Bernie Clark Answers Your Questions

Bernie Clark Answers Your Questions
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[00:00:00] Today we have a special guest. He’s very well known in the yin yoga community or the yoga community in general. And as always, when Bernie and I get together and we started chatting, it ends up being a really long time and I’m so grateful for Bernie to just hanging out on Zoom with me for so long. And so we will have split this into two different episodes.

So this first part, questions answered with Bernie Clark because I had some questions and he answered them all. And then the second part would be about Bernie’s new book. So if you wanna hear Bernie answers some questions that y’all have actually asked me to ask Bernie some of these challenging questions, , then stay tuned because I think there’s so much.

Always, there’s so much that we can learn from Bernie. So this first part is your questions answered with Bernie Clark.

So [00:01:00] Bernie has been on the podcast before and his episode was long enough. I split it into two and I will of course link that in the show notes and most people that are. Yin are familiar with Bernie. He’s a staple in the yin community, most people are super familiar with Bernie, but just in case, I wanna share his bio.

Bernie’s been teaching yoga and meditation since 1998. He has a bachelor’s degree in science from the University of Waterloo and combines his intense interest in yoga with an understanding of the scientific approach to investigating the nature of things. His ongoing studies have taken him deeply inside mythology, comparative religions, and psychology.

All of these avenues of exploration have clarified his understanding of ancient eastern practices of yoga and meditation. [00:02:00] His. Teaching workshops and books have helped many students broaden their understanding of health, life, and the source of true joy. Bern’s yoga practiced practices encompass the hard yang styles, such as Ashtanga and power yoga, and the softer yin styles exemplified in yin yoga.

His meditation experience goes back to the eighties when he first began to explore the practice of zen meditation. During those days when he struggled with the conflict between practice and theory, Bernie also worked as a member of an executive team of one of Canada’s oldest and largest high tech companies.

So that’s a little bit about Bernie, and the next time that you hear from me, I will be with Bernie. Hi, Bernie. Welcome back to a Yin Yoga podcast. Thanks, Nick. It’s great to be back in the two Times Club. Well, I technically, if you count splitting the two into [00:03:00] the first one, into two, maybe that’s the Three Times Club. Right. , I’m really grateful, that you’re coming back on. I’m so excited to talk about your book, your new book, prana One Breath Many Worlds.

But before we do that, if you don’t mind, ’cause , whenever people know Bernie’s coming on, they send me questions. . And, , so we have a few, if you don’t mind, we can start with those. But before we start with the, , with the questions, , maybe just a brief catch up. Last time we spoke, you were doing the last live version of your anatomy course, and then it was moving into On Demand.

Do I have that correctly? That’s right. It’s, it was called Functional Anatomy for Yoga Teachers and anybody else. But it was really to take her teacher Paul Grey’s teachings and kind of expand it quite a bit. Yeah. As you know, I wrote a, a trilogy of books called Your Body Your Yoga. . And it’s a textbook, so people aren’t just gonna read that from cover to cover.

It’s like a thousand pages. So I wanted to have a way to [00:04:00] show it in person with people. So I came up with a 40 hour course that people attended and I only intended to offer it three times live and the last time we recorded it, so now it’s available as a video course. Awesome. And I think that’s so good too, because I know for myself, I, I don’t learn well from reading.

Right. Um, so I mostly read for enjoyment. And if I do have to like learn from a book. Then it, , it takes me longer. I sometimes have to read out loud to myself. And then of course there’s the sticky notes that have to happen, whereas, , of course, like a video course, I, the information would just like pop in in my head and drop in no problem.

So that’s good to have something that hits all the learning styles. Yeah. Yeah. Because there are those people that are gonna want the book to refer back to. I know this when I’m teaching my courses as well, that there are very much the people that are like, , they want the manual in advance, they want my slide deck, they want like all the right re reading material, and then there’s the ones that are content [00:05:00] just listen and then maybe rewatch the video later,

so, yeah, sure. Yeah. It’s , good to get everyone. It’s one thing to say that the tibia has a torsion of 23 degrees on average. And it can vary from three degrees to 47 degrees, but nobody’s gonna remember that. So having a book that you can look it up again. Exactly. I don’t remember it all either.

People ask me questions, so I wrote it down so I wouldn’t have to remember it. But in, we actually show people, so we have a whole bunch of people and we show where they’re. They’re angles. Yeah. And you knew that in Shavasana just at the beginning we start with, yeah. What are the foot angles of the people in Shavasana and where is that coming from?

Is it the tibia, is it the femur? Is it the hip socket? And throughout the course we’re looking at these variations. So when we did that with Paul in my very first training, it was interesting because right before we did the lay in shavas and to see how people’s feet turned, I had asked them about a particular student I had who was very internally rotated.

So much so that like when she lied in Shavas and her feet almost crossed in. Yeah. And I just said, you know, [00:06:00] how common is that? I can’t remember what my question about it was, but, and then it was funny because then we all laid in Shavas and they poked me and they were like, , Nick, you just won the internal club.

I was like, what? I had no idea that I was as capable with internal rotation as I am. Until then. But I also have a, I’m one of those that can sneak into both Yeah. Camps. Yeah. Double agents. Yes, exactly. . So, yeah, that’s a great course. Maybe I’ll add that to my continuing ed and I did have somebody reach out to me and maybe it’d be good to get this on the record and ask if that anatomy was like yin specific and I told her no.

That it would affect all yoga. Correct. Yeah. Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, just how does your body work? Did your body work? You had yoga, a great continuing ed for all yoga teachers, whether they’re yen teachers or not. Yeah. Or dancers or gymnasts. Anyone of the body. Yeah. Or just anatomy nerds. Yeah. Totally.

Awesome. Okay. And, , anything else new going on with you that you wanna mention? You’re on a bit of [00:07:00] a break right now. Yeah, I’m on a sabbatical this year from teaching teacher trainings. I’m still doing my once a week classes, which are live on Sunday mornings or watch the recordings. So I’m doing that and, uh, just kind of taking it easy and getting back up to speed.

Mm-hmm. I’m sure we’re gonna talk about, there’s. There’s a, a kind of a cycle in science where new things are always coming into vogue, and I remember there’s a, I dunno if you’ve heard a version of this myth or a story, but in the 1930s and forties there was a dean of the Harvard Medical School and he famously said that half of what we’re teaching you is gonna be wrong in 10 years.

Now that story got embellished over the decades, but it meant basically to stay humble because . There’s always new things coming and so this year I’m just kind of reading a whole bunch of other stuff and kind of updating what I used to know 10, 20 years ago and thinking, Hmm, you see, that’s the problem with writing something once you’ve written it.

Yes. It’s permanently in stone. [00:08:00] And yes, I may not say that today. I often say in these interviews, I’ll say at the time of this recording, yes. You know, to try to caveat that. But yes, actually exactly. I’m slowly but very slowly but surely trying to figure out my book and. That is the hardest part for me is, is when I write the section on fascia, knowing that we, you know, still in the baby steps of exploring this.

Yeah. And that, you know, five years from now even anything I say might be, you know, yeah. Diff, I mean the names have changed and also different fascia researchers use different names for different things, so it can be quite complex. The rest of the book I’m feeling pretty comfortable with, but it’s that section where I’m like, by the time it goes to publish, maybe it’ll be totally different, you know?

But I think if you address that at the beginning, you know, just this is what we know now. Yeah. Yeah. We’re allowed to change. Our mind is new information comes up. Right. And don’t you think that’s, , to me, that’s the sign of [00:09:00] a wise human is, , being a critical thinker enough that when you get presented with new information, you don’t immediately push it away.

You go, oh. Let me learn more about that, yeah. Well, that’s the theory of science, that with new data comes new hypotheses and variations. Like we’re never gonna completely discard Newton. But Einstein added another layer of, , kind of nuance to it, and then other people layer on top of him, so you don’t necessarily throw out the 9%, but that other 10%, and here’s another 1%, so we’re always adding to it.

But humans, scientists are humans and sometimes they, they spent their whole career on this one particular theory that’s now being kind of surpassed. And it’s Max Plank who once said, science precedes one funeral at a time. Oh, that’s a good, but the, that’s a good reference. Yeah. You guys come up and then of course,, the skeptic in Me Too also has to always be like, and who’s funding that study and, all of those other things that go into that.

Right. Um, [00:10:00] okay, so let’s do some questions that came up, , . Sure. , So one question that came up was, , are you saying that Yen yoga can increase bone density in people with osteoporosis? And if so, what are you basing that statement on? Okay, well that’s a big topic.

Yes. And you had a wonderful podcast a couple of weeks ago with Neve. Mm-hmm. Ne and I’ve recommended it to a lot of people. I think that was an excellent chat, but I’d like to maybe add a bit of nuance or maybe even take your listeners into the biology lab again, back to grade 12, biology or Biology 1 0 1.

Like what is a bone and how does it grow and how does it change? Well, back in 1892, I think it was, . A German surgeon, an anatomist named Wolf, Julius Wolf. He discovered that when he looked inside the bone, he noticed that bone grew in certain lines and those lines equated with the direction of stresses.[00:11:00]

So he is the first one to realize that bone grew through the stress. If you put a stress on the bone, it lays down more bone along those lines of stress. So that was an aha moment about 130 years ago. But now let’s wind the clock forward to about the 1980s and nineties. There’s another guy, Harold Frost, who discovered, or he coined a term called Meno Stat, and in there he took Julius’s teachings a little bit further.

Unlike Wolf’s principle or Wolf’s law, where if you stress the bone, it grows stronger, he said. But that’s only within a certain level. If you have too much stress, you can break the bone. If you have too little stress, the bone dissipates. Degenerates. So it’s only within a certain range that we can stimulate bone to grow.

And after the menos stat idea came out, a lot of other researchers, um, Lance Lanyon was one they wanted to look at. Well, exactly what stimulates bone growth now in the textbooks at the [00:12:00] time. So in the 1990s, 2000, even the 2000 tens, the textbooks were still saying you need to stress bone and that will make them grow.

So in my earliest books and we’re talking about how the books change, that’s what I was mimicking. When you do a back band like swings, pose, you’re compressing the bones together. When the bones hit bones, they’re compressing, that’s gonna increase bone. And that’s where we get these osteophytes and bony growth.

Well, Landon’s test, he started to look at different parameters, right? How much stress, what type of stress? Is it tension or compression? Is it constant or does it come and go if it comes and goes, how many cycles? What speed of the cycles and what he and other people discovered is the best way to grow bone?

It’s a subjected to a one hertz repeating stress. One hurts means one pressure per second or one cycle per second, which is very much like [00:13:00] what we do when we walk. We put a stress into the hip and then we take the stress off and then we stress it again. We take it off. So doing a lot of experiments, he discovered that the the most efficient way to grow bone is by stressing and releasing at about one cycle per second.

But you only have to do that maybe 10 or 20 times and then that’s it for the day. ’cause when you do it too much, the bone cells kind of ignore the signals. So bone cells, they love variety. Something that’s new they’ll pay attention to, but it’s the same thing. They start to ignore it, they habituate to it.

Now, let’s just put that on the little buffet table for a moment and we’ll come back to that. Within the bone, there are three types of cells that work together to build bone. There’s one called an osteoblast. Think of blast for building. Osteoblasts is the Greek word for to germinate, to seed to create.

And osteon is the Greek word for bone. So an osteoblast builds bone. [00:14:00] Well, nature always need a balance. There’s a yin for every yang. So there’s another cell called an osteoclast, which consumes bone. So think of the C for consuming, and it reabsorbs the bone. It takes the calcium outta the bone and puts into the bloodstream if it’s needed there.

So health is kind of the balance of building bone and reabsorbing bone. Now osteoblasts, when they kind of turn off, they change into another type of cell called an osteocyte, and this is like a spider in its web. It’s got all these. Silky fibers going out there and it’s now embedded in the bone. It doesn’t move around anymore.

The osteoblast can move around and go to where the stress is and lay down no new bone. But the osteo sites, they’re sensing what’s going on within the bone. And when you stress a bone, like you bend it, when you bend a bone, the top part gets stretched and the bottom part gets compressed and that forces fluid through the inside of the bone.

They go through little [00:15:00] canals, cani, and these osteocytes are sensing that. And when they sense the fluid or if they sense the actual physical strain, they turn on the signals and they tell the osteoblast, get busy, put down more bone. And they tell the osteoclast, slow down, don’t absorb as much bone ’cause , we’re needing to build this up ’cause it’s under stress.

So what Landon and others discovered was that the best way to build bone is by. Dynamically stressing it in lots of different orientations on a one second per cycle, , rate, but you don’t have to overdo it, that is now coming into the textbooks. So, as I said, there’s this lag. So this was research done in the 1980s and 1990s.

And when I first wrote my book Yin Yoga, the Complete Ian Yoga, that wasn’t in the textbooks. I didn’t know about that yet. I was still under kind of wolfs law that you need stress to build bone. But as time went by and started to hear more and more about this stuff, [00:16:00] it became part of, , exercise science.

And Nev also cites that. When you’re doing a yin pose, you’re not building bone. Well, that’s not exactly what Landon discovered. What he said is the best way to build bone is by cyclically, stressing and releasing. Stressing and releasing. He did look at long held stresses up to one or two minutes, so I wasn’t looking at like five minutes.

He wasn’t doing yin type stuff and he found that had a little bit of bone growth, but sometimes it was the same as the control group. So there was minimal bone growth, but if you really wanted big bone growth, you need to repeat the stress. So that led to this whole thing in the last five or 10 years of trics coming back in vogue where the balancing skipping rope jumping.

Mm-hmm. Those stresses into the bone. They’re very important. Now let’s park that on the buffet table and we’ll talk about one more thing. There’s two different types of bone itself. There’s the bone around the bone, which is like the bark of a [00:17:00] tree. Now the Latin word for the bark of a tree is cortex. So this is called the cortical bone.

And that confused me a lot when I was first getting into anatomy. Why isn’t the cortical bone in the core of the bone? Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. But no, that, that’s a different type of bone. That’s called trabecular bone, which is honeycomb , like a bees hive. And it’s honeycomb to give it more strength and structure, but make it light and airy.

So the inside of the bone or the inside of the vertebrae is trabecular bone. But if you look at the neck of the femur, this is more cortical bone. Now cortical bone, all bone can have osteoporosis or osteopenia can start to become thinner. But the question is, when is it in danger of fracturing? Mm-hmm.

And this is what you and NIV took a long time talking about. ’cause she was really referring to the trabecular bone in the thoracic spine. This here. Back in the two [00:18:00] thousands when I was looking this up, I would found some statistics from a osteoporosis society that said 50% of osteoporosis is in the lower back, 20 percent’s in the hips, 10 percent’s in the wrist, the other 20 percent’s all over the body.

Well, more recently I’ve been trying to find that statistic again, and apparently it’s gone. It’s not so true anymore. The best I can discover now is that most of the fractures that we have in the body are in the arms and in the neck of the femur, and then in the thoracic spine. Now the thoracic spine, that bone can break through wedge fractures.

Mm-hmm. But in the arms, that mostly breaks only with a sharp a fall. Fall. Mm-hmm. Like they call it fosh, F-O-O-S-H-A, fall on outstretched hand or in the neck of the femur. That too, usually only breaks with a fall. Mm-hmm. Now, Paul did mention [00:19:00] that sometimes this breaks and causes the fall. Mm. 80% of the time what happens is you fall and that breaks the hip.

So yeah, it could be that it’s so brittle, that breaks and then you fall. But most of the time it’s a fall that breaks cyst and it’s the fall that breaks out. And the vast majority of bone breakages, fem osteoporosis is in the neck of the femur or in the ulnar or, or, um, radius of the arm. About one, about 20%, 25% of the time.

It might be here now in the spine, rarely. And here, just for those who aren’t watching the video here is the thoracic, oh, sorry. Yeah, that’s okay. IC is fine. The cervical spine hardly ever breaks. It’s almost always in the thoracic or where the thoracic becomes a lumbar. So the most common site for the thoracic is around the eighth thoracic vertebrae, seventh or eighth, which is right behind your heart.

Mm-hmm. And then the next most common is between the 12 thoracic vertebrae and the first lumbar. So those are the most [00:20:00] common sites of breakage there, and it is the trabecular bone there. So when we get osteoporosis, we’re really worried about breaking the trabecular bone in the vertebrae through too much flexion or flexion under load it.

Yoga is not going to cause breakages in the neck of the femur on the arms unless you fall. Okay. So those are the kind of the three things I wanna put together before we really talk about. So, do we really build bone in yin yoga? We might to a degree, but it’s a very tiny degree. If your intention is to build bone, you gotta do resistance training.

You gotta really put a good stress on that bone, but you don’t have to do a lot of it, stress it. You know the cycles eight, 10 times second on, second off. It’s just like lifting weights and that’s why walking is so valuable. And then let it rest. You don’t have to do that a couple of times a week. To really start to build the bone, but there’s another half to it.

Remember I talked about the osteoblast? That’s what builds the bone. [00:21:00] Then there’s the osteoclast that consume the bone. And remember the mechanicals stat thing from frost? He said, you can overdo this, but you can also underdo it. So in my view, I wouldn’t say today that yin yoga will build bone. I do believe it can help slow down the reabsorption of bone.

’cause we know one of the worst things you can do for your bone health is nothing. Mm-hmm. The lie in bed all day. Or like the astronauts that are currently up and circling the moon and coming back, they’re in a zero gravity environment. Their bones are starting to decay right now. And NASA studied this for many years and especially in the space station.

When you’re in orbit for six months or a year, you lose about 25% of your bone density ’cause there’s no stress at all. So you need some stress. So I would no longer say that yin yoga really actively builds bone. Although there’s no proof, it doesn’t, it’s just, it’s at a very slow rate. But I do believe it can help slow the resorption of bone.

So it can be beneficial that way. [00:22:00] But I think brilliant. But I think the real big advantage, Tegan Yoga is, as we say, most of the bone fractures are caused by a fall, a sudden dynamic shock to the bones, and yoga is really good at preventing falls. Mm-hmm. In my view, there’s kind of three aspects to physical health.

There’s strength, there’s endurance, and there’s mobility. But if you improve your mobility and you improve your strength, you’re much less likely to lose your balance and to fall and suffer these breaks. Now, when I think of these three axes, I do lifting weights for my strength resistance training. I will do something aerobic for my heart, for my endurance climbing stairs or playing pickleball.

But for mobility, yin yoga I think is the best for that. ’cause mobility is different than flexibility. Mm-hmm. In my view, flexibility is your range of motion. Mobility is your ease of motion. Mm. How easily can you get up and off the floor [00:23:00] and sit down on the floor? So that mobility requires flexibility, but it also requires strength and coordination.

And I believe yoga can help us in all three of those Es. So I think yoga can help to build our mobility, which is osteo protective because of reducing falls. Right. Brilliant. Brilliant. Yes. As always with these things, say, the answer is always so nuanced and so Well it depends. Yes, yes, yes. And you and Neve talked about that because she talked about a woman whose legs were up the wall.

Mm-hmm. And she brought her legs down and broke her spine in three places. Yeah. That would not be forecasting. She had another friend who was a, a lot of osteoporosis, but she’s a rock climber and she had a fall and never broke anything. Yeah. We’re all so different, so. Yes, exactly. And Asif said like, you just, you can’t, sometimes you just can’t predict these things, you know?

Right. Yeah. I know that my, my stepmother, um, has ms and she’s, so she’s been using a walker for quite a few years, [00:24:00] and before that she started using a cane and she was very resistant to that. Even she’s very tenacious. Did, does not take this diagnosis lying down, that’s for sure. Right. Um, but she did fall and, and break her hip.

Right. And, , because of that and the fact that the osteoporosis was already there, she now uses a walker all the time as a, , a stabilizer. Yeah. But yeah, that is the concern. My father recently, who’s now at the time of this recording, 83, recently he’s been having dizzy spells, which they’re looking into why that is.

And so , he took a little fall and , cracked his ribs. And so yeah, these things as we age just become more and more of a, I think is a concern, you know? Yeah. Like you said, to start incorporating strength training to, you know, work on your balance so that you are less likely to take the fall.

Yeah. Yeah. And then of course there’s the nervous system aspect of Yin, which I just think is, you know, yeah. [00:25:00] There’s a nervous system, stress, the immune system, everything’s interrelated. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So I think it’s all good. It’s all, um, homeostasis building. Totally. Okay. The next question was in your book you say that flexing the foot in upright pigeon, so not swan, where you’re folding forward, but as the backend, , protects the knee.

And , my question was, that sounds like some old school alignment cue that I would’ve gotten in my Igar classes. , How does this actually protect the knee? Does the knee need to be protected? And then the third part of that is if someone has that many issues with their knee that it causes them discomfort, shouldn’t we just give them a different pose with less external rotation or less weight, like flip them on their back to do something rather than, you know, trying to give these cues.

And then the last part of that question was does giving cues like that, like we’re doing this to protect the knee, instill [00:26:00] a sense of almost fear in the students and give the impression that that pose isn’t safe for knees. And is that something we wanna perpetuate?

That’s a lot of questions there. Sorry. Yeah. So I’ll try to work through them and remind me if I miss one of those. I will do, uh, to start with the middle part. Yeah. If somebody’s got issues with the knees and they don’t like a pose and don’t do the pose, that’s why we have so many poses. There’s always other ways to get to the targeted area.

And I often will say that there are no knee openers in yoga. Right. And have hip openers. But the knee is not designed to abduct or adduct. Yeah. It doesn’t go sideways. I’ve often said to people, , joint pain is never the goal, right? Yeah. So we’re not trying to open the knee to the side or twist the knee, but however, because of , the soft tissue around the knee, especially the collateral ligaments and the cruciate ligaments, when the knee is flexed, there is some ability to twist.

And the more you flex the knee, the more you can twist it. I, in my book prana, [00:27:00] I talk about how I destroyed both my knees by trying to do lotus pose when I didn’t really have the hip flexibility for it. So I got this is, , benefit, which is actually really common in long-term yogis. Yes. And yoga teachers Yeah.

Often do this. So for those who are watching this live, you can kind of see what I’m doing here. But when you externally rotate. At the back of the hip socket, the back of the neck of the femur come into imp impression they impinge. And that limits how much you can externally rotate. Mm-hmm. When you flex the hip, you actually give yourself more room to externally rotate, which is why people can externally rotate more when they’re sitting than when they’re standing.

And the more they flex, the more they raise the knee up, the more external rotation they can get. But if you can only externally rotate, say 45 degrees, well, let me start with somebody who can do it a lot. If somebody can externally rotate 90 degrees, then for them to put their foot on the opposite thigh, they’re simply extending the [00:28:00] leg.

Mm-hmm. There’s no toric happening in the knee. But imagine you’re only externally rotating the knee 45 degrees. Now to get that foot on the opposite thigh. You have to add back the knee and the lateral collateral. Ligament is not gonna like that. The medial meniscus is not gonna like that. You’re compressing that.

That’s how I destroyed my medial meniscus. I tore my meniscus ’cause I was trying to get my foot on the opposite thigh. Now with the knee bent, you do have some laxity there. In these tissues you can do a little bit of that, but not a lot. And the less external rotation you have, the more you’re gonna have to bring it from the knee.

So some people easily can do it, no problem. They wonder what’s the problem? Other people, the putting too much stress into those ligaments. So the question is, well how can I reduce that stress? So the idea is dorsa flex the foot, pull the toes towards the shin and that will protect the knee. So like you, I heard that [00:29:00] early in my yoga career and like a lot of people, and they just start out, you repeat what the teacher said.

Mm-hmm. So I was repeating that cue quite a bit. And then I met Paul and started to get more into anatomy. And I started to realize, well, the muscle that dorsi flex the foot is the front of the shinbone muscles. Mm-hmm. The TBIs anterior. Mm-hmm. And it doesn’t cross the knee, so how does engaging that muscle do anything to stiffen up the knee?

So then I started to say, no, that’s just an old wive’s tale. There’s actually no effect there. But then I got more into fascia and I thought, oh, I forgot about the fascia, because when I flex the foot, like this dorsa flex, I’m extending the gastrocs in the sole. Mm-hmm. The calf muscles, they do attach to the back of the, the femur.

They cross just like the hamstrings cross here. And that tension in that tendon will help to stiffen because as you dors aflex the calf muscles under stress. But also we have a [00:30:00] three-dimensional body stocking of fascia underneath our skin. And it’s continuous. But in science, we like to break things into, into parts and subparts and sub subparts.

So when the fascia is here in my arm, it’s called on the lower arm, it’s called the anti brachial fascia. And then it’s called the brachial fascia or the bicep, but it’s the same sleeve of fascia. We just give a different name and then it comes over the front here it’s pectoral fascia. In the upper back, it’s the tho lumbar fascia.

When it goes down into the hips and the legs, it’s the, , fascia latte. And then down into the calf, it’s the curl fascia in the bottom of the foot. It’s called the planter fascia. But it’s all one. It’s all one stocking. So just like if you lift your arm up and you’ve got a shirt that covers your shoulder and you pull down at your hip, you’re gonna feel that stress.

Mm-hmm. Because that fascia is continuous. So if I dorsiflex the foot, I am actually stressing all the fascia around the knee. And that stressing will help to prevent too much of that abduction [00:31:00] from twisting. So both from the. The calf muscles pulling on the back of the femur, restricting some range of motion and the fascia tightening up around the knee.

There is some protection there, but the bottom line is what does it feel like for you? Mm-hmm. When I do it, I do feel like my knee feels a bit more supported. Some other people might have very loose fascia here and they won’t feel anything. So the real question is, forget all the theory. If you dorsal flex your foot and you feel like your knee is stiffer and stabler, then great do it.

If you flex your foot and you feel nothing and you can’t see any reason for doing it, then maybe you don’t have to do it. So I feel it, and I had to figure out why do I feel it? And this is kind of what I’ve come up with. I don’t, but that might be because I have a large amount of external rotation genetically anyway.

Yeah. So my question then is, okay, so that makes sense about Lotus, but if you’re in Swan. [00:32:00] I know there’s a lot of teachers teaching this out there, so this might be Yeah. Some aha moments for people here. Sometimes people think the point of that pose is to get the front leg to 90 degrees, right? That’s an aesthetic.

Right. And I would argue that where the foot is, is individual based on the human and also where, how externally rotated the knee is. So oftentimes if I have people who are just a little uncomfortable in swan, if I just get them to bring the knee more center to their body, then all of a sudden they’re totally fine.

Right? Um, and so wouldn’t we, you know, wouldn’t we wanna do modifications of, the knee and all that before we ask someone to engage the foot in a pose that otherwise is kind of passive? Like, I’m just trying to think about being in swan and trying to get into it and then having to like engage my foot the whole time.

Just feels like a lot of work. The intention of engaging the foot first is to stabilize the knee before you [00:33:00] start to put a torque into it. Gotcha. Okay. Once you’re already torqued, stabilizing, well, it’s torqued is probably not gonna really help. So at that point you would soften a bit. I’d probably come out and then find it again.

Again, the knee is not the target area in swan. Exactly. You’re quite right. A lot of people think the aesthetic is such that , the leg has to be at 90 degree angle. Yeah. The tibia to the femur,, that’s irrelevant. Where the foot is irrelevant. The targeted area is the hip, and we’re trying to extremely rotate there.

So when people do the proud swan or the proper pigeon in there doing a bit of a backbend here, notice the hip is only flexed 90 degrees. . And that has a certain amount of external rotation. Mm-hmm. When you’re in the sleeping swan, as you flex, it changes that hip forward. You’re giving yourself more room for external rotation.

Yeah. So that’s why there’s less pressure in the knee because it’s now coming more from the femur. So the danger part is when people think they have to have their leg at 90 degrees. That’s like coming into Lotus and that’s the most risky part. The more you flex the [00:34:00] knee, the looser these ligaments get when the leg is completely straight, they’re the tightest.

Gotcha. You never try to twist the knee there, so half flexed, it’s still pretty tight there and you’re trying to twist it, not so good. So you could just bring the foot in underneath you. Mm-hmm. And you talked about ABD ducting bringing the knee in. That changes the amount of abduction at the hip. Mm-hmm.

Which also affects your range of motion. If you abduct there, you are gonna change how much range. This is decreasing your range of motion. Mm-hmm. Bring in here you’re increasing it. Mm-hmm. So your cue of bringing it in actually gives you a little bit more range of external rotation at the hip socket.

Mm-hmm. Some people don’t have to worry about it. They got so much room, they can have the knee way up to the side. They can have the shin forward, but other people who don’t have that in the hips, you don’t want it to go in the knee. So bend the knee more. Yeah. Or raise the knee up a bit more or fold forward a bit more.

All that may increase that. Or of course if it’s really uncomfortable with all those flip on your back and just do it upside [00:35:00] down or do right. , Do deer pose instead. Yeah. Yeah. I have a lot of students that have knee issues and so we do a lot more reclined versions of Yeah. Stuff for our hips.

Just ’cause it’s easier than saying, you, you, you and you do this and you, , it’s like, let’s just all lay down. Yeah. , And then the other part of that question was though, is that a cue then that you’re giving your students, when you’re teaching them in class, are you telling them to flex their knee or are you bringing that out only in specific cases if people, if you feel like people might need it?

I try not to use something called nocebos and unfortunately Nocebos I noticed were quite common when I was. Starting in yoga, you’ve probably heard of placebos. Mm-hmm. That’s from the Latin eye. Please. You take a sugar pill and it helps stop your headache because you believe it’s gonna be good for you.

Well, that same power can work in reverse. Yes. It’s called the no sibel, meaning I harm. And sometimes yoga teachers with the best intentions of the world, they don’t wanna hurt their students, but they’ll [00:36:00] say like classic from Paul Gurley’s example, you have somebody in MO year two and the knee is pointing over the second toe, not the third toe.

It’s gotta be over the second toe. And if you ask the teacher why, she says, well, because if you don’t, you’re gonna screw up your knee. Well, there’s no evidence of that. That’s a pure speculation. It depends on the tibial torsion of the foot and the femoral torsion, the acetabular version. There’s so many things that will dictate where’s the knee line up to the foot.

But if you tell your students, if you keep doing that, you’re gonna destroy your knee. Now they’ve got this no SIBO in their mind. And now maybe they were playing rugby and they tweaked the knee a little bit. Now they’re doing the yoga practice and they’re in a warrior pose and they get a little tweak there.

And they remember, oh yeah, my teacher told me. I gotta be careful in my alignment here. So now they start to become hypervigilant. Mm-hmm. And they don’t move in the ways it sort of natural. And they start to cast catastrophizing. And that’s the danger of a placebo. You tell somebody that this is gonna be bad for you.

We don’t know if it’s gonna be bad for you. There’s been no [00:37:00] studies done of how the knee alignment over the second toe is destroying knees. It’s a pure speculation based on an aesthetic approach to yoga, not a functional approach. So I try not to ever. Give out an sibo. Now, it’s hard to do that. So when I say make sure you flex your foot to protect your knee, I wouldn’t say it like that.

I would say, if you have knee issues or if you want a little bit more stiffness around your knee, you can try this or this or flip onto your back. Do different options, and then it’ll say the targeted area is the hip. We’re not trying to target the knee. So if you’re feeling this in the knee, it’s not a targeted area.

Let’s do some of these things to maybe help protect it. That’s it. That’s how I would present it as well. Yeah, it would just be like if somebody says their knee is bothering them, then let’s try this. Let’s try this. Let’s, yeah, so let’s, you know, even going back to our story about osteoporosis to say, never flex the spine because you’re gonna destroy your spine.

That’s an placebo and that’s gonna cause people to become hypervigilant and stop doing the exercises that they need to [00:38:00] do. Yeah, we don’t want ’em to go too much, but as we know, being a silent sort of situation, we really can’t tell what’s too much. So let’s not put the fear of God in them to say, oh, he should never flex the spine.

You know, yoga class, but they’re doing it while they’re washing the dishes or turning around. Well, to get something outta the backseat of the car. I was gonna say, if we never flex the spine, \, for those folks, then they’re gonna go home and think, how am I supposed to pick up the laundry off the floor like that, , I tend to, , mostly because I have a, my level of expertise is mostly in people with back pain.

Yeah. It’s my niche. And so I tend to flip people on their back anyways. If I’m looking for like a hamstring stretch. Mm-hmm. , And grab a strap, I think it’s more effective. And then I don’t have to think about their spine at all. Um, but then of course there’s other things where we can gently round the spine supported wise,

yeah. Over a bolster. Over a bolster or, , a modified child’s pose or even a modified butterfly. Um, you know, so I find that [00:39:00] sometimes those ones like butterfly. For a lot of people are actually a little bit more effective because for, if you’re thinking about spine, because they don’t have to think about the tightness of their hamstrings as much.

Mm-hmm. And especially if they can extend their legs further away, that gives them more opportunity. But yeah,, it’s such a fine line, you know, as yoga professionals between, I wanna do my best to keep people safe, but I also don’t wanna make them afraid to do yoga. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it is, it is a fine line.

Yeah. And also, maybe I could spend a minute on soapbox when I’m not. Yes, please do. Rant sometimes I’m not a doctor and I’m not a therapist. I’m not trained to heal people. Mm-hmm. I’m just a guy who got into yoga, but also has a science background. And so I’m very curious of a lot of these things. So I started to educate myself about things like arthritis and.

Um, ard loss disease, hypermobility syndrome. And, [00:40:00] and I know a little bit about diabetes and stuff, but I’m not an expert in all these things. I’m not an expert in any of these things. And I think it’s really unnecessary for us as teachers to expect that we’re gonna be an expert in all these things. I, I’ve heard some yoga teacher training saying, oh, you’ve gotta know about trauma.

Now it’s great to know about trauma because everyone’s got some trauma, but another teacher says, and you gotta know about osteoporosis ’cause you’re gonna have some older women in your class. Great. And you also know about arthritis. ’cause you’re gonna have some of that. And you also, a lot of women have had cancer.

So you have to know a bit about that. And of course you have to know about MS and, um, back pain and Crohn’s disease and there’s so many things. Even a doctor doesn’t know all these things. Yeah. So how can you expect a yoga teacher with two, 500 hour, a thousand hours to know all about these things? You can’t.

Yeah. So I don’t think we should put in ourselves that we have to be an expert in all these things. We can listen. Students want us to listen and we can sympathize, but I always [00:41:00] default to, what did your doctor say? Yes. Oh, doctors, what do they know? They know a lot more than me. Yes. Plus the doctor’s had a chance to sit down with you and talk to you and find out what’s really going on in your specific situation.

You get somebody coming to a drop in yoga class who’s got a particular and you’ve never met them before. Practice with them. Yeah. And they come and tell you afterwards. I remember Sarah Powers telling me this one time she was in , a class and a man came up to her after the class and said, oh, that was great.

’cause I just came out of a heart surgery. I had a heart attack three weeks ago. And she said, I would’ve liked to have known that before the class started. Right. So she, you don’t know who’s gonna be there. Yeah. Yeah. And if she did tell ’em, she’s not an expert in cardiac surgery and the stuff, yeah. I, this is something you’re preaching to the choir here.

’cause this is something I tell teachers all the time. , And I feel like maybe because yoga’s not licensed, and I’m not saying I want it to be right. I’m just saying one of the, one of the negatives of that is that we don’t have anybody kind of overseeing our scope of practice like other professions would.

[00:42:00] Right. Right. And I think it’s one of the smartest things you can do as a yoga professional is if they tell you something and you don’t know anything about that to say, I don’t know, have you checked with your doctor? Or have you gone to physio? Or, , I used to say at the end of classes, if you have any questions, let me know.

I’m happy to connect after class. And then I realized I needed to be more specific. Mm-hmm. Because most of the questions I was getting is like, I have this thing here, is that sciatica? Or my knee hurts when I, and I would just be like, Hmm, you need to go to a chiropractor or a physiotherapist or a doctor.

Yes. I’m a healthcare person. So now, yeah, now I, I even say that as a joke. I say, you know, um, if you have any questions about our practice together. I probably have answers for you, but just to be clear, I’m not a nutritionist. I’m not a physiotherapist. I’m not a the, I’m not a therapist. I’m not, you know, and I list them off.

Yeah. And that usually gets a little laugh. And then, you know, I don’t have to worry about, you know, and, and I’ve said to so many people, well, I don’t actually know what is going on there, but if you can go to your physiotherapist, [00:43:00] find out what’s going on there, and they’re okay with us connecting, well then I might be able to offer you some support.

Once I know what’s going on, what you shouldn’t be doing, what the physiotherapist said, you should do more of. Now I can help you. But otherwise I have nothing. If you were a physical therapist, this is not a place for physical therapy. Exactly. This is a yoga class. Yeah. So if it was physical therapy, you’d have a one-on-one, half an hour chat to get to know the person, their history, what’s going on.

Yes. And then try some stuff and come back and let’s see how it goes. And so there’d be a whole different way of dealing with that. Yes, we, I’m sure you’ve had too. I’ve had doctors, medical doctors in my classes, but this is not the place to do therapy. Yeah. You’re not here as a doctor. And there’s a difference too, as a yoga professional between, like you said, in a group class versus if you’re working one-on-one with someone.

Yeah. Very different. Then you have so much more ability to help if you’re working one-on-one. But you still need to connect with their health team to figure out what exactly is the diagnosis before you just start randomly shooting in the dark, trying to figure it out. , And yeah, there is a [00:44:00] big difference.

Yeah. I always say in a group class, the best you’re gonna get out of me is I can give you a modification so you’re not in pain. Right. That’s all I, that’s all I got because I don’t, I can’t, I mean, we’re in a group, first of all, and also I can’t, , like you said, diagnose or treat anybody. , Yes.

That good soapbox. I stand on that soapbox with you, my friend. I remember one time a woman came up to me, , I used to teach y yoga Sunday evenings in person, and she’d been coming for about a year and I didn’t really know her, but she’d always be in the back of the class. And after about a year, she came up and said, can I give you a hug?

And I said, sure. So she gave me a hug and then she said, you know, when I started coming to Yin Yoga with you a year ago, I was in such terrible back pain. And now after a year of doing your yin yoga, I’m completely back pain free. And she started to tear up and she was so happy. And she walked away. And my ego was starting to think, oh, this is great.

But then the scientist to me said, time, time out. Mm-hmm. I have no idea why that woman got better. Yeah. Maybe she would’ve gotten better if she just stayed at home too over a year. [00:45:00] Or maybe it was. The breath work, or maybe it was the relaxation or ana nervous sitting out of her house away from her husband once a week.

Yeah. Cortisol levels, who knows. Right. But it’s true. She did get better, right? Why she got better. I could only speculate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I had somebody say that to me after a, it was ironically a APAC pain workshop. And, , afterwards she said, I don’t know what magic you did in that workshop, but like in the middle of the workshop, I felt something kind of shift.

And we were just doing something as innocent as locust pose. Like it wasn’t, she said, I felt something shift and I haven’t been in pain since. And I was like, I really cannot take credit for that. That is, yay for you. But like, please do not put that pressure on me.

No. Like, it’s just, we’re great teachers. That must be it. It’s just, it’s magic, right? Yeah. Yes. Funny. , Okay, let’s talk about the whole. The only reason I even wanted to talk about this is ’cause I thought it would be good to have something on the record [00:46:00] in addition to what you wrote on your website, which I will link in the show notes.

, But let’s talk about the Lizzie Lasseter post. Okay. And I cannot count how many people on Instagram sent me that post. Mm-hmm. Which is why I finally was like, Bernie, take it away. It was just like, I was like, because to me, I, the way that I read the Post, and we can get into, you know, the exact verbiage and stuff, , in a moment.

But I looked at that post and was like, okay, that’s telephone game pseudoscience. And I moved on. , I was just like, there’s no validity. Like I’m very open to, I’m not such a yin fan, that if there was actual, like, scientific evidence that something was bad about this practice that we’re doing. You know, I would pay attention to that of course.

But when somebody says, , my friend so and so said, and then they and I think it was probably pulled through AI too, but when you read the post, [00:47:00] none of it is backed up. It’s very almost, , it’s like winking at being alarmist, but without actually being alarmist. And then the other thing I strongly dislike about that is I really don’t like pitting styles of yoga against each other.

Hmm. I don’t need to say yin is great because Vinyasa sucks. Like, I don’t love Vinyasa, I don’t practice it myself, but if people love that practice and they’re getting benefit from it, they should party on with themselves, ? And so the fact that she used this so-called yin information to say that’s why I practiced restorative, I was just like.

Do, do we need to do that? That whole post would’ve been just as powerful if she would’ve said, and , we can get into the post in a moment. , As a woman going through perimenopause, my practice has changed and here’s what I’m doing now. That would’ve been just as powerful without having to pull in the pseudoscience and try to dis yin to make restorative yoga somehow superior in my [00:48:00] opinion.

So that’s the problems that I had with the post. \, Also the person that she’s quoting is a yoga therapist and I don’t know exactly what that yoga therapist said ’cause I wasn’t in the room. So we already have to worry about is the telephone game happening here? For those of you who don’t know the telephone game, ’cause I know it’s got different names around the world, , when you have little kids sit in a circle.

The grownup in the group whispers to one something and says, okay, now tell the person next to you and next to you and next to you. And by the time it gets back to the original kid, it’s nothing like what was originally said. And so I’m always aware of that. If you are quoting, , Mary Richards who’s a yoga therapist, but I didn’t hear what Mary Richards said, nor do I know what her sources are or where she got the information.

And also she’s a yoga therapist, not a scientist, not a nervous system expert. And , so I, it really, , it felt a lot of like she was trying to use some pseudoscience that was hearsay to throw in under the bus just to make restorative seem better, which I’m not down for. I don’t [00:49:00] think we need to do that in yoga.

, So that’s, that was my,, issue with it. , And then of course I tagged you. I was like, Bernie, please take it away because , you’re the one who’s gonna go down the scientific rabbit hole , and find anything if there. So do you want me to,, read the post or do you wanna read the original post and then your response?

, No. Maybe I’ll let you read it, but I’ll just Okay. , Say in advance, what I’m really worried about with social media is that people start doing the ad Mann attacks. Mm-hmm. They start to attack the person instead of the position. Mm-hmm. Which I really try to resist. Yeah. Because I think the world’s gotten too binary or polarized, and we start to think, oh, you know, this person’s got this opinion and they’re just idiots.

Yeah. Smart people can have opinions that you disagree with. Totally. The intention, if I always start with the intention, anyone that I see that’s coming from a yoga background, I honestly believe they’ve got the best intentions of their students at heart. And they may extrapolate from their own [00:50:00] experience in thinking this is probably what’s best for the students.

Well, we know because of human variation, that’s not always a good extrapolation because there’s so much difference there. Mm-hmm. , I don’t know Lizzie, I certainly know of her mother, but I do believe she came at it from a, this is what I’m finding, therefore you students, you may want to be aware of this.

Yeah. However, what she cited for us to be aware of didn’t turn out to be scientifically valid. Yeah. And that’s, but that’s what I think happens when you just , maybe without foresight, , and checking into things, you just kind of throw up a social media post. Yeah. And I do think, I’m certainly not gonna knock any yoga teachers whose intentions were good, but I do think that when you have a platform as a yoga professional, that, and people look up to you and they train with you, et cetera, that there is a little bit of a responsibility on your part to.

Check things out a little more before you post. And, and if it does turn out that you’re incorrect to then post just [00:51:00] like a well back when journalists were actually journalists, , like in the past, ,

with real journalism, , if there was something that they got wrong, they would print a retraction or they would say a retraction, right?

I’ve said this countless times in my life. There are things that I used to believe. I don’t even believe those at all anymore. And I have no problem saying, well, that’s what I thought at the time because of the information I had. , And the, and I was younger and I was hubris and the belief system that I had, but now, , now I see it differently because I have new information or I have a different perspective based on my own life or somebody close to me.

And so I think we have to remember always as teachers to have, I’m gonna say this might sound risky. Actually, if you were gonna put on a scale, like an old fashioned scale, a weight of expertise and humility, I would like to see the humility be a little heavier. , So that we can leave this open for learning, for changing our minds.

But [00:52:00] also I think it’s, people are less likely to put a teacher on a pedestal if they’re very human , and say , I don’t know. Or, well, what I used to think is this, but now we’ve learned,, I think it helps to kinda keep that, yeah, that humanity in teachers. So we’re less likely to be put on pedestals.

And then, , when a teacher falls from grace, which so many have over the years, , I’m just always hyper aware of that. , When anyone compliments me per se, based on the yoga, I’m always really quick to be like, I’m glad that my voice translated that teaching to you in a way that resonates.

But the yoga did that. That wasn’t me, , yeah. So let’s talk about it. So I’ll read her actual post and then , you can go from there. Okay. The first point was, for years, I believe that longer holds meant deeper healing. But as a, as yoga therapist, Mary Richards teaches us, or tissues don’t actually work that way.

That way, after about two minutes, mechanoreceptors in your muscles and fascia, especially the [00:53:00] goji tendon organs that measure tension, stop sending fresh information to your brain, your proprioceptive awareness fades, and the stabilizing muscles go offline. What you feel after that release point isn’t opening, it’s your nervous system.

Checking out. The joints may feel looser, but they’re also less supported. Stay at end range for five to six minutes, and you may overwhelm your sensory systems. That creates instability in your. Restorative yoga is different. The goal isn’t stretching, it’s opening. We fully support the joints so the body feels safe enough to soften.

Now, as I move into perimenopause, my practice centers around building somatic strength with shorter intentional stretches and lots of restorative. Send this to someone who loves yin yoga, but might be served about learning about the science behind holding these poses. A bit shorter, man. Now that I’m rereading that, I’m like, I [00:54:00] could, I have point by point.

I have things to pick apart too, but I’m gonna let, I’m like, but I’m gonna, if, and if you don’t address it,, I’ll bring them up at the end, but I have a feeling you’re probably gonna cover it. Alright. Over to you, my friend. Okay., As you asked me, I, I did create an article that I posted on my website and perhaps you can give a link to your Absolutely.

To that. So I’m just gonna go , to the scientific claims that are in there. Her statement that after about two minutes the mechanical receptors in your muscles and fascia, especially the GOGI tendon organs, they stopped sending fresh information to the brain. I wish she had cited a source for that.

Because that sent me down a rabbit hole. ’cause that wasn’t my understanding. And I spent a good morning, hours and hours that morning trying to figure out where did she get that from or where did Mary Richard get it from? I couldn’t find anything that verified that. To back up a bit, the GOGI tendon organs or the GOGI organs, they’re named after an Italian anatomist quite a while ago.

And these are [00:55:00] little cells that measure stress. They’re throughout the body, but they’re also in the place where the muscle and the, the tendon become one. So it’s called the muscular tenderness junction. ’cause that’s where this tissue is kind of the weakest. So they got a little sensor right there. And if you’re in danger of pulling.

That apart, like most tears in the muscle is at this junction in the muscle tendon junction. If you’re in danger of doing that, the GOGI tendon organ will send a message through the nervous system to the muscles telling the muscles to relax. A good example is that if you ever watch two people doing an arm resting contest mm-hmm.

You see how they’re, they’re going back and forth and one guy’s trying hard to stay and suddenly how does it end quickly? This guy just collapses. It’s not a slow decay to the tabletop, it’s just there’s so much stress going into his, his fascia there that it’s about to snap. So the nervous system just reflex relaxes all the muscles.

Yeah. So you just [00:56:00] completely relax. Well, that’s true that in yin yoga, part of the reason we get longer and longer we’re deeper into the pose is because the gogi tendon organs or just the GOGI organs, wherever they are in the joint capsules, all, all over the fascia, they’re sending out this relaxed signal, relax, let go.

And it’s not a danger ’cause we’re not under a huge sort of load here, but they don’t turn off. They never switch off. Rather, they’re forming a feedback loop with another sensor called the muscle spindle. Now the muscle, imagine you got a typical muscle like a bicep in the wrap or the fascia that wraps the muscle groupings called the parum.

We got these other little sensors called muscle spindles, and they’re measuring the stress on the muscle fibers themselves. And there, if they notice there’s too much stress, the muscle’s gonna get torn. They do the opposite of the GOGI tendon organs. They turn the nervous system on to contract the muscle to protect it.

So it’s like a yin yang thing, or a [00:57:00] break in a gas pedal. The GOGI organs relax the nervous system. The muscle spindles activate the nervous system. So these things are never turned off. They’re always in a continuous communication in a feedback loop. And it’s not just these two cells. There’s other mechanisms throughout the body that are always monitoring what’s going on, and then the body adapts to that.

So it’s not that we turn off, it’s that we adapt. I suspect one of the reasons, I don’t know what Mary Richards told her, I don’t know Mary Richards, but I’ve heard other yoga teachers say something similar and they talk about something called neural drive. Now a neural drive is the nerves have to activate the muscles for us to turn on the muscle.

A nerve is activated and one nerve may touch 10 muscles fibers, 10 muscle cells or a hundred depending on where they are in your hands. The ratio is like one to 10, but in your calf it’s one to a thousand. ’cause you don’t need as much calf muscle [00:58:00] dexterity as you do with the hands. But if. If I want to get more strength, I’ll have to activate more muscle cells.

So when I first start getting stronger, say I’ve got a New Year’s resolution, I’m gonna do 30 pushups and I can barely do one, and then I keep doing it ’cause it’s a New Year’s resolution. I’m gonna do it for at least a week. At the end of the week, I’m doing 10. Now, in one week, you haven’t gotten more muscles, but what you have done is retrained the nervous system.

Mm. That nervous system’s not just turning on 10 muscle cells, it’s now turning on a hundred muscle cells, so you’re 10 times stronger. So that’s a neural drive. When you’re holding a stretch like we do , in yoga, that drive is reduced. We’re not recruiting as much, but this is not a permanent change. This is a temporary change.

And then later when everything goes back to normal, the nervous system’s actually more efficient. So it is true to say that you don’t wanna do yin yoga before sports. Yeah. If your goal is to set a personal best. [00:59:00] And we did a whole episode on that yin yoga for athletes, which is, which Tiffany explains that really well.

So I can link that one too. Yeah. Yeah. So this is a temporary thing, like if I am a hockey player, I probably don’t wanna do a lot of stretching before going in the ice, ’cause it’s gonna reduce my explosive stiffness, which I really need to skate the fastest. However, if I’m a goalie, maybe I do wanna stretch out ’cause I’m gonna have to do the splits a few times.

So, a hurdler might need a lot more flexibility than the explosive running of a sprinter, right? So this is not black or white. So it is true that we will temporarily inhibit the neural drive, but it doesn’t mean anything goes offline and it’s not a permanent change. The permanent change actually is healthier.

You start to be able to more be more functional at longer ranges of motion than you were before. Right. So in my response, I did cite some resources. So, beautiful. Unfortunately, Lizzie didn’t give any references to studies that proved her point of view, but I [01:00:00] did cite some of these things in here. .

She also claimed that proprioception fades. Well, proprioception again, is a systemic thing. It’s not just GOGI organs. There’s , the muscle state itself, the muscle spindles, the sensors underneath the skin, the sensors in the, joint capsules themselves, the RET macular is filled with these receptors, so they know what angle the joint is at.

So all of this is part of proprioception, and they do not go offline. They can habituate, they can react to these things, but the nervous system doesn’t go away. If it did, if you sat and watched a movie for five minutes, you’d become completely useless. Or if you’re driving a car for half an hour, your hips would no longer work.

Your gardening all of a sudden, oh yeah, that’s it. We’re stuck. Yeah, I, the other thing I wanna just mention on that proprioceptive point, since you’re talking about it, and she says, the stabilizing muscles go offline. Well, if that was the case, you wouldn’t be able to stand up after yin, right? So that’s obviously not the [01:01:00] case.

The other thing I wanna mention is that, as you just said, it’s not like your proprioception goes offline, but what can happen in a yin practice, which is, is fairly unique, is you increase your introception. Yeah. So when your teacher maybe is saying things like, we’re looking to feel this in this area.

Notice the sensations in your body, , things like , that increases introception, which is something that honestly, most of us, especially in the west, suck at. , We’re not good at. Of dropping into our body , and being with that and noticing, and I think it’s an incredibly useful skill.

So proprioception, yay. We love it. It’s super important. But also, let’s not forget about the huge benefit of introception, which I think a yin practice is, especially if it’s taught in the way that the teacher kind of guides you back to your own awareness of yourself over and over again. That can be such a great way to build introception.

Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s a very important [01:02:00] benefit that we get from the practice. Yeah. Not just prop percept, but introception, She also mentioned that the, the nervous system disengages, well, again, I don’t, the nervous system never disengages, but it will recalibrate, so it’ll adapt to what’s going on.

But it doesn’t like, it’s not like a switch that’s turned on or off. Yeah. That one confused me too. It’ll shift back and forth as it needs to,, the nervous system, it’s not, yeah, it’s not turning Yeah. It’s not like, boop. Now the nervous system’s turned off and now we let flick a switch and it’s turned back on.

Yeah. And she also says staying at end range of motion for 5, 6, 6 minutes overwhelms our, that’s exactly what I was gonna get into as well. Yeah. , First of all, end range in yin yoga, we’re not really trying to get to end range. We’re trying to get to sensation. Mm-hmm. Or to a first edge. And maybe that’s gonna be an end range for some people if they’re at compression.

But usually when I’m doing yin, I’m not at my maximum range of motion and I’m not trying to get there. No, me [01:03:00] neither. And I don’t encourage people to do that. In fact, I encourage them to back off a little because. Most of, , culturally, but also other styles of yoga kind of typically tend to encourage students to push, push, push to go deeper, deeper, deeper, to do more, more, more.

And I’m usually saying, what if we just backed off a little? , Not so much that you’re like doing restorative, you know, but like, where’s the in between? Like, this is my extreme and this is doing nothing. Like, let’s find that middle way and hang out there and then watch it and see how it changes too over the course of the time that you’re in a pose, because that midpoint is gonna shift as well as your body changes.

And let’s not demonize end range of motion either because, ’cause you know, if I extend my arm out, my, my arm is straight because I’m at end range of motion. Yeah. This is my end range of motion. It’s not bad. What’s bad is trying to go past your end range of motion and for certain populations, like in the ano syndrome, right?

Maybe end range of motion isn’t good, but [01:04:00] that’s a very specific case in a very specific. , Group of folks, which I also have a whole episode about, which I can link, man, the show notes are gonna be full. Um, and, but that’s a very specific group. And to say that like someone like me who’s always been in the, , not so flexible, overly strong category, can’t go to my full range of motion like it is, believe me, it’s not that impressive in a lot of places.

So like, I’m gonna be fine, so yeah. I think that is such a common misconception,, that I hear teachers that have never been trained in yin say, is that, well, I don’t think going to your full eng of range of motion and hanging out in your joints is wise. And it’s like, well, first of all are, is that what we’re doing, second of all, for whom?

Right. Right. And people in Downdog or handstand, they’re at end range of motion in the elbow. Yeah. And they’re hanging out in their joints. Yeah. And they do that deliberate. You watch people doing weightlifting, they’re taught to lock and load. Yep. To be where the bones are locked because then the bones are taking the stress, [01:05:00] not the muscles.

Yep. This is taught in many other modalities, but for some reason for some yoga teachers, oh, never go to end range of motion. Why not? Why can’t I lock the elbows? Yeah. Yeah. Use these negative turns like don’t hang out in the joints or don’t dump into your joints. Okay. I don’t wanna dump into my joints, but how about if I just align my joints so the bones are taking the stress and I don’t have to slightly micro bend.

Are you gonna micro bend? You got 300 kilos up here you to, and tell ’em to micro bend the elbows? They’ll tell you what the micro bend and maybe for some people locking the joints out or going to end range is, is problematic if they have an injury or something else. But that, that doesn’t mean that let’s just use a non yoga example.

So I’m allergic to dairy. I don’t respond well to dairy. Does that mean everybody else should stop drinking dairy just in your class? Yeah. Everybody that I know. Yeah. And in my class, no dairy because I have a negative response to it. , It’s , this is where I don’t love , these big overarching statements in yoga.

It’s like, ’cause as, as you and [01:06:00] I know and often say, well it depends, right? Right. Somebody locking their joint, if that joint is injured or unstable or they have ano syndrome or something problematic for the average, most common of us, not really an issue. Um, so what we could say is it’s not good for everybody to lock their joints and it’s not bad for everybody to lock their joints.

Brilliant. Perfect. Yes. Um, I’m trying to think if there was anything else that I really,

and the other thing I wanna say too is, um. When she says restorative yoga is different, the goal isn’t stretching and it’s opening. That’s totally valid. I have taught yin and restorative both for years. I practiced both yin and restorative. Yeah. To me, even though they’re both yin like in nature, there are some real differences in the two practices if they’re done.

Kind of how restorative is in the Judith Lasseter vein where you’re very, very supported. [01:07:00] I don’t think that we have to choose one versus the other. And I also think that sometimes with very A type students, you might get them to do a yin class ’cause they feel like they’re still doing something in air quotes.

But trying to get someone who’s super high energy, super, , a type go, go, go and has a lot of these kind of messages in their head about calming down and being still and chilling out. To just go right into laying on bolsters and napping is sometimes a bit much. And so I always think of like. Yin is that perfect in-between a really active class.

It is more contemplative, it is more still, but yet they feel like they’re doing something and they’re not in the shapes as long before they’re moving. So I just feel like it’s a little bit more digestible sometimes for certain, for certain folks. Yeah. I don’t have a problem with her statement of what restorative yoga is, but I’m not sure I agree with her insinuation of [01:08:00] what yin yoga isn’t.

She says the goal isn’t stretching as just to say the goal in Y yoga is to stretch. It’s opening. Well in Y yoga, the goal can be to open as well. Yeah, it can be whatever. And maybe we can fully support the joints so the body feels safe enough to soften as well. That’s why we use props. Yeah., Or it could be that maybe you’re not even there necessarily for the physical benefits, but you’re there to work with your mind.

Yeah. Or to just have some quiet time away from the kids, or who knows what people come to the practice for. Yeah. We shouldn’t assume. Everyone’s coming just to stretch at their end range. , Yeah, there’s many goals, many reasons that people come to the mat. Right. Anything else you wanna say on , the Lizzie thing?

No. I think again, if people want, they can look at the detailed response that I’ve given you, put the link in there and mm-hmm. Some of the, uh, studies that support that. But again, let’s not make an SIBO that people are afraid to do something because they’re gonna destroy themselves. Okay. There are a lot of [01:09:00] people who don’t like in yoga and they shouldn’t do in yoga, and I’m perfectly fine with that.

Totally. If you try in yoga and you like it, don’t be afraid of it. If it was really that dangerous, there’s probably tens of millions of people doing yin yoga on a regular basis around the world. And if it was really that dangerous, where are all the reports? Right. Okay. And then the last question I have for you, before we. Move into potentially part two, , on the book is how long is too long to hold a yin post? Yes, that’s an excellent question. Well, what makes it yin is the time itself. So if you’re only holding for a minute, that may be valuable, but it’s not really yin.

So in a lot of other forms of haha yoga, you might hold the pose for five breaths or a minute, and that’s perfectly adequate In terms of the, the physiology of the tissues, there’s a, um, one of the rock stars of fascia research, Carla Teco and her [01:10:00] Atlas of fascial anatomy. She says it takes at least two minutes for the internal relaxation of the collagen fibers to really begin to release.

Hmm. And you’ll get about 95% of that after four minutes. So if you’re simply looking at a, an internal release of the stresses inside the fas. And the fascia can be in the muscles, it can be in the joint capsules, ligaments, tendons. You want to be there for at least two minutes and probably ideally about four minutes.

However, there’s also the nervous system relaxation that we talked about. So you think of it when you come into the first edge in, in yoga, like a butterfly after a minute or so, this kind of, ah, something just released. Mm-hmm. That might be the physical tissues just kind of realigning where the tissues are maybe at a, an angle like a fishnet stocking and then you pull it and they start to realign and they got more length.

Or it could be the gogi tendon organs are now starting to send the signal to the muscles, okay. Relax, soften. Mm-hmm. [01:11:00] So there’s that effect as well. And that can be anywhere from two or three minutes up to maybe 10 minutes. Right. But Robert Slipe also talks about the state of water and Carlos Deco’s brother, Antonio Deco, who works at the University of New York, he talks about how.

You can kinda liquefy the gel state of the water through either heat, like about 40 degrees, 38 degrees centigrade, which is the ambient temperature in a hot yoga room. That’s one of the reasons why it’s so good for a lot of people is ’cause it kinda melts the gel into a solution state. But also through this XO tropic effect, if you put a stress into the tissues, after a while, the water kind of changes its state and also softens, and that also can take several minutes to happen.

Now when you do all that, there’s that sense of fragility. You’ve literally pulled the tissues apart. You’ve downregulated the nervous system, you’ve changed the state of water. So when you come out, that’s when you get that sense of fragility. Mm-hmm. That [01:12:00] rebound. Mm-hmm. You want all that to kind of go back to its original state and that that can take time, that can take half an hour or an hour, depending on just how much you’ve been doing here.

So I don’t think there’s any preordained, , time. But I think you gotta be at least two minutes Now if you’re pregnant, you got a condition, maybe two to three minutes is enough. I’ve been experimenting with gin chair yoga. Hmm. Find sitting in the chair in one place for five minutes. It’s really uncomfortable.

Yeah. So when I do my own chin chair, yin yoga,, I like to be two to three minutes. Did you just call it chin yoga? I love that. Chin yoga. Yoga. Chin yoga chair. Yoga chair yoga. I love it. Chin cho. So you know, people are pregnant. I’ve heard from prenatal yin yoga teacher trainers who say, you know, for me when I was pregnant, three minutes was really the maximum.

Yeah. Because I don’t want to be pulling the pubic synthesis too much apart. Yeah. Yeah. So two to three minutes is a minimum, but some poses you can go up to 10 or 20 minutes. But what’s, [01:13:00] ’cause I’ve had students ask me this in my trainings, , because I say as a ballpark, know, in my training we’re gonna go between two and a half to five minutes on average.

Right. In your average drop in mixed level, who knows what we’re getting in class. But then I also say , there’s nothing wrong with holding it longer, but also longer isn’t always better. Right. And I, ’cause I think sometimes people think that once they get experience in yin and now they’re an intermediate yin student, that like, they’re gonna get more out of their body if they just hold it longer.

And maybe, but, know, for me, for example, for probably the first, God, I don’t know, five or more years of practicing in, I never went past five minutes in anything. I just didn’t need to. Now I would say. That there are certain shapes that I will hold for seven minutes, 10 minutes, things like that.

I also noticed the other difference is, when I was newer to yin, when I came out of a shape, I felt really felt the urge to [01:14:00] move. Like I was like trying to make sure everything was still attached, you know? But then as my practice has progressed, if I come out and move too much, I lose that little, um, rebound Paul.

’cause that I call it the resonance or the linger. I lose an awareness of that. Yeah. Because it’s much softer over the years. So now I tend to hold a little longer and then come out and be far more still so that I can still feel it. Well, I agree. I think from a physiological point of view, once you’ve got to your final edge.

You’re probably not gonna release any further. So there’s probably not another benefit physiologically for staying longer. But from a psychological point of view, I think there could still be a lot of reasons for being there. It’s like, why do you meditate for 20 minutes instead of five minutes? So if you’re getting into more of a mindfulness interceptive type practice and you’re in something like saddle, most people, they can’t do saddle.

But once they’re in it, I spend a lot of time getting in here. I don’t wanna come out right away. Totally. [01:15:00] Yeah. I’m gonna really enjoy it. But for me, I love saddle, so I could be in saddle for 10 minutes, no problem. Yeah. I’m not getting any more physical benefits. I get that all in the first three or four minutes, but I’m getting more psychological or if you want spiritual or emotional benefits.

Energetic. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I noticed that and an acupuncture needle, how long they leave that in depends. Yeah. Yeah. But it’s probably not one minute or two minutes. Yes, exactly. I notice with, um, with practice that. If I don’t have a timer, or sometimes even when I am timing, like I can just feel the point in my body now where it’s like, and that’s all she wrote.

Yeah. Like, I, you know, there’s no, I’m, you know, in particular poses, I’m not gonna go deeper in this and I’m no longer feeling any sensation. So like, yeah, we’re done here. You know? Yeah. And so I may come out earlier or I might just hang out there and enjoy it because it’s one of my favorite poses, you know, until the timer goes off.

So, yeah, I just think that was a question often is like, what, what’s too long? And as always, with everything, it [01:16:00] depends too long. Definitely. If it hurts, yes. It starts at tingling. , Electrical feelings, sharp, burning, stabbing definitely come up. Yeah. And also, what is your experience level and what, in what pose?

’cause I don’t do all my poses for 10 minutes. Yeah. Just certain ones, so yeah, there we go. I think that kind of answers that as well as we can. And then I think we’re gonna pause here for those of you listening, and we’re gonna turn this into part two, and we’re gonna dive into Bernie’s book. , So that will be, , linked Below.

Yes, I have it right here with, you can see with all my sticky notes, which is what I do to avoid writing inside the book. Oh, okay. , Yes, I have to do those. Otherwise I’m writing in the margins and highlighting and scribbling all over the place. Um, so hop back for the next episode, my friends, and we’ll be talking all about Bernie’s beautiful new book, prana.

One breath, many worlds. Thanks Nick. Thank you [01:17:00] Bernie.