Rob Walker
The New Yoga: From Cults and Dogma to Science and Sanity! Where did most of your yoga moves come from? A guru from the annals of Indian folklore? Or are those "thousand-year-old poses" really a twentieth century invention hidden behind a veil of tall stories? Were they based on movement science–or cooked-up creations with a big pinch of folklore? The New Yoga takes a brutally hard look at these critical questions. It proposes six radical steps to strip away the nonsense and provide common-sense yoga for the future, based on movement science: • Stretching is not the primary goal. Really? Yes. More important are ten other benefits including two new buzzwords, proprioception and interoception.• Mobility tops flexibility. Focus on better control over a safe range of movement. • "Practice and all is coming." Not so! Despite the famous guru's oft quotes words, we may never achieve certain poses. Trying will lead to injury.• Avoid repetitive stress and encourage brain health with frequent and varying moves on and off the mat.• 'Pretzels' pushing extreme flexibility lead to injury and misplaced envy. Hyper-mobility is not something to envy; it's sad.• Don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Maintain what works but question all for good evidence.Rob Walker quotes a wide range of experts and speaks from his own 20-year yoga teacher-training experience. He dumps accepted dogma behind much current teaching and brings a fresh sparkle of evidence and science to twenty-first century yoga.
