your commitment to learn and teach. Thank you.
The worlds of fitness, movement, and yoga seem to be enjoying an inundation of new research and ideas these days. It is so hard to draw absolutes from the mountains of information, and perhaps one of the best things about a lot of the new information is that it points to there not being absolutes that work across all modalities in all bodies. The brain doesn’t like that vagueness, nor does our sound-bite-addicted culture. While I have not always agreed with everything I have seen in your blogs, videos, etc, I am so grateful for and appreciative of your passion for learning and your willingness to put yourself out there when your knowledge goes against convention. And I always find your thoughts and writings worth hearing and absorbing. That Einstein quote at the top of your piece says it all. Stay courageous, and thank you.
Thanks for saying so eloquently what I think but can’t elucidate quite as easily. Ive often thought about blogging to my former students: what I know now that I didn’t know then and what I probably don’t know now. Always a student. Always!
Wonderful post! Thank you so much! As a yoga teacher who didn’t have nearly enough eduction in movement science early on, I did a ton of studying and learned so much from many from wonderful teachers like and including you. I’m learning every day. I still teach and love yoga but I’m better at it now and I hope I create a safer environment for my students. That said, I’m sure that in a few years I’ll be groaning about something I taught yesterday and have since changed my opinion on. At least I hope I will be because that’s what happens when one is continuously growing and learning. You contribute so much to the study of yoga – thank you for that and for this wonderful post. This post could apply to any field and it’s an apt reminder for all teachers. Much from gratitude to you!!
We must always question what we do and keep refining and reevaluating in any discipline or endeavor. In that process, sometimes we do find out that what we believed was good for us is no longer beneficial. Your voice is important and I appreciate your honesty and humility however keep up the safety tips and biomechanical explanations.
I agree that it is hard to have definitive proof if yoga practice caused an injury or if there was already a condition that was aggravated. However I think that yoga should not be compared to sports injuries. Yoga was not developed to be a sport but a modality of healing and mindfulness. The yoga injury statistics are on the rise and I have personal experience with hundreds of people who had repetitive strain injuries and chronic pain conditions brought on by their yoga practice. Most of them began to realize that when they did not practice, their body stopped hurting. When they changed the biomechanics of a pose or removed it from their practice, these painful repetitive strain injuries healed. There have been studies on the side effects of static stretching revealing evidence that it weakens muscles. Until yoga poses are actually scientifically studied and evaluated, we have no real guidelines or proof. A recent survey of over 2000 yoga practitioners revealed that 55% said they were injured from yoga. I find these statistics troubling and encourage the yoga community to network with physical therapists, sports medicine doctors and orthopedic specialists.
Jules….As always, your experience, research and open mind teaches the rest of us. My best friends and teachers are humble educators who seek to teach and share, not to be right.
Thank you.
So grateful to you as a teacher and a voice in the yoga community, doing the work you do. This post takes the cake. Thank you thank you thank you for being such an inspiration to continue to grow myself as a teacher and yogi. Namaste!
Big Love Sweet Friend & teacher!
I am so glad to be a part of this journey with you!
and yes all of us reading this will be as they say”
“the change we want to be in this world!”
Hear ye, hear ye!!!
“I lay awake at night worrying about how I can make it up to those of you who studied with me 3 years ago when I was unfocused, overly enthusiastic, and full of assumptions.
I wake up in the morning and remember that 3 years from now I will think what I’m teaching today is unfocused, overly enthusiastic, and full of assumptions.”
Obviously, there is fear that serves to inhibit our tendency to act. I’m grateful that you don’t let that fear cripple you, that despite not knowing everything, you’re still willing to produce content that is informative and useful, even if it is proven wrong (or right) in a three year span.
This is a brave, bold post, and I LOVE it. I am right behind you. I teach yoga to cancer survivors, and I have thought about the fear issue every day since I have been lucky enough to do this wonderful work. On the one hand, so many contraindications, so many “fragile” bodies before me. I couldn’t do this work with simply blind trust of conventional yoga trainings. Fear was shaping my own yoga practice. My own nagging injuries were growing worse. I started studying with a movement coach, who introduced me to modalities like Feldenkrais, MovNat, Ideokinesis, Functional Range Conditioning and Nutritious Movement a la Katie Bowman, Fighting Monkey, Ido Portal, etc. Now I study and experiment with everything constantly. No more blind trust in conventional yoga training and cues! I’m out of pain, adapting and growing stronger myself, and teaching with not only a healthy respect for the fact that I don’t know everything, but a hell of a lot more confidence that all of this WILL improve the quality of my students’ lives. Keep up the great and inspiring work.
Yoga, quite frankly, (in my humble opinion) is the ultimate journey into fear and the unknown – for the teacher and student. Now that the yoga apocalypse is out of the bag, you continue to inspire and motivate me to learn more and be completely unafraid to say “I don’t know” or “Okay, if that feels better, do it that way”, and other apprenticed phrases that leave my students scratching their heads. This has pushed me so far deeper into the waters than I ever dreamed I’d be and with absolutely no land in sight. And I’m OK with it. Because of teachers like you that continue to push the envelope. Thank you for being here for all of us. When people ask me what type of yoga I teach, I say “functional”.