Mula bandha, boat pose, and all of my yoga pet peeves.

Step into the void with me.

As I begin to write, the first thought in my mind is Am I really doing this?

I am. Welcome to my rant on yoga as it intersects with the pelvic floor — and why it’s always good to be a wise consumer of any movement you enjoy.

I began practicing yoga when I was 16. A wildly un-athletic child, I hated gym class and anything to do with running (this is still true). I started going to a studio in my junior year of high school because I was able to get out of a whole quarter of phys. ed. that way, which felt like an excellent deal.

That experiment was the beginning of a 15 year love affair that turned professional, and to many extents, still is. I began practicing multiple times a week, then daily, at 6 am, obviously. At 23, I took my first teacher certification, and would go on to do both specialty and advanced certs.

For me, the practice of yoga was both spiritual and entangled in early aughts diet culture of Lululemon perfected yoga gear — but that’s a different essay. The point is, it was serious for me.

Being a yoga teacher hugely influenced my decision to go back to graduate school and become a movement professional. I loved anatomy. I loved working with bodies, and specifically, I was interested in chronic pain conditions of lower back and hip pain. I was fascinated with the nervous system and the concept of a relaxation response.

My doctoral thesis is entitled “Yoga for Chronic Pelvic Pain Management”. So yeah, I was a big fucking fan. Throughout graduate school and beyond, I taught anatomy for yoga teacher trainings (and still do). In many ways, yoga feels like my first movement lexicon, and a home base for how I relate to exercise.

But if I’m being honest, I don’t go to classes anymore. Most of the time, I don’t enjoy them. I have a lot of pet peeves. And while I still think that there is huge value in the practice, I also think it’s worth having a discussion around trusting the authority of fitness professionals when it comes to pelvic health.

Let’s do this.

Here’s the tl;dr;

• There is no such thing as bad or off-limits movement. I will die on this hill. If you love yoga, keep going for the love of all that is good and holy!

• Do not accept specific advice on what to do with your pelvic floor unless the person giving a recommendation has done an in-depth individual assessment.

• Yoga is fantastic for integrating diverse movement patterns in a sitting world, but it is generally not a replacement for strength training.

• Try to stop giving fucks about what other people are doing next to you.

Related reading:

• Deadlifts, lunges, and squats, oh my! How strength training is essential to pelvic health.

• Are my abs forever fucked? Part one and Part two. On diastasis recti, which comes up in our discussion today.

  

The deep dive:

I took my first teacher training in 2011. At that time, yoga was going through its own Me Too moment, which has spurred fantastic changes to the industry and culture of westernized yoga in the years since. (A note that this article will be speaking to westernized yoga, and it should be said that — of course — it’s a weird, appropriated practice based largely off of colonialism and supposedly British gymnastics. Again, that’s another essay, another time, but very worth acknowledging.)

Anyway, one of the things to come out of yoga’s reinvention was a new emphasis on anatomy. In many ways, I’ve appreciated this, and I’ve definitely benefited from it in terms of getting jobs to teach trainees. When I was in both my foundational and advanced trainings, two separate mentors told me that anatomy wasn’t really their thing. Now, the pendulum has swung — everyone in the yoga world wants to flex on their anatomy skills and know-how.

But here’s pet peeve number one: Most yoga teachers are getting a weekend anatomy intensive (potentially taught by me, lol) that focuses on the basics. There is absolutely no way to teach the abundance there is to know about anatomy (what is where), physiology (how that shit works) and kinesiology (how it works in context of movement) in a weekend. For contrast, I took a six week intensive anatomy course at the beginning of grad school where I dissected cadavers at Harvard Medical School. The memorization component of the class was grueling, to say the least. If you didn’t pass it, you couldn’t continue with the program.

(I loved it so much that I TA’d the next year, then worked as an adjunct at a community college doing cat dissection for nursing students for two years. I love dead bodies! It’s weird!)

Of course, lots of fantastic yoga teachers devote their lives to learning about anatomy, physiology, and kinesiology. I am lucky to be friends with many of these people. But my experience taking similar courses is that they are never as hard core as my grad school experience, and I imagine that’s by design.

I say this not to shit on yoga teachers, including the very wise and experienced ones. I say this to say that yoga teachers are not healthcare professionals (unless they are dually trained). The education process is different, and the standards are different.

For example, when I teach anatomy or specific pelvic floor workshops, no one is asking for references or studies. And that makes sense, because it’s not the goal of the experience! But I could roll in with totally factually incorrect information and it would be accepted and taught as truth.

Which leads me to my second pet peeve, mula bandha. If you’re not familiar, mula bandha is this concept of the root lock, the idea of engaging the pelvic floor muscles and then releasing them.

In my effort to provide sources, I looked up this article on mula bandha from Yoga International, a reasonably well respected publication in the yoga world. I started going lightly insane with frustration as I read it, but let’s begin here:

“Mula bandha has the effect of restraining energy at the perineum; in this sense it is stabilizing and calming…

A variety of physical benefits have been attributed to mula bandha. It has been suggested that through this practice unstable menstrual periods can be regulated, respiration rate lowered, heart rate and blood pressure reduced, sympathetic arousal calmed, digestion improved, and urogenital functioning harmonized. These effects are noted by adepts in yoga, but there seems as yet to have been little scientific research to investigate them.”

Like, huh!? What!?

I find these kinds of assertions annoying at best and harmful at worst. “Unstable menstrual periods” could easily be endometriosis, and kegels are the very last thing anyone should be doing to support themselves with endo.

The anatomy issues show up here, too. In the article’s anatomy section, it describes the anatomy of mula bandha engagement: “In men, mula bandha results from contractions of the muscles surrounding the perineal body, which lies midway between the anus and the genitals.” Okay, sure. But then — “For women, the contraction of mula bandha is said to be felt not at the perineal body, but at the area surrounding the base of the cervix.”

Um, no. The muscles around the cervix are the levator ani, located in the deepest layer of the pelvic floor, whereas the muscles around the perineal body are in the first, most superficial layer. The binary is dumb and these muscles are pretty homologous among biological sexes, so if one person is feeling an action superficially, it’s easily recreated in that same space on the opposite sex.

Fun story: A yoga teacher whose flow class I loved frequently taught mula bandha, which I politely ignored. (Who will ever know if you’re just sitting there?) Years into going to her class, she found out what I did for work and pulled me aside, telling me that she experiences classic stress urinary incontinence. She asked for off the cuff, in-studio advice. “I do mula bandha all the time,” she said. Her eyes widened when I told her to stop and get a proper assessment.

not bad, just not for everyone

Which brings me to my next point: You can ignore poses. I personally have beef with navasana/boat pose because it increases intra-abdominal pressure, putting more pressure on the anterior abdominal wall and pelvic floor. It tends to exacerbate diastasis recti, especially if you’re newly postpartum or pregnant (you’ll know because you’ll feel an uncomfy ripping/pulling sensation in the center of your belly, or see “coning” emerge from the center of your belly).

There’s nothing wrong with this pose (there’s nothing wrong with any movement), but honestly, it doesn’t feel good to me post pregnancy, and I would way rather spend that time engaging my deeper core muscles. So I don’t do it. Many of my clients, however, feel a need to “keep up” with classes, and I think this social paradigm just sucks. If any instructor makes you feel badly about modifying a pose to meet your body’s needs, move on!

And lastly: Yoga is not strength training, and strength training is essential to pelvic floor health. No, you don’t need to be lifting super heavy to have a functional, healthy pelvic floor. But yes, the goal is to be able to lift either a heavy dresser or the weight of your heaviest kid (plus five pounds) with confidence, ease, and no symptoms. This can be achieved in so many different ways, but a movement diet of solely yoga is probably not going to get you there. And for what it’s worth, my arm balances got so much better and easier after I began strength training!

While the yoga community has gotten infinitely better about this since the days of my youth, there is also an element of hypermobility that is worth mentioning here. People are generally drawn towards what their body can do best: for my somewhat hypermobile body, yoga was an activity where my bendiness was an asset. But you know what bendy folks need more than stretching? Strength, baby. Lots and lots of joint stability.

Here’s the take-home:

If you like yoga, keep doing it.

I still believe deeply in the power of yoga. As a source of parasympathetic nervous system regulation, as a connection to one’s body, as a spiritual experience, and as a community builder. I really miss having a community and life built around it, if I’m being real.

So please, stay with your practice. But if there was any part of your brain that resonated with these points, know that it’s okay to have a personal practice that doesn’t necessarily look exactly like what everyone else is doing in class. If something doesn’t feel quite right, don’t be afraid to reach out to a pelvic health therapist!

And if you’re a yoga teacher, keep on keeping on! It’s so freaking hard to be a teacher or a studio owner these days, and I bet you’re a delightful human. We’re all learning, but my unsolicited plea to you is to please stop teaching mula bandha, or if you do, teach it from a perspective of open curiosity, and not authoritative prescriptiveness. If a student shares any challenges related to their pelvic floor, refer out! Or make friends with a pelvic floor therapist — there is absolutely nothing better than hanging out, experimenting with movement, and learning from other movement professional friends!

Have another yoga pet peeve, question, or want me to talk about my pilates, barre, Cross Fit thoughts? Drop a comment or respond to this email! I would love to hear from you. Remember that you are a rock star of a human, and I am rooting for you.