Yin Yoga and Osteoporosis – with Niamh Daly

Yin Yoga and Osteoporosis
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[00:00:00] Welcome or welcome back to a Yin Yoga podcast. Today we have a guest, A guest I have been looking for a very long time. I’ve been looking for somebody who can come and talk about osteoporosis and osteopenia and how that might affect how we teach or practice yin yoga. So we are gonna go into that today.

Welcome to a Yinny Yoga podcast. I’m your host, Nick Denu, certified yoga therapist, mentor of yoga teachers, yinny yoga teacher trainer, and total yin yoga geek. If you have a crush on yin yoga and are ready to dive deep, then you’re in the right place. Here, myself and my guests will discuss all things in yoga, including [00:01:00] anatomy, philosophy, traditional Chinese medicine, meditation, Taoism, teaching tips, and so much more.

You can expect these conversations to be long format, informal, lo-fi, and delightfully imperfect. So whether you are a yoga teacher or a yin yoga student, I welcome you to the inside.

I will do, my guest bio in just a moment, but I wanted to mention for those of you watching on YouTube, , you will probably see a little bit of chaos in this video. I’m sitting in a different spot than normal, , due to extenuating circumstances, and this was recorded about an hour and a half before my cat’s lunch.

And so the cats get very, . Pesky when I sit here and record at this time, if I sit somewhere else, they’re [00:02:00] fine. They don’t bug me at all. But because I’m near their food and near, near their food bowls , there’s jumping all kinds of things. So at some point, if you’re watching the video, you will see the video jiggle.

This is due to the location I’m seated. You will see me jumping up perhaps to rescue a lamp from being, that could have happened. Um, and also there was a point during the recording where my cat has decided to bat the microphone around. And so, you know, see me having to adjust that and multiple times of me, kind of my hands moving to keep a cat away or stop them from chewing on something.

So it’s been, it’s been a multitasking episode, so just be aware for those of you on YouTube, you got a little bit of an extra show today. And for those of you with audio, I don’t know how much of that will come through. Maybe the odd bit, so before we, dive into the, there, you, you can just see it again there.

Those of you watching the video, that was a cat jumping on the table that I’m working on. It feels like I’m a little bit in a boat on the seashore. , [00:03:00] Before we dive into our guest bio, I just wanna mention that if you have been loving the podcast and you have not yet offered me a rating or a review, I would be super grateful if you would just take a moment right now, pause as the recording.

I’ll also be here when you get back and go into whatever app you’re using and either give me the stars, you could do like five stars. And on Apple you can also do a written review. And on Spotify you can do five stars and you can leave me a comment under the episode and then on YouTube of course, make sure you are subscribed.

Take a moment to like the video and then leave me a comment below. These things help the algorithms let other folks know that this yin yoga business is useful information. And so these platforms are more likely to introduce them to people in search or, , as recommended if they get a little bit more love.

Plus, it also helps me to just know that you’re actually out there and you’re [00:04:00] listening. So that would be super helpful. Take a moment to pause and offer me a rating or a review. Gimme some stars. , If you love the pod, gimme five stars. Gimme verbal feedback as well. Um, if you would like in the review, either Apple, you can do stars and written Spotify.

You could do stars and leave me a comment, and again, on YouTube you could like the video, subscribe and let me know in the episode Comments. Any ahas that you may have had about the episode, that would be great. Okay.

My guest, NIV Dali, teaching since 2004 is a registered teacher trainer with Yoga Alliance professionals and a continue education provider with Yoga Alliance. She is also a somatic education coach, a Pilates Mat one and two instructor, and trained in the Buff Bones Method. Fall prevention and still holds an advanced diploma in nutrition [00:05:00] coaching.

In 2015, she began to develop yoga for menopause and beyond launching the yoga teacher training at the same time in 2020. She has since then authored the book, yoga for Menopause and Beyond, published by Human. Kinetics in 2024 and available worldwide, and she has trained hundreds of yoga teachers worldwide in her trainings, which include yoga for bone health, neuro soma, yoga, and other professionals also in menopause awareness in strategies for fitness pros and psychotherapists.

She also teaches classes, retreats, and one-on-one in person and online. Promoting the value of pleasure, self-led movement, and rest. She’s also keen to honor the robust research that effects of our yoga and exercise have on physical, mental, emotional, and neurological health. Her trainings offer ways [00:06:00] of teaching and practicing that are original evidence-based and most relevant to our changing needs, yet respectful and inclusive of traditional yoga.

The next time you hear from me, I will be with my guest niv.

Welcome Neve to a y yoga podcast. Thank you so much for, it’s probably evening where you are, I’m guessing. Mm-hmm. Yeah. For spending your evening with me then this is the thing that happens with time zones when you have guests. Sometimes it’s, yeah. Yeah. I think we didn’t know like some years ago when podcasts weren’t a thing and we were just these little communities in our own countries and totally here we’re global community.

Yeah. I love it. , Just so that the listeners know, we’ve already chatted about it, but I have been asking for quite a while if anybody has a source that could come on the podcast [00:07:00] and talk to me about osteoporosis and osteopenia specifically and how that can affect our yin practice and how we teach.

And, it’s been a long haul ever since the, since the episode four, which was like almost three years ago. I’ve been looking, so I’m very glad that you’re here. But somebody on Instagram who I’m guessing has either studied with you or knows you or has your book or something, sent me your way.

And so I’m so happy that you’re here. . Before we dive into the topic at hand, I would love to hear a little bit about your yoga journey. Maybe starting with like how you found yoga, , touching on when you decided to teach and giving , your introduction to yin , and then , we’ll go from there.

Cool. Yeah. So I, uh, actually trained years ago in the nineties as an actor. And in the drama school that I was in, there was a, , the person who ran it was really into the Alexander technique, which is a technique which is about helping the body to let go of habitual tensions, [00:08:00] uh, so that it can be more neutral, which, you know, is a great state for an actor to have so that you can take on a different character or whatever.

But she also encouraged acrobatics of all sorts of mad physical stuff. So I fell in love with physical stuff there in my mid twenties. And then it wasn’t though until. Dawn on the top of a mountain on the year 2000. My sister taught me a sun salutation as the sun came up and I was like, oh, this is fun.

And I was very fortunate that she was going to a teacher not far from me, who was truly excellent. One of the few teachers in Ireland at that time, who was teaching for over 20 years. She was, , a real outlier and fabulous. So I fell in love with it.

Sometimes we dive into training as a teacher pretty quick. So I was 2004 when I trained. That was a 200 hour teaching, a teacher training where I came out thinking I can’t teach yoga. That’s bonkers. So I was lucky enough to do a year with that teacher , as my mentor. So [00:09:00] being, the, maybe in a way the traditional old school of being with a teacher for a long time, but probably not as in depth as it would be traditionally.

So I started teaching haha yoga then, and I think it was pretty soon, maybe two years into my teaching that a, an Irish teacher who had trained in yin yoga in the states came back all full of this new fab, fabulous. Style, , this idea. And I went to some of her workshops and I was like, oh my God, this is just so delicious.

It’s ridiculous. So there was no yin trainings in Ireland at the time. There was no online yin training, so I just went to workshops with her and started to,, introduce it into my classes. And I did it really quite a lot as part of class. And then I think I went through , a 40 hour yin training.

So for those of you who are listening, I know a lot of yin teachers teach, train, hours and hundreds of hours. So I would be not as trained as some of your [00:10:00] listeners in Yin. , But I started to, because I was also a time massage therapist, I used to do some hands-on width in the yin poses and called it yin safe hands.

And. Oh my God. The, the people who came on a weekly basis for two hours on a Sunday, just, you know, they were puddles of delight on the floor. Um, just so kneading that deep rest. Um, I was also very interested in the emotional permissiveness that’s in yin. That whole thing of emotions are not wrong, it’s, we’re getting to know them.

What’s wrong is when they are either stuck, they can’t be expressed or they are,, overly . Expressed , and knee jerk, you know, so it’s not just the physical practice that I fell in love with. And then, , anyway, at some point around, , age 45, 2015, I started having my perimenopause symptoms and started researching, , [00:11:00] menopause.

And outta that, grew yoga from menopause, which is a specialization of mine. And, , that became a teacher training in 2020. , In the interim, I had developed this thing called instinct yoga, which was me melting yin into my love of instinctual movement. So I used to do workshops where we would start in a yin pose and spend some time there, and then I would guide instinctual movement from that for maybe five minutes and then come back to another yin pose.

So that was kind of part of it, but it was also the idea. Of our yoga practice, just all of it being influenced by yin in that softness, coolness, and emotional permissiveness. And the permission as if we needed it to do something different, if we felt like it, to shift to change, you know, outta that very linear, um, eye anger style, which I had been connected with as well.

Hop back to the yoga for menopause. And then a couple of [00:12:00] years into that, those teacher trainings, one of those teacher trainings, I got my own diagnosis of osteoporosis. In the yoga for menopause, there was always a module on osteoporosis. There has to be, , because it’s,, uh, as a condition of the bones that is accelerated.

Just towards the end of perimenopause and into menopause. So of course there was a module there, but when I got my own diagnosis, I was like, okay, something. I need to do something even more here. So then I started researching that in much more depth, and then I created yoga for bone health training, and it is specifically called yoga for bone health, not yoga for osteoporosis.

So that I don’t give people the false notion that just doing that is gonna improve their bone density or reverse osteoporosis. If I was being really genuine, I would call it yoga. With a bit of Pilates and resistance bands and neurological tools to help you stay strong so that you hopefully avoid a fracture if you do have osteoporosis.

But it’s not a very catchy [00:13:00] title. So that’s one my three. That’s, that’s not very good to easy to market that. Yeah. No, not really. No. So I’ve yoga for menopause, yoga for bone health. And then because of menopause brain changes and because of balance issues, I’ve also developed a thing called Neuro Soma Yoga, which is about neurological tools to improve brain function, improve mobility and pain, and improve stability and dynamic balance.

So that’s obviously they all really link up. So that’s where I’m at currently. So a couple of things to tease out there. You said that,, did you wink, did you wink to the fact that your initial training was, or, and practicing was quite I younger based. Did I catch that? Yes. So that first teacher I mentioned, she had been a trainer on the Iyengar trainings in Ireland, but she had left because she found it too rigid.

Mm-hmm. So, yeah, that was, that was, that was my first teacher training was, uh, well I guess we could call it Iyengar based or Iang influenced, yeah. Uh, because it wasn’t [00:14:00] an actual Iyengar program, ’cause that at the time they didn’t have 200 hour programs, but all the teachers teaching in it were Iyengar teachers.

So that was the, the lens that everything was through. , And then it, feel free to, to, , decline if you’d like. But who was the gal that you started that? Like who was the first in workshop that you took and that you started, um, hanging out with? If you remember?

I feel so bad. I feel so bad. I can’t remember her name. But she had come having trained with Sarah Powers as a teacher, so she trained to teach you in with Sarah Powers. Lovely. So one of the reasons that I thought that this is an important topic is that I feel like unless you’re gonna go take like a yoga therapy certification or something, there’s so few resources out there for teachers on what to do when your student says they have blank.

Yes. You know, and I run into this all the time because I have a specialty in back pain. And so it completely affects the way that I [00:15:00] teach all of my poses. , And I would imagine when you have a specialty with osteo, it’s gonna be the same way. Um, and I have a sort of a, I guess you could call it a more than a surface understanding of how I might modify a yin practice for people.

But I wouldn’t say it’s a deep dive either. So I’m looking forward to, um, picking this apart and learning what I can learn as well. , First maybe let’s just talk about like what actually is osteoporosis and osteopenia. , Layperson’s terms. Thank you. I was gonna say inaccessible terms, yes.

Yeah, sure. So we all reach , the greatest bone density we’re going to have somewhere between mid twenties and 30. Our bones actually reach peak density at different times for different bones., And there is a level of bone density that is considered the norm that most people would be expected to get to if they didn’t have certain risk factors.

After 30, we start to have a [00:16:00] reduction in bone density. So there is building of bone density that happens primarily on the way up to 30, and then there is more deconstruction than building. There’s always deconstruction. It’s a living tissue, just like our skin is always renewing. When we get to 30 that.

That clearing happens more efficiently, but the building doesn’t happen as efficiently. And that happens to people of all genders. So it’s not exclusive to people born with ovaries and with estrogen and progesterone, though, and I would have to say this in quite binary language, it, because that’s where the research is.

Women are two times more likely to develop osteoporosis than men. Mm-hmm. But everyone’s bones are reducing in density then, and I would, I tend to call it therefore a condition rather than a disease because everyone’s bones are moving that way. It’s like saying that a certain degree of wrinkly skin is a [00:17:00] disease and another degree of wrinkly skin is just normal.

So there’s a quite a broad spectrum for how bones. Change as we age then for, for cis females, I think is, is what I’ve gotta go with here. Just, uh, approaching menopause perhaps with this, the research is still young, but definitely after menopause there is an accelerated drop of bone density, so for about five to seven years.

Then it levels out if you had a brother and you were a female and you both had the same risk factors for bone density and you both got to 30 and you had similar scores. The only reason why the female would may have lower bone density after menopause would be menopause once you both get to 50. But then after that, you and your brother might deteriorate in density at the same rate.

So if someone does have [00:18:00] risk factors before 30. That acceleration at menopause is more serious than for someone who got two 30 with that perfect bone density score that they measure us against. So I have, for example, a lot of risk factors. Not all of them, but I have many that would explain why. Given I have a DI diagnosis or had a diagnosis at 52 of osteoporosis, I probably had osteopenia during perimenopause, but I didn’t get a scan then.

So I didn’t know that then because the level of osteoporosis that I have post menopause is significant enough that it couldn’t have just been that. So it’s not a disease of menopause, but menopause can exacerbate. The, um, reduction in bone density and just to, uh, last little bit about it os well not last little bit, you may want to ask me more.

The difference between osteopenia and osteoporosis can [00:19:00] either be significant or tiny because it’s only a point of a number. So we’re, we’re talking when we are looking at osteoporosis scores of minus 2.5, minus 2.6, minus 2.7 or minus 1.5. So you could have osteopenia and be minus two and then be minus 2.5 and have osteoporosis.

So it’s only a little tiny difference. So we have to take osteopenia as seriously in our classes as we do osteoporosis. So if somebody says to you of only osteopenia, when they come to your class and you’re asking them their health status, you’ve to be as safe as possible. You gotta think, okay, I’m just going to, , support that person in the same way as someone with osteoporosis.

Before we get into answering the question I asked you, you just you just sparked something else in me. I also think that generationally just based on fitness trends, ’cause I’ve seen a few of them, um, women were not, so I’m Gen X for anyone who , wants to know. That’s the [00:20:00] generation that gets forgotten about in between boomer and millennial.

And I would imagine you might be Gen X as well. I dunno what Gen X I’m 55. Yeah, you are? Yeah. Cool. It’s six four. Does that make cool? I’m not sure it makes you the coolest as far as I’m concerned. Um, yeah. Gen X is anyone born from 65 to 80 Oh cool. In that window. Yeah. , I know when I was a little girl and a young woman and a teen, uh, aerobics Right.

Was the thing. Right. , Most fitness was cardio heavy. Mm-hmm. And very little resistance training. If any at all. That was just the trend. Nobody wanted to be bulky, so very few women were lifting weights. Um, they were just wanting to be smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller.

And so there was this, you know, diet culture that went along with that and all the weird drinks and things. But also on top of that, people were mostly doing high intensity cardio. Mm-hmm. And you know, and then of course there’s diet culture as well, like you said. [00:21:00] So not getting what they need.

I am really heartened to see that a lot now. I was not that way. , I did do a little bit of aerobics and stuff, but also I’m an asthmatic kid, so like that wasn’t super fun., so when I was about 18, I started lifting. I stopped by the time I was about 23. , But I, and I lifted hard and heavy, like I was a competitive bodybuilder briefly.

I’m about to pick that habit back up again, not competing, but just lifting, , and I’ve been really, really heartened to see that a women of our generation tend to get into this perimenopause, menopause era, and they hear that this information and they go, well, then why am I on the StairMaster?

I need to be doing my deadlifts. , So that’s giving me some hope. But also that the generation like late millennial and maybe even Gen Z, there are so many more women now that do strength training. , So it gives me some hope, you know, that they can like, build that strength before that kind of area where things start to [00:22:00] decline.

It’s unfortunate, , that we were all just told to do our step aerobics and. The aerobics has a lot of pounding, so they might have really good hip density and not so great in the spine. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. On the wrist and all that. Their arms.

Yeah. Yeah. But it also depends on where you’re eating enough. When you were exercising, I mean, it would be more athletes, people who are extreme exercises, maybe high intensity, but people doing maybe their aerobics every day and, and competitive and all of that. That might be more at risk than someone who’s going to aerobics three times a week.

That’s, you know, that’s probably okay as long as you’re eating enough. Yeah. Well the unfortunate thing is that unfortunately, like the sister to that style of working out was often also,, calorie deprivation and, , not enough protein and all that stuff, yeah, it’s interesting.

Um, I didn’t fall into that trend only because, uh, and this was a long time ago. This is not a problem for me anymore, but I was naturally very thin. Mm-hmm. Um, to the point where un other people were uncomfortable with how thin I [00:23:00] was. Um, and, uh, it was just a phase. My whole, my dad, my mom, my whole genetic line goes through that phase.

Then later we beef up later in life,, and I got so sick of people being uncomfortable with how thin I was that I thought if I can’t put on some fat, maybe I could put on some muscle and then I won’t be so small and thin looking and people will quit. Bugging me about how skinny I am. Yeah.

So that was the whole reason I started weight training. I started doing lightweights just for that, and then I got fully addicted and went hardcore. Um, and that was a really good window for you. So that age that you did it at is such an important window for bone building. And that’s, for example, the time when a lot of people are, would be drinking a lot of alcohol, you know, drinking every weekend, . And I did for sure. I was, , definitely out partying and that’s a risk factor to be drinking during your teens smoking in general. But, particularly during your teens and early twenties, if you’re taking alcohol,, when you should be [00:24:00] building bone,, it’s gonna reduce that building.

So it’s, that’s unfortunately the key period to protect yourself from osteoporosis is when you don’t care about osteoporosis. Right. It’s kind of 15 to 28, , when you’re thinking about other stuff. Yeah, it’s interesting because actually while I was bed at bodybuilding, I didn’t do any of that. But then

once I stopped I did, I did. Yeah. I made up for lost time. I made up for lost time. Yeah. No, alcohol was not worth the calories when you were a competitive bodybuilder, that’s for sure. Mm-hmm. , The other thing I would imagine is that genetics, of course we all have different bone. Yes. Density genetically.

But also I would imagine that um, women that have like quite physical jobs might fare better than those who have more sedentary jobs. I’m just trying to think , you work out, they both work out the same amount, but then let’s just say the one woman is like a construction worker, , and the other is sitting at a desk.

That one’s definitely gonna have a lot more bone density from all of the [00:25:00] physical lifting and just working their body. , That’s something that might affect it too. So, and at the same time I was a hiker and I was a, an avid strong yoga practitioner, , strong postural yoga practitioner, and I still developed osteoporosis.

Yeah. But I didn’t, I did have a sedentary life outside of that. , So I think one of the most important things is to make sure, and, and you are not doing this at all, but to make sure that we don’t blame ourselves or blame other people for. And ending up with a condition, because sometimes shit happens.

Yep. We think in this world of wellness culture, do this, do these, all these things to empower yourself to a healthy future that we can, if we were doing it all, we could make sure it wouldn’t happen, but there’s no such thing. No. You will get the healthiest person ending. With cardiovascular disease, the person who runs and blah, blah, blah.

And then you’ll get a person who, , lays on the sofa most of the day and smokes 20 and lives to [00:26:00] 105 and just falls asleep and dies nice and peacefully, , so shit happens. And um, that’s one of the, one of the, if you’re talking about minding our yoga students in class who have osteoporosis at the beginning or.

Continuously, they may be blaming themselves for their diagnosis. Mm-hmm. So it’s not just supporting someone for physical safety, it’s supporting their emotional journey with it and making sure that the language with which we speak about lifestyle and protecting our health is not exclusive. It’s not saying, if you do this seven times a week, you will get this result when there might be someone who has arthritis, or there might be someone who has to work in a 10 hour job every day and doesn’t have time.

There might be someone who doesn’t have the money to go to the gym, et cetera, et cetera. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So there’s that in terms of lifestyle recommendations that we think what’s actually possible. And then there is, knowing that people will be in shock after a [00:27:00] diagnosis for quite a while, they’ll be scared to move.

Mm-hmm. They’ll be scared for their future. They’ll be having major conversations about medications that are being suggested that are notoriously difficult to tolerate, and they will be potentially doing a lot of regret, what if, why did I, all of that kind of stuff. So it is, I think one of the most, , the conditions about which there is most application in yoga.

For a yoga teacher to use yoga to help to assuage that person’s difficulties because it is so tied up in physicality. Mm-hmm. Nobody really going to yoga gets a diagnosis of sarcopenia, which is muscle wastage. And if we get a diagnose diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis, we’re like, well that’s an inflammatory condition.

I couldn’t have done anything about that. It’s also immune, but we’re coming with our skeleton [00:28:00] to our yoga. We’re coming to yoga with our, with the very bones of us compromised. And this is a practice that’s about putting your bones in different positions, you know, alongside other bits.

So I think that using our. The beauty of yoga, which to me is about helping people find the gentle middle ground rather than the polarities. And supporting that. Um, yeah, supporting people’s journey through that so that they can come to equilibrium in it would be, first of all, about the middle ground.

Yeah. Yeah, me too. Yes. And the older I get, the more so I am. Yeah. I’m sure younger me would’ve been like to the middle ground, right? Yeah. I was too hardcore. But now it’s like, oh yes, this is where the wisdom lives. So if you have someone that, let’s just start with, if you know your student has it, like maybe you, you work in small groups or they tell you before class, or you’re working one-on-one with [00:29:00] somebody and they say that they have osteopenia or osteoporosis, which we’re gonna treat the same way because one may just lead to the other.

Right. What would we want to in a yin practice? Not do or modify in order to not put them at risk. Yeah. Like obviously practicing yin yoga is not gonna increase their bone density. They need to go lift heavy things and work their, , work their strength for that. But I would imagine that the mental, emotional psychosomatic, um, nervous system benefits of yen could be super helpful for that person.

So we don’t wanna say to anyone with osteo, sorry, go, go lift some weights. This is not relevant for you anymore. Yeah, yeah. You can’t do this class anymore, so what can we do , to help them or to modify things so that they’re able to enjoy the practice without risking anything. So I think the first thing is if somebody does tell you, and I [00:30:00] hope you’ll ask me about how many people don’t know.

Mm-hmm. At some point I think you will. , If somebody does tell you, I think the first thing is what’s your reaction? How do you respond? Because they are gonna be afraid and they’re gonna even wonder should they be there. So I think the first thing is to say, ah, okay, thank you for letting me know, rather than, oh, really?

Oh my goodness, what’s your doctor said? Blah, blah. So not getting caught up in the drama of it, just, , if you have learned enough about it, say from , this podcast or from a training or from research or from your experience of working with other clients and students is. How you respond.

Okay, I hear you. Yep. And then you’re saying, uh, you know, during the class I often say, and if you have osteopenia, osteoporosis, just do this instead. Or, um, we’ll do the osteoporosis osteopenia. Say first, first, and then if you don’t have osteoporosis, go ahead and do this if you want to. Um, so letting them know that you will be saying that stuff and say, [00:31:00] just listen out for that please.

Because a note for teachers, no matter how often you deliver your osteoporosis, osteopenia friendly, um, suggestions, there’ll be people with osteoporosis ignoring you and they will just go ahead and you can’t fix it for everyone. You can’t make everybody adjust their practice. I would also say, before I talk about the specifics, that the way I work is from accepted guidelines that may change.

So the risk factors for fracture are established in the literature. They are medically supported by when they see fractures happen, but there are individuals who may never fracture with osteoporosis, and there are individuals who will fracture from [00:32:00] sneezing. So the spectrum of potential fracture is wildly different, and it is incredibly hard to predict.

Mm-hmm. So the best story I can tell you about fracture risk is that I have a, somebody close to me who has, , osteoporosis and she is similar sized body to me. So she’s quite small frame. She’s extremely fit. She’s a, a cliff climber. Like ropes and toes and you know, Matterhorn, you know, I don’t know what the Canadian or American version, but you know, proper rope climber for 30 years.

One of the top female amateur climbers in the country, she runs up a hill and down a hill, swims 200 strokes out in the cold Irish sea, swims back, runs up the hill and down the hill home more or less on a daily basis. And she has osteoporosis. So she’s very physically fit, [00:33:00] very muscular. And she fell off a cliff with osteoporosis.

10, 15 feet. I dunno, not the, not the height that you definitely die ’cause she didn’t die and she did not break a bone. Wow. And a. Teacher in my yoga for bone health training had a colleague who was also a teacher who had osteoporosis and fractured three vertebrae coming out of legs, up the wall pose. So we cannot know.

We do know certain things. We know that people with higher level of muscle are less likely to fracture even their vertebrae. We know that people with stronger leg muscles are less likely to fall, which would be the way we would fracture our hip. We know that higher levels of back strength directly, positively improve your outcome for [00:34:00] vertebral compression fracture.

We cannot tell any of that by just looking at our student going, oh, she looks fit, she looks fine, or She’s quite mobile. She’s done yoga for years. She’s healthy. It is called a silent disease because it doesn’t hurt. So that’s o of the reason why a lot of people don’t know whether they have it or not, is because it doesn’t hurt and they just, it’s not until they get a, screening, , an age-related screening about 65 in most countries, and they get a diagnosis then, or they have a fragility fracture, so they sustain a fracture and then they get a scan and they’re like, oh, yeah, well, that’s why that happened. So sorry for the precursor. Um, no, please. By all means.

So my point is that you Yeah, my, that , the protections that I put in place because of that wide variability of vulnerability are absolutely standard guidelines. If they change, I’ll change with them. [00:35:00] Currently, the standard guidelines are, of course, don’t fall. The three areas of our body most prone to fracture with osteoporosis are the hip, the wrist, and the upper spine and middle spine.

So the thoracic spine and where the thoracic . So the middle and upper back. That doesn’t mean you can’t have a compression fracture elsewhere. And that kind of fracture, a compression fracture is where the fronts of the vertebrae collapse because of pressure upon them. And that usually happens with flexion of the spine.

So in yin yoga, there’s gonna be no falling unless, I don’t know. Is there a standing yin of the invented a standing yin balance? I’m sure not five minute standing balance or a no five minute headstand yin. So you don’t need to worry about falling. And there some people are concerned that, , say something like, , square pose because it’s putting a lot of pressure on the hip joint.

Could that fracture somebody? I would say the likelihood of [00:36:00] that is. Extremely small., And I would say so small as, as not to be a thing, but we could never say never. , So the thing that a yin teacher needs to be concerned about is spinal flexion and spinal twisting. Especially with flexion.

So if there was one, one spinal position to avoid overall would be flexion and twisting at the same time, and then the next would be flexion on its own. . And for the teachers that don’t speak flexion extension, that’s forward folding, forward bending. Yeah. But not forward bending at the hip. So if you’re doing chair pose, that’s, I know that’s not yin, but if you’re doing chair pose, that’s a forward bend.

But the spine stays long, straight, neutral, whatever language makes sense to you. We have the natural curves, but if you do ana standing forward fold where you bend right over your straight legs or [00:37:00] Ana, so seated forward fold. Yeah. Caterpillar and yin. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That will create a rounded middle back in most people.

Yeah. However, people who are hypermobile might be able to do that entirely from the hip joints. But the likelihood is that once they bring their nose to their shins or their chest to their legs, that’s gonna be some flexion in the spine. Some people. We’ll still have space between the fronts of the vertebrae.

So if you could picture a spine, so I’m sure everybody can picture a rudimentary skeleton, you know, from Halloween or something. When you bend in the middle of the back, you can imagine the fronts of the vertebrae come closer together. Mm-hmm. And that’s called compression. And if that compression is severe enough, that can cause collapse of the bone or a fracture of the bone, which is basically like, uh, it is like a collapse and it is the fronts of the vertebrae [00:38:00] that are more prone than the sticky out bits at the back.

Okay. ’cause there are a softer kind of bone that’s a different. Kind of makeup. It can happen in the back, but it’s usually a vertebra. Compression fracture is like a wedge shaped fracture, so it’s not, the whole vertebra collapses 360 degrees. It’s usually the front of the main body of the vertebra that’s collapsing.

If you’re watching the video, of course I’m trying to do this with my hands, but if you’re only listening to the audio, you won’t be able to see that. So a different people’s seated forward fold caterpillar is going to be different in impact on their vertebrae. So I tend to work for the person in the room who’s most vulnerable, and I don’t know who that is.

Right. I will never know who that is. So I’m bringing everyone with osteopenia, osteoporosis to hinge at the hips and pause there. Then they can bring their hands down to rest by their thighs and they can [00:39:00] bow their head a little and maybe put a bolster under the head so that they’re not having to hold the weight of the head.

The deeper, or the more, I don’t wanna say more certain, the higher risk inflection is flexion under load. So it would be if your teacher comes around and pushes you into a position, or if you hold, which they should not be doing in yin, which they should not be doing. Absolutely. Or if you hold your toes in a, that wouldn’t happen in yin, although you never know if people are getting a bit gung-ho, hold your toes and pull.

Mm-hmm. That is pressure, that is adding external force. It’s the force of your arms, but it’s external to the spine and the muscles that can bring the spine into that position. Likewise with twists. No levering, no binding. I know there’s no binding in yin. That can be that, uh, I can’t remember the name of that one way curl under, in a little twist.

It’s not really levering, but there is weight of the body onto that, um, [00:40:00] onto the spine that way. Or also in daily life, you bend forward with the rounded spine. You pick up your dog or your grandchild or your a box of groceries or whatever. I want to say before we go further, that most vertebral compression fractures happen outside of exercise classes, full stop.

Mm-hmm. That when we’re moving in an exercise class, we’re likely to be more careful. And injuries from yoga are pretty small in number and or however. There was a very small study done. I think it was like teeny tiny, like eight, 12 people. And they had osteoporosis before starting yoga. And they signed up to the yoga for this, osteoporosis study and within a year all of them had acquired a vertebral compression fracture.

Now the trouble is, I know [00:41:00] you’re looking shocked, but when you’re quoting a study, you’ve gotta be clear. We don’t know if the yoga poses cause the vertebral compression fracture. They could have sustained it outside, even if they did sustain it during the yoga practice. We often won’t know for days, weeks, months, even that we’ve had a vertebral compression fracture.

So some of them will be immediately painful. Sometimes you don’t know you’ve had one until you go and get your height measured and you’ve shrunk and they do you a dexa and oh my gosh, you have three fractures. So there are external ways you can kind of guess like someone’s shrinking or there are getting much more rounded upper back, but.

The likelihood of you being in teaching a class and hearing a crunch is pretty small. So all you need to do, well first you need to know that there are never any [00:42:00] guarantees. You cannot guarantee that your osteoporotic student or osteopenic student is going to get a fracture ever in their whole life.

You also can’t guarantee that they won’t get one, and you can’t guarantee that it won’t happen. In practice, if someone can fracture vertebrae, coming out of legs, up the wall, anything can happen. So again, going back to this thing of we use the guidelines to avoid flexion, especially flexion under load. So that means.

As I said, with Caterpillar, tilted the hips, put a bolster under the head, vertical bolster, just it’s really nice feeling to rest your forward. Right. Uh, with twists to only twist as far as you can twist without pushing with your hands. I would say something like Twisted Deer, I wouldn’t bring someone to the floor and twisted deer.

I would always prop that on a bolster and just ask them to come slightly back out of it. Mm-hmm. So they’re still twisted. We need to have all these ranges of [00:43:00] motion. We need to not stop moving. We need to, live life and we will twist in life. So can’t avoid everything, but we aim to stick as close as we can.

Guidelines while still having a lovely time because I have a focus in my personal business and my niche is back care. There’s a lot of, there’s a lot of problems with a lot of different back conditions with folks doing for doing flexion and, , and doing it in a way where their back is rounded. So I very rarely even teach those poses.

I tend to flip people onto their back and get them to legs up the wall or grab a strap, um, or, you know, if they’re doing butterfly, maybe, you know, hold their feet or loop their feet with a strap reclined. Mm-hmm. Because their spine is then supported with the floor. So it feels to me like it’s a little bit more spine [00:44:00] neutral and more legs.

It’s that way. Yes. So that’s something that I, I tend to do in general. Um, the odd time I will get people to fold forward, but I always coach it as like, you know, coming from the hips. Uh, for the same reason, just because I, in my particular population and the people I work with, I have a lot of people with back stuff.

Um, yep. And I then to favor lying down. Um, you know, to me, if the point of a pose is let’s get into the hamstring, well, they don’t need to fold forward over their leg to do that. They can get their hamstring by laying on their back. The other question I had about that is I was always taught in my yoga therapy training that we don’t want people with osteo hanging their heads unsupported.

Um, that that weight of the head can be a bit much. Um, so I’m wondering your thoughts on that. , I usually, again, like you said, if it is a posture where the head might be coming down, I, I offer support options. Like, put a block here, put a bolster here. [00:45:00] Um, or I just ask them to slightly restrain and draw their chin in a little so that they’re not just head dead weight forward.

Uh, same thing if we do anything with the neck, which I do in yin, um, you know, it might be fine for some people to kinda do one side and then come to the middle for a few breasts and do the other side, but that’s probably not gonna be. As wise, you know, for somebody who does have something going on maybe with the vertebrae in their neck.

And I usually will say, if you have osteo postage osteopenia, instead of dropping your chin to come to the center, just keep your chin, you know, parallel to the floor as you come to the center. And then would you, the other side, I also don’t do a lot of like ear to shoulder cue. It’s more bring your head back in space a little and sweep your chin over as opposed to like, I’m really mindful of like the hanging of the head in any position.

Um, also for people who have neck stuff as well. , So I’m wondering your thoughts on that, on like, how do we support their head. Yeah, so the neck [00:46:00] and the lumbar spine, part of the reason that they’re not as prone to fracture is because they’re naturally in a lower doses of forward curve, a hollow. So the thoracic spine, the upper spine is in a kyphosis, which is a rounding of the, , flexion of the spine anyway, so the fronts of the vertebrae are closer together for, from the get go.

So taking the head forward does, of course, bring the fronts of the neck vertebrae together closer, but it would be harder to. Uh, flex the neck so far that you would in incur that kind of pressure. But I would, you know, coming outside of Vienna would not be teaching shoulder stand, for example, I wouldn’t be teaching plow pose and with bridge pose I would be asking people to do exactly what you are talking about, which is just to type, keep the chin slightly away from the chest rather than mm-hmm.

The instruction I was taught, which is to pull the chin to the te chest. My sense of the hanging of the head is more the pressure and [00:47:00] weight that it puts on the rest of the spine. Mm-hmm. That I don’t want to happen. So I would, that’s why I was suggesting one of the reasons, ’cause it’s pleasant to propping the head in, in that seated forward fold in Caterpillar if they’re not going down to the legs, which they shouldn’t be.

I feel, uh, and again, agreed, that’s kind of, you know, there will be people. Getting a bit miffed about that idea. We shouldn’t be flexing, but we’re just erring on the side of caution. Um, so I would support the head. Yeah. And, and actually even, you know, dramatic turns of the head can often be quite, um, exacerbating of neck conditions and instead mm-hmm.

A little bit of neck flossing. Like turn the head a little then do a little nodding your head yes and shaking it. No, just at that slight turn is actually much more, potentially much more soothing for the neck anyway. So I think we get a bit crazy about neck movements and actually so much so we use our necks really freely in the world anyway.

We’re always gonna look for the bird in the sky and the creature on the ground shoulder. They’re checking when you’re [00:48:00] driving and, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It gets enough. It’s. Yeah, it’s like we don’t need to work on that. We also don’t really need to work on flexion. ’cause we do that all day too. The thing we don’t do so much is extension.

Yeah. That , you’re preaching to the choir here. I did do a whole episode on Back Health, my friends, which I will take in the show notes. Um, and that is exactly my argument in that as well, is that in our daily lives we are always inflection, right? Yeah. We’re bending over to the dishes, we’re bending over to brush our teeth, we’re bending over to pick stuff up off the ground.

We’re raking, we’re vacuuming, we’re constantly bending forward. And so, ’cause I will get that question sometimes in my training, so I do teach them of course, all of the forward folds, but that when we do our practice, I tend to favor a backend or even a lateral pose or other things because I just feel like.

You know, and if I’m looking for hamstring, I’m gonna just try to focus really directly on hamstring by laying them on their back and giving them a strap as [00:49:00] opposed to thinking I need to have the whole spine rounding forward to get the back of their leg. Um mm-hmm. Yeah. You know, it’s, which is more destabilizing for the sacroiliac joint.

Yeah. ’cause you’re pulling the spine one way, the top, the sacrum one way and the pelvis the other way, which can be destabilizing. Yeah. And the other thing I wanted to mention, you said we don’t do shoulder stand and like we don’t do it as far as upright feet in the air, but there is snail poses. Oh yeah.

Plow pose. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I wouldn’t be doing that. So I, again, don’t ever, don’t ever teach snail in my classes for many reasons.

One, because of my back, neck, obsession. , But also there are very few people in my opinion that have. The, , ideal bone structure for a pose like that to be done safely. And you know, of course in my iang training, we would’ve been putting a bunch of blankets under people and like all of that. And I’m just like, you know, if somebody can’t do snail, there’s other things to give them.

Like, [00:50:00] this is where as teachers we need to, and an episode will have come up not long ago about this, focus on what is the function of this shape? Like, what is the point? Because if we understand why we’re doing it, then if someone can’t do it, it’s really easy to go, oh, okay, let’s try this instead. But if we don’t understand the why of what, why we’re putting that pose in, like, what is the point of it?

What’s the function? That’s when as teachers, we get overwhelmed, confused. We get the deer in headlights. You know, someone says an injury and we’re like, oh, I don’t know what to do. It’s, it’s because we’re, we don’t have a strong understanding of the, the function of the pose. We understand the function, then we can, like you said, take that moment of being calm and grounded.

When someone comes to you and says, I have osteoporosis, I have osteopenia. And say, thank you for letting me know. And now the wheels can be going in your mind and go, okay, so what else can you do? Yeah. You’re like the swan, right? Your feet are pedaling really, or your brains peeling really fast and you’re looking Yeah.

Your mind, your mind is going, okay. [00:51:00] Okay. And I would say. I think that sometimes as teachers we get these ideas that these alternatives in yin are air quotes, modifications.

Mm-hmm. And I really don’t like that word. I’m trying to stop using it. They’re variations and they’re not modifications because we’re just giving people another option. Yeah. And again, so in terms, yeah. Start in terms of looking after people with low bone density, that is a huge deal. And the way that I teach is that I teach the osteoporosis friendly first.

Yes. And then I say, if you don’t have osteoporosis and you fancy, you know, bringing your head to your knees, go ahead. I’m gonna stay here. I feel it’s quite functional and I’m okay. So, because if you, it’s the same with in a half a class rather than a yen class. Obviously if I’m doing balancing poses, I’ll bring everyone to the wall first.

And then I say, use the wall if you want to or don’t use it if you don’t. But if you just say to a room full of people standing in the middle, if you need the wall, go to the wall. Who’s gonna want to do that? Nobody. [00:52:00] A, they can’t, can’t be bothered. And B, they feel exposed. So I think everybody there and then they don’t have to use it.

So that is a really important piece of the, the holistic care that I think yoga teachers can be brilliant at giving, but it does mean that our teaching is not relaxing. We’re not sitting there going, I’m having a lovely time being a yoga teacher. We’re working hard, we’re thinking hard. Mm-hmm. We’re considering postures, we’re considering people’s sensibilities, their hip replacements, our conditions, we rock, you know, and we’re doing this.

Yes. Trying to make them with this calm atmosphere. It’s quite amazing. I just wanted to, um, jump in and say what you were talking about. What’s the function of the pose? This is when people are asking me on my yoga for bone health training, how do I. You know, what do I do instead of child’s pose? And I’m like, well for starters, some people will do child’s pose really safely.

’cause they’ll have the hip and knee flexibility that their spine is not particularly rounded. But I would maybe lift the head, put a bolster under the head. Mm-hmm. Um, or you can do what I [00:53:00] call the slump, which is that you have your bolster long and you have the front body leaning, lying out over the bolster knees on the floor, head on a block, really flat spine.

Nice. But what I say to them when they’re thinking about any posture that they want to do, not just what’s the function, as in what have I been told in my training, but why am I putting this posture in now? Exactly. So is it, let’s say it’s Charles pose, are you doing it ’cause you wanna stretch their bum?

Are you doing it ’cause you want them to have a timeout so that um, they get a breather? Are you doing it ’cause you want them to not look at you while you look at your notes feverishly ’cause you’ve forgotten what to do. Are you doing it because you want to give them a moment of crawling inside? And whatever it is that you want, how else can I give that to them?

So how can I stretch their glutes, lie on their back, happy baby, hug their knees to their chest If I want them to have an inward moment lie on their side and hug the bolster and feel it physically close to them if I want them just to stop [00:54:00] looking at me so I can look at my notes. Feverously, have them lie prone.

There, there’s so many reasons why we put particular postures, in different places and it’s not just the known in air quotes function of, of the pose because of course that’s all up for grabs anyways. You know, Nick, because the function of the pose that’s in the literature is not necessarily how an individual’s body receives it.

That’s, they may be a generic function. Yes. Well I can say we could have like an intention, for example, for someone to feel a pose in this area, but that doesn’t mean that person’s gonna feel that in that area. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. The other thing I wanted to just tease out that you just talked about was,

starting with the sort of softest version first, I would say that is fantastic for osteoporosis, o osteopenia, but I would just say, dear teacher, what if we just got used to doing that period, the end, full stop all the time. Mm-hmm. What if we started teaching the most accessible version first and then say, if you don’t feel this, or [00:55:00] if this is, you know, then you might try, rather than teaching the air quotes full post and then backtracking so that anyone that can’t do the one that’s on the cover of the yoga magazine now feels like, oh, yoga not for me.

I’m not good at yoga. You know? Um, so I, I am always trying to find, um. The softest version first, and you will have to repeatedly encourage your students that it is okay to back off. Yeah. Yeah. Because, and the best way to do that is when you’ve taught all the possible shapes, you settle in the one that the person, you know needs, the gentlest one is needs to settle in.

So as long as Nick and Nev are in the pose that the one person who needs the gentler version or the less impactful or the less bonkers version, if we settle there, they’ll know that that’s valid. Because if we do, as you’re saying, you know, start with the full pose and then we work back, then all the other shapes are [00:56:00] considered as just a, an effort to get to, to Z.

Whereas actually there’s value in all the other shapes on their own. Mm-hmm. They don’t need to be a progression to Z you know, to the people I pose, I always, there are times I don’t even introduce the full post because I can look out at my people and I can see no one here needs this. Like, nobody needs to do this version in order to feel this in the intended area.

So why would I trout it out as some sort of, you know, um, you are very right about that. I often call it, um, monkey see, monkey do with students. So whatever you are doing upfront, unconsciously, they will try to do unless they are very self-aware and very experienced. Um, so much so that I noticed, um, twice I’ve noticed this and I’ve been like, huh, I really gotta watch what I do.

There was one time I was teaching a class and I paused what, what, what I was doing to pull my shirt down and three people in the room pulled their shirt down. Yes. [00:57:00] Oh my God, Jess. It happened just the other day. I was saying, okay, you know, bring your head back in space to where it used to live before you had a cell phone and then sweep your chin diagonally towards your, and I did this with my hand.

You can’t see it. Sorry. Those of you on the pod, I have my fingers on my chin and I’m sort of using my fingers to directionally guide my chin over towards my shoulder and at least half the room. Yes. Put their fingers on their chin as they, so people are mimicking you. Yeah. The other thing I would say is, as the teacher, I, once you’ve demoed the pose, you don’t need to be in it.

Like get out. No. Be, be present. You know, it’s not your practice time. Yeah. See if people around the room might need a prop or you, maybe there’s something else you could call out because you see somebody’s not comfortable or you know, or somebody’s unclear or, you know, um, your job isn’t to lay around in your yin shapes and practice.

Um, while you’re doing it. Uh, your job is to be, to show. For those visual learners and then to get out and be present and available. [00:58:00] So I wanna summarize a little bit before we jump into, um, sort of, kind of your offerings and also I have some, uh, closing questions that I like to do. Mm-hmm. But I wanna just summarize a little bit.

Okay. We, first of all, and you let me know what I forget, we may not know if somebody has osteopenia or osteoporosis in our class. So my question, and they may not know and they may not know, um, and even if they do know, they may not tell you. So my thought is, if you are teaching a lot of a certain demographic, would it not just be safe to assume, like, let’s just say you happen to teach a lot of women that are in kind of perimenopause, menopause age.

Like why not just modify from the get. So that one statistic out of the USA, and it is echoed everywhere, but just by differences of 2%, say 54% of women over [00:59:00] 50 have osteopenia. Wow. That is over half of women over 50 have osteopenia and the higher number per of vertebral compression fractures are incurred in people with osteopenia, not osteoporosis.

Now, interesting, just before you freak out, it’s not that people with osteopenia are more prone, it’s just that there are more of them. So it’s the numbers are greater. It’s not that there’s greater likelihood, but the point is. You can fracture a vertebra with osteopenia and 50 plus percent of your students are gonna be osteopenic who are over 50, who are female.

Uh, women are the highest demographic of yoga practitioners worldwide. Mm-hmm. And women over 40 are the highest demographic by mm-hmm. Gender and age. So if you Yeah, you can, you can assume also a lot of, uh, yoga practitioners are in small bodies and they are, we are more people in small bodies are more prone.

A lot of [01:00:00] yoga practitioners in the west are Caucasian and Caucasian people are more prone. So Yeah. And also people unfortunately, , who get drawn to yoga are often prone to chasing quote unquote healthy lifestyle, which often is synonymous with calorie deficit and therefore periods of not eating enough food.

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Which is also a risk factor. So I would say, unless you only teach the Vinyasa bunnies or , the yoga Barbies, like the very young, very flexible, very able bodied folks that are just there for the jam and playlist and to get their sweat on and da da da da.

If that is not your exclusive clientele, maybe we should just start adding these things in now. And my apologies, cat playing with microphone. You never know what’s gonna happen. No, no. , I’m just gonna hold this in place for a moment till she loses interest.

This is real life, y’all on the podcast? Yeah. , So you know, why not start introducing [01:01:00] these concepts in. If you teach, which odds are, like you said, you probably, if you’re teaching, you probably teach mostly women. That demographic is quite common. And even if you do have younger folks, younger women in the room, like why not prepare them anyway to know, to have this knowledge?

Most of my generation didn’t know how important strength building would be as we age. Mm-hmm. But you know, if I had heard that, you know, I don’t know because I might have just thought I was invincible, but part of me wonders if I had heard this more when I was still lifting, maybe I wouldn’t have stopped, you know, imagine if I had kept going maybe I would’ve kept lifting, this whole time if I had known that.

, This could be something that could really help me, , as I got older now, I don’t know for sure, , I’m a bitt rebellious. No, we don’t. I thought I was invincible. I might not have listened to my own advice, but, you know, it would be good to have the knowledge mm-hmm. Rather than in my generation where we [01:02:00] just didn’t, we didn’t know any of this stuff.

Like nobody talked about it. That’s one thing I’m so grateful for, , at this time in the world, is that so many more women are actually talking about these things. Whereas in my mother’s generation and my grandmother’s generation, menopause wasn’t being talked about, , osteopenia, osteoporosis, how you would eat, how you could move your body.

None of this was even addressed. , No. And so I’m so grateful that, mostly Gen X women that are bringing this to the forefront because we’re all in that age group now, and we’re, and, and we’re not content maybe to sit quietly like our mothers or grandmothers were, and.

And not talk about these things, we’re more likely to say, Hey, 51% of the population, y’all listen up. We got some stuff to say. So that I’m very grateful for. , So why not my, my, I wanna summarize, why not treat everybody accessibly and with the soft dispersions so what I do with back hair is I just assume everyone’s got something going on with their back.

And I [01:03:00] teach to that as opposed to saying, oh, so and so do this. Oh, so and so do that. Oh, so and so do this. So if you work with this particular group of women, this population, why not just teach as if. This might be I, the, I mean the, you know, the downside would be that people get more, uh, fearful if you’re talking about it a lot.

But actually I have to say that an osteoporosis friendly practice is very functional. It’s functional yoga. And also when it comes to outside of yin haha, it’s also very joint protective in terms of using strength to take yourself into postures instead of collapsing and using gravity to take yourself into postures, which is really important for cartilage, which is also thinning as we get older, just like bones are.

And so, yeah, I think , it’s a more sustainable, and functional practice often. Yeah. Yeah. Any, other little nuggets that you really wanna talk about that we haven’t said yet before we [01:04:00] do some questions and talk about your office? I don’t think so. I’ll probably remember them after always. Right.

So like six other podcasts. Maybe tomorrow we’ll just meet again. I can’t think of anything right now. , That’s why you have a whole course on it. ,, I have some little questions that I like to ask my guests at the end. Some of them are light, some of them are a little more soulful.

Mm-hmm. The idea is that they’re rapid fire, but that very rarely actually happens. That people have a rapid fire answers. So, you know, more yoga, we think a lot. Yes, exactly. Coffee or tea? Tea. Favorite ice cream flavor? Pistachio. Ooh. One thing people often get wrong about me. Oh, that I’m unapproachable. But that was maybe years ago.

I just think I was a bit, yeah. Defensive. But I think it’s probably when I’m shy or something. Yeah, I have gotten that one as well. I’m intimidating [01:05:00] apparently., Do you have a pop culture vice, like a show you like to binge or a book series that you just can’t put down or, , no, I, I don’t think I do.

I always look for something a bit quirky and interesting, although maybe like crime stuff sometimes. And then I’m like, I regret it ’cause I have nightmares.

Well, true crime is definitely one of those pop culture vices. Okay, cool. Then yeah. Got you on that one. But I really regret it whenever I start watching it. I know it’s kinda like the thing you can’t not watch, and then you’re like, why am I watching this? Yeah. And then you’re, I can’t, yeah. Yeah. Uh, when I’m not practicing yoga, I am

walking my dog or doing, sitting around waiting for my kids to need a lift. Good times. Good times. Um, one weird fact about you, , I, it might not be weird, but I’m severely hearing impaired, , which has developed over the last five [01:06:00] years. I have like my Bluetooth from my computer into my hearing aids now.

Wow. Okay. That’s affecting my balance, which is good. Yes. And, but I wow. How far technology has come. Hey. Hmm. To be able to have your Bluetooth in your hearing aid, that’s impressive, bonkers. . What the world needs now is.

Oh, I know. I’m just gonna say pick one. I know that’s like hard to do, but it needs people to stop forgetting their humanity. Mm, yes. Yes. One thing I wish people knew about yin yoga,

that it doesn’t have to look pretty. Yes. Love it. I’m here for that. Mine rarely does. , , is there anything else I forgot to ask you that you would like to add? Uh, no. I’m happy as a. Full as a tech, as my sister would say.

I [01:07:00] am. I’m replete. I’m satiated. Awesome. By this conversation. Me too. This is your opportunity to just let folks know, ’cause you have courses and books on these things. So I do a brief overview of what you got and then where people can find you as far as Yeah, so your website and the socials and all that stuff.

Hmm. My website, my socials are all the same name instinct, instinct with a y from the days when we yin teachers. Were anything that began with a vowel, we put a y in front of it. So instinct yoga is my, .

Social media mostly on Instagram and Facebook. And , my website is that as well, instinct yoga.com. My book is Yoga for Menopause and Beyond, which is primarily for teachers, but some practitioners who are regular practitioners have been enjoying it. And it does have a section on brain health and it does have a section on bone health, but.

Terribly comprehensive as much as obviously the trainings. I run a 40 hour training in Yoga for Menopause, a 15 hour CPD in what I’m now calling Yoga [01:08:00] Plus for bone health because it involves Pilates elements, resistance bands, , applied neuroanatomy, uh, for stability and dynamic balance and all of that.

And I run a co-run a training called Neuro Soma Yoga, which is for, , reducing or doing our best to stimulate the brain, which is a known, uh, factor for helping to reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s dementia, and also has tools in there for mobility and chronic pain and balance as well. And I teach online all my trainings are online.

People have joined from Canada, America, Australia, Europe, et cetera. , And I also have one class online, which is Yoga Plus for Bone Health, which is a 50 minute class on. Thursday afternoon’s Irish, which is, , like you’re in Vancouver, so you’re eight hours behind me. So it’d be early morning for Pacific and normal morning for Eastern.

Yeah. Lovely. Yeah. That actually works well for lots of schedules. Yeah. Yeah. And [01:09:00] also people can get the recording. It’s really fun on bonkers. It’s very physical. , It’s bands and using your bolster and swinging your bolster around to destabilize you while you try and balance and things.

, It’s sounds fun. Great fun and yeah, it is. It’s really fun. Yeah. Thanks. Sounds like a party. Oh, I remember what, I didn’t, what you didn’t ask. . But, , whether yin yoga can, , increase bone density.

Let’s go for it. So there’s a rumor Dear Ies, going around. There are people saying that yin yoga can increase your bone density. Take it away, my friend. Take it away. Well, for start, given that even normal yoga can’t, or, Asana can’t, the likelihood that yen can, so there was some conversation.

I saw a quote from a book by a well-known yoga teacher, and somebody who trained with that well-known yoga teacher also told me they were trained on the course that phis in particular could increase bone density of the spine. , And there was , a claim that basically the compression that happens of the [01:10:00] vertebrae in yin yoga poses like nothing we get in any other yoga.

And that it is, that compression puts pressure on the bones and that’s what creates bone turnover. And this is not the case. So it is muscular activation that creates bone turnover or impact, bang, bang, bang. Um, we have known for about 30 years that what. Bones need for stimulus is not, is repeated but varied,, quite speedy or dynamic impact that the longer you maintain a contraction of muscle does not increase bone density.

More wolf law tells us 30 seconds of muscular activation is what can create a, , encouragement of the bones to, , to turn over. And that if we, , static loading isn’t what builds bone adaptation, and we [01:11:00] only need that short duration to initiate that response. And the longer the duration has a diminishing effect, so we get less bone adaptation, the longer we hold a position or a muscular contraction.

And what’s really important is that bones get. Bored really quickly. So bones get bored. I love it. Boards get bored. They once, even if , a sphinx pose increased your bone density for a week, very quickly your bones would be like, that’s doing nothing for me anymore. So what we know about bone density for decades is that we need constant, what’s the word?

We need progressive intensity, so it needs to keep amping up. Same with muscles. And we need variety. So the likelihood of yin yoga or any other kind of yoga doing that, especially repeated same, same, same practices is minute. Unless someone’s coming from sedentary and I was giving out about this on my socials, but also [01:12:00] talking to a colleague about it, and we were, she was saying, so if sitting in a forward fold in yin was to increase bone density, then so would sitting slumped on the sofa.

If sphinx increase bone density, so would lying on the beach on your tummy reading your book. And we know that none of those things increase bone density. So what would make yoga so magic that it would do that? Nothing. Um, there is benefits to yoga, like stress can increase bone density loss, but there is no indication that nervous system regulation can reverse osteoporosis because reducing risk is not the same as increasing bone, right?

But there is absolute value. Beauty in helping people who are worried relax in helping them who, people who have muscular tension because they’re trying to hold themselves safe or they think it’s [01:13:00] safe to actually let that physical tension outta the body and to deal with stress, to reduce the likelihood of further breakdown.

Those are the huge values , and of course, being in community with people who know what condition you have is also really very supportive. So yeah, it’s an important thing and I would think, and it also, guiding people to befriend their body instead of be afraid of it. Yeah. And to basically go, okay, yes, I have this, I need to accept and now how do I support myself that might be medical.

Um, and for many people at some point it is, but also strength training or whatever. Yeah. Dietary and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. Beautiful. Mm, no, I think we’ll leave this right here. We won’t edit it back to the beginning because it was the one thing I forgot to ask you about. So there we go

I think that’s for those of you on YouTube, this has been a very, um, dynamic video. It has, between the two of us there’s been microphone issues,, cats everywhere. Cats issues. It’s, yeah, it’s been a [01:14:00] thing. , Okay, so we know where we can find you. Of course. I’m gonna put the link in the show notes to your website and your Instagram and your book and all that stuff.

Thank you so much for coming on. I would like to just say and invite that we will do this again at some point. Mm-hmm. Uh, on menopause perhaps, and how we may, I would love to, may or may not use a yin practice to support women who are going through all of the things. Of the things, all of the things I thought,, naively before I hit menopause, I thought it was just people had some hot flashes.

But , no, just a just tiny little thing. Um, so yeah, we’ll do that again in the future and thank you so much for sharing your expertise with us and um, for those of you that are watching or listening, until I see you again, bye for now. Thank you so much, Nick. Bye everybody.

For those of you who stick around until the very end, thank you. [01:15:00] If you love this podcast, I’d be grateful if you gave it a review. It really helps other yin yoga lovers find it. If you’ve already given a review, would you consider sharing a screenshot in your Instagram stories? And don’t forget to tag me at Nick Danu Yoga or at Y Yoga podcast so I can share the love.

Before I sign off, some gratitude first for you, the listener, for spending time with me today. Big gratitude and deep reverence for my teacher, Paul Grille. Thank you to Fred Westra for the Hang Drunk Samples. You can hear more of his music by clicking the link in the show notes. A big thank you to my beloved for mixing the intro and outro tracks, and until we meet again.

May you be well, may you be content. May you be at peace. May you be [01:16:00] free.