The practice of yoga dates back over 5,000 years to northern India, but it has enjoyed newfound popularity in the west over the past couple of decades. While some people are adherents to the spiritual tenets of yoga, many do it for exercise and body health.
However, ancient yoga poses were not developed with the modern physiological needs and challenges our bodies face.
"When someone was doing a sun salutation say even a hundred years ago, the body that they brought to the sun salutation was very different than the bodies that we live in right now," yoga instructor Kyle Ferguson told Vermont Edition Thursday.
Ferguson, who runs the Burlington-based Second Circle Yoga, has been working on ways to better align the practice with modern challenges human bodies face — things like prolonged screen time and long commutes.
"The things that we were evolved to do are walk, run, climb, swim, throw and squat, right?" Ferguson said. "And so approaching the class not simply from, like, 'oh you might be tight in the chest because of a cell phone,' but 'let's try to orient your body back in line with its sort of evolutionary design.'"
"When someone was doing a sun salutation say even a hundred years ago, the body that they brought to the sun salutation was very different than the bodies that we live in right now." — Kyle Ferguson, Second Circle Yoga
But is it really yoga's responsibility to change, just because modern humans' lives have become more technology-laden?
"It's not necessarily that the poses themselves don't work," Ferguson said. "It's that we have to make sure that we are approaching the practice from a place where we really understand the challenges that people come into the room with."
Ferguson said while yoga itself is a practice dating back thousands of years, the yoga commonly done in the U.S. is already a variation on that — so yoga isn't new to adapting and evolving.
"If I can take ... those movements and reform them and cue them in a way that meets the problems that we have now, then that's much better than just sort of leaving the current day problems out and just doing it the way that it's always been done," Ferguson said.
"If I can take ... those movements and reform them and cue them in a way that meets the problems that we have now, then that's much better than just sort of leaving the current day problems out and just doing it the way that it's always been done."
So what might this approach actually look like in a practice?
Ferguson provided the example of a person sitting in a chair for a long time, which can put their glutes to sleep and even affect movement later on. There are different ways then, Ferguson continued, that a yoga instructor can approach certain positions — for example, a lunge — in order to take that person's time spent sitting into account.
"I can either cue that [lunge] to be, you know, 'how tall can I get?' Or 'can I get that nice sweeping back bend?' Or 'can I lengthen my leg back?'" Ferguson said. "Or, can I cue that to be 'let's try to first wake up and then strengthen your glutes and your core muscles?'"
Ferguson said that choice is ultimately up to the instructor, but the goal whenever possible is to take people's "basic needs in terms of the physical practice" into account.
Broadcast live on Thursday, August 8, 2019 at noon; rebroadcast at 7 p.m.
