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Jayne Dawson: Posers beware
As we pass the midpoint of Let’s Do It January, I discover that yoga can be bad for you.
I know, it’s not such a bombshell: standing still can be bad for you if you do it in the path of a big fat bus, breathing can be bad for you if you happen to be underwater at the time.
As with everything, it all depends. But, still, this revelation has hit yoga enthusiasts hard.
And in Leeds at this time of year, we speak of little else but yoga – or at least we talk about exercise more often than usual.
“I went to my gym twice last year, so each visit cost me £150,” we say, or, “I did a spinning class last week, it made me feel really sick and the saddle was an instrument of torture, not that I got to sit on it much,” we say. That sort of thing.
Anyway, the news for all women (it’s usually women) who have ever plunged right into a Downward Facing Dog yoga pose, or are toying with the idea of attempting one, is that if your instructor isn’t up to the job and you do poses beyond your body’s capability, then you are likely to do yourself a mischief.
I suspected as much when my instructor – maybe I should say “our” because there were about 50 of us in that room, after all – suggested a headstand. It didn’t seem quite me, but more of that later.
Madonna is yoga’s poster girl. Lovely, lovely Madonna with her taut body and beautiful face and, as certain newspapers seem keen to emphasise, her muscular arms and veined hands.
She is said to be an athlete of Olympian standards and, with hours of practice every day for several decades, she ought to be. As for the arms and hands, they are her punishment for being able to wear sleeveless dresses at the age of 53, or so her detractors would have us believe.
So to my own experience of yoga, which is this: I have given it a go at two points in my life. The first time was as a teenager when exercise classes were held at night in school halls and were often indistinguishable from the PE class that had taken place there earlier in the day,
My companion and I were dismayed to find our old maths teacher amongst the crowd on the school mats – as probably was she to see us.
Since her last ever classroom-based words to me had been: “Go back and read it again, you stupid girl, it’s not written in German,” the situation was awkward and, halfway through a Tree pose, I put my other foot down and decided yoga was not for me.
Later in life I tried again, this time with my daughter and at a venue so popular the assembled class would rush through the doors like a football crowd being let on to the terraces in the bad old days, batting others out of the way with a sly swerve of the rolled mat under their arm.
At this class I learned that yoga is not nearly as gentle as you would expect it to be; that Downward Facing Dog poses and Sun Salutations and even establishing Mula Bandha – pulling everything in and up – are all quite surprisingly difficult to do.
I stuck it out until we reached the headstands. As I rested in a heap against a back wall, not quite upside down and not quite the right way up, I decided yoga was bad for me, and bad for my dignity. And I went back to my lying on the sofa pose instead. Years of practice have made me good at this one.
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