What’s This Research About? The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) exercise guidelines recommend 30 minutes of moderate intensity exercise five times a week to decrease disease risk and maintain good cardiovascular health. In 2012, twenty million people were choosing yoga as their form of exercise. It is estimated that by 2020 [...]
What’s This Research About? There have been a number of articles in the lay press about how yoga can be harmful and cause injuries. Yoga schools, teachers, and studios around the world have taken different stands. Some have even gone as far as banning certain types of yoga poses from being taught [...]
What’s This Research About? This study provides a systematic analysis of physical appearance-related attributes from three leading yoga lifestyle magazines published between 2010-2015: Yoga Journal, Om Yoga & Lifestyle, and Yoga Magazine. Media frame content of the magazine cover captions was also analyzed, in addition to whether differences in characteristics existed depending [...]
What’s This Research About? Traditionally, yoga is a holistic philosophy that integrates the mind and the body; other principles include ethical behavior towards the self and others. Hatha yoga, the most widely practiced form of yoga in the US, utilizes physical postures, movement, controlled breathing, and meditation to improve physiological and psychological [...]
What’s This Research About? This perspective article examines the idea that an unstable scapula is related to shoulder pathology and dysfunction. The authors question this long-held belief, challenging the concepts of scapular instability and scapula dyskinesia as causes of shoulder pain and dysfunction. TITLE: Critical and Theoretical Perspective on Scapular Stabilization: What [...]
What’s This Research About? The prone plank is often used to improve core strength, stability, and endurance. Previous research has shown the prone plank activates a variety of core muscles, including the internal oblique, rectus abdominis, external oblique, and the erector spinae. To correctly perform the prone plank requires keeping the spine [...]
What’s This Research About? Is eccentric training better for building strength? Previous research suggests eccentric muscle actions differ from concentric muscle actions. Mechanically, eccentric muscle contraction leads to greater force production when compared to concentric muscle contractions. This preliminary research has lead researchers to speculate that eccentric resistance training could stimulate greater [...]
What’s This Research About? This study measures ground reaction forces (GRFs) of common yoga poses. They hypothesized that yoga would result in less than two times body weight (BW) GRFs and that GRF results would be consistent across all subjects. The authors reference several articles suggesting that high impact sports (running and [...]
What's This Research About? Is it safe to include headstands in a group yoga class? This study looks at how much weight the head and neck withstand when coming into headstand (sirsasana) three different ways. They’re interested in moments of peak force when getting into the pose. They also look into [...]