Yoga vs Ballet : what better training for athletes ?

Many coaches and athletes ask me: what is the difference between yoga and ballet?

As an international certified professional ballet teacher who has studied all over the world (including India), I feel it is my obligation to reveal the truth and debunk the myths about Indian Yoga.

Let’s start with simply comparing yoga and ballet by examining the careers of two great athletes - Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant. What do they have in common? They are both very hard working and have great passion for basketball. Kobe lives in Orange County, CA and I often observed him working out in a local sports club with his trainer Tim Grover. Mr. Grover is a talented renowned trainer who also trained Michael Jordan. Kobe is driven to be the best, therefore he hired Tim (and flew him from Chicago) to succeed. I asked Tim why basketball players do not also do ballet? He answered “I agree, basketball players should do ballet but they complain that ballet is too difficult, so they prefer yoga “.

So this raises the question: how do the careers of Michael Jordan and Kobe Bryant differ? Michael Jordan did ballet. In an interview with HOOP Magazine in 1997, Jordan said, "I wasn’t even running. Actually, it was a ballet move where I jumped up and spread my legs." Jordan did not experience any major injuries during his career. On the other hand, Kobe loves to do yoga. As a result, he has sustained 22 career injuries (2014) and continues to have more during his career.

 In 2013, after I had heard that Kobe suffered a torn Achilles tendon, I had heard enough.  I contacted Tim Grover and offered a detailed ballet rehabilitation program for Achilles tendon injury for Kobe and recommended strongly to Mr. Glover that Kobe stop yoga to avoid further injuries. Tim Grover responded to me “I totally agree with you about yoga “and he tried to help Kobe by offering my program. But Kobe was not interested in ballet and unfortunately he continued to sustain more injuries. I recently learned of his plans to retire, which I feel is unfortunately premature given his talents and potential future contributions as he is still young and vibrant. 

In 1988 I, together with the Soviet Union dance delegation, travelled to India to study yoga and Indian dance for 2 months. I have acquired extensive knowledge about yoga, likely more than most yoga instructors in the US, because I was taught by the best professionals. 

My delegation learned that Yoga is not actually a form of training at all. We were very surprised that we did not see any Indians using or training with yoga while we were in India. Then we discovered that Yoga was actually created without any knowledge of anatomy, physiology or kinesiology; rather it was created to facilitate mental and spiritual practices in ancient India as a form of religious meditation. Some meditation poses represent a form of ritual supplication to heavenly gods and heroes. Other poses represent the ritual of fire sacrifice. Other poses for “caring upward in the burst of light to the sun and to the heaven”. Basically, as an Indian specialist of history explained to us, yoga was used to control and pacify the vast poor Indian population. Also he mentioned that “detailed descriptions of yoga poses were nowhere to be found in the Indian historical record “.

To tell the truth, Yoga is not popular in India at all, especially among the higher castes. In hotels and wealthy homes, women, men and children play tennis and other sports, but do not practice yoga. Yes, people pray. Every home had a small beautiful chapel in the garden with God of Kama Sutra; but they do not practice yoga.

My dance delegation learned that yogis do not typically enjoy good health or a long life. In India, yoga teachers and practitioners often experience chronic pain and joint issues which lead to misalignment and surgical replacement, especially of the hip, knee, and shoulder. Dance professionals in India typically have short 6-8 year careers and then they retire due to injuries and disabilities.  We were examined and learned a lot about the mechanisms of different injuries from yoga. Simple poses like headstands , shoulder stands , forward bends , backward bends , lotus , half lotus , handstands and others produce the greatest number of injuries ( like damage to the structure joining the femur and the hip , acetabular labral tears , tear in the arteries in the neck , muscles / nerves damage and others ). My delegation reached the final conclusion that “Yoga and Indian dance must be prohibited in professional dance and athletes training “.

Incidentally, at the conclusion of our trip, it was the most beautiful and colorful business trip. We studied in wealthy cities of India and saw poor India only from bus windows. I have wonderful memories of India and of the Indian people as being highly intelligent.

In the US we hear about the unusual healing powers of yoga; ironically, this is never mentioned in India. It reminds me of stories about magic bracelets, magic water or Aladdin with his magic lamp, rub it and the Genie appears!

Yoga is very popular outside of India, especially in the US. Americans tend to be gullible, and are often entranced and seduced by what seems to be exotic and different, without necessarily carefully and judiciously evaluating results. US have a large population of immigrants from India. Think about it - have you ever seen people from India in yoga classes? I am sure never.

Unfortunately even professional teams and athletes do yoga. I always asked coaches “Why do you choose yoga for your team? Has India ever done well in the Olympics? “If yoga is so important to training athletes, how do we explain why India did not compete well in the Olympics? Then coaches started to think.

Please do not misunderstand me. I do not completely dismiss yoga. I recommend yoga to my clients for a short time (but not to athletes!) who have extremely stressful situations in life, for example divorce or tragedy in the family. But if athletes have stressful situations, I recommend a Sport Psychologist. If I train an athlete, I insist that they stop yoga. There is no point for me to work with an athlete who will go on to have an injury as a result of continuing with yoga. Let’s examine a simple contrast of training between yoga and ballet: let’s take ligaments - the tough bands of fiber that connect bones or cartilage at a joint. Ballet technique is very careful to develop strength and flexibility in the ligaments for control and stability in joints. But yoga over stretches ligaments , it not only creates tears in the ligaments ; as a result of yoga the ligaments fail to regain their shape , increasing the risk of strains , sprains and dislocations. Now you understand why many professional players in baseball, hockey, and basketball who do yoga develop knee problems. Even before the season starts, they have to go to doctors for steroid joint injections which can be very distracting during the game because the joint becomes swollen with reduced range of motion. This is one of the simplest examples of why I require my athletes to discontinue yoga immediately. After having knee surgery , one of my client - professional athlete followed my advice , stopped yoga and after one month of my intensive ballet training , told me “ I do not feel my knee anymore during the game , I feel just muscles around the knee “ . This is the normal sensation of a healthy knee. As a representative of Russian ballet technique (its world recognized as injury-free training), I am obligated and proud to maintain these standards. Russian ballet does not just reduce injuries; we guarantee an injury-free long career.

By history, India introduced yoga to the World as a complementary intervention for schizophrenia, cancer, asthma. Only in the US Yoga do practitioners claim that yoga is a magical training which improves musculo-skeletal development. But over the years famous India yogis show the “true color “and “true results “. Some of them like famous Glenn Black in Manhattan received a spinal injury; some of them like Bikran Choudhury in Los Angeles were fined 6.5 million dollars in damages. I very respect Glenn Black. He is very careful practitioner who studied in India and work with celebrities and prominent gurus. But even he could not avoid injuries from yoga; he developed a serious condition - spinal stenosis. He is the first yogi in US who openly speaks about major traumas from yoga and simply told people “Don’t do yoga! ‘’. The famous yoga community has remained silent about injuries, even Indra Devi in her best seller “Forever Young, Forever Healthy “avoided the issue of injuries. But they could not repress the truth about these injuries for long.

The first reports of yoga-related injuries were published in the world’s most respected journals - among them, Neurology, The British Medical Journal and The Journal of the American Medical Association. The problems ranged from mild injuries to permanent disabilities.  In 1972, the Oxford neurophysiologist, W. Ritchie Russell published an article in The British Medical Journal about yoga postures that threatened to cause strokes in healthy people. Russell found that brain injuries arose not only from direct trauma to the head but also from certain yoga poses. In 1973 he published a lot about his patients, one of them a 28 year old healthy woman who suffered a stroke and developed Horner’s syndrome (eyes glancing involuntarily, drooping upper eyelid and a rising lower lid) after yoga. After two years of rehabilitation, she was finally able to walk but the Horner’s syndrome continued.  ”In my practice, I've treated more experienced yogis than rookies”, says orthopedic surgeon Jeffree Halbrecht, M.D., medical director for the Institute for Arthroscopy and Sports Medicine in San Francisco. Finally the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission showed that the number of emergency -room admissions related to yoga, after years of slow increases, was rising much more quickly. Most often, the damages includes strained muscles, rotator cuff tears in the shoulders, exacerbated carpal tunnel syndrome in the wrists, torn cartilage in the knees, and lower back and neck injuries such as herniated disks. Around the time, stories of yoga -induced injuries began to appear in the media. The Times reported that yoga raises the risk of over stretching , muscle damage , torn cartilage and develop serious medical conditions including spinal stenosis , thoracic outlet syndrome, degenerative arthritis of the cervical spine , retinal tears , damage to the fibular nerve , called “ Yoga foot drop “.  In 2009, a New York City team of Physicians and Surgeons published a worldwide survey of yoga teachers, therapists and doctors about the most disabling yoga-related injuries. First were injuries of the lower back, then shoulders, then knee, then neck. It appeared in media nearly four decades after Russell first issued his warnings about dangers of yoga.

The yoga community could not remain silent anymore and has finally begun to address the issue of yoga -induced damage. In a 2003 article in Yoga Journal, Carol Krucoff, a yoga therapist who works in Integrative Medicine at Duke University, revealed her own struggles (she is unable to walk normally anymore). The editor of Yoga Journal, Kaitlin Quistgaard stated“I ‘vet experienced how yoga can hurt after a torn rotator cuff in a yoga class - and I’ve heard the same from plenty of other yogis “. The Yoga practitioner and science writer William Broad had suffered a back injury from practicing yoga and he published in The New York Times Magazine in January 2012 about his experience and common yogi injuries including torn muscles, knee injuries, and headaches.  Timothy McCall, a physician who is the medical editor of Yoga Journal concluded “Unfortunately, the negative effects of yoga can be insidious “. Recently Glenn Black took a message to a conference at the Omega Institute “Yoga is not a panacea or a cure-all. A lot of people don’t like to hear that”. I want to repeat again, I respect Glenn Black for his honesty.

And at the last let’s compare the education of yoga to ballet teachers. To receive a yoga teacher certificate in college you need to take 11 units, equivalent to 1 semester. If you want certificate by famous Yoga Institute you need 200 hours of study. A yoga therapist requires 300-400 hours of study of various subjects like aromatherapy. You can also become a yoga teacher online sponsored by the American Sports and Fitness Association and it will cost you $ 99 - $ 299. Do you want to entrust your precious health and welfare to instructors such as these? I hope not.

Now let's discuss Russian ballet education. You require 8 years of intensive study followed by numerous challenging exams. The final exam is Government approved to permit professional performance on stage and to be permitted to receive a budget for tours. I remember it was a 4 day intensive final exam , on the fourth day I was so exhausted physically and mentally , I did not remember what I did , who lifted me , who caught me during my jumps … my brain was shut down , I did not feel my body but muscle memory did its great job ! A professional ballet career in Russia does not allow you to teach until you receive pedagogical education from the Teacher Training Department of the Ballet Academy or University of the Arts. Pedagogical training in Russia include system of progressive ballet/dance technique instructions focus on attention to every detail and precision in a teacher's instruction, particularly when to teach what, how long to teach, and in what amount. This is all done in order to protect dancers from injuries. This codified technical approach of teaching is an injury-free foundation for any dance or sport with natural individual breathtaking results in dancers and athletes. In America and Canada most ballet teachers don't have this type of pedagogical education, so its no wonder why there are so many injuries in dance. Last year I attended both a Sports Medicine Conference in Vancouver and Dance Medicine Conference in Montreal . They both reported that 95% of Canadian dancers are injured every year. Professional American dance companies also reported that as many as 67% to 95% of their dancers are injured on an annual basis, while dance schools report 77% of their adolescent (12-18 years old ) dancers injured in the 1st academic year.

Ballet training is a tough, unforgiving, ruthless discipline; consequently it is included as special training in the Olympic Center. Not everyone can handle Russian ballet. I remember the fact that in the USSR when a Swedish hockey player came to practice with coach Tarasov, he couldn’t last. He reportedly said, “We Swedes don’t grow up on practice like this. I don’t want to die “.

I want to draw to your attention that Russian Vaganova ballet (The Mariinsky Ballet!) and other ballets are completely different. I agree with the statement by Michail Baryshnikov “This is no ballet in America”. Ballet in America has injuries because their training based on style and entertainment. Russian ballet is injury-free because it is based on a technique which creates an elite athletic body then adds speed and character. This training program has produced the best dancers in the world, including Rudolf Nureyev , Vaslav Nijinsky , Mikhail Baryshnikov . Their performances were unforgettable and electrifying with pure strength, power and precision. They are legendary for their ability to devour space and time and soar effortlessly through the air during their jumps. Mikhail Baryshnikov could jump much higher than his entire height of 5 ft 8 inches and could change few positions in midair. . Vaslav Nijinsky especially was widely admired not only for his uncanny ability to leap 20 feet ( 6 meters ) above the ground but also to remain suspended in mid – air long enough to miss several beats of music. He received a gold watch from the Czar's own hands. Parisians called him the “god of dance "and the “eighth wonder of the world”.

I hope you now have an appreciation of why I am upset when people compare scientifically proved Russian Ballet with yoga from India, which was created primarily as a religious practice to subjugate a large poverty-stricken population. “India Is Home to More Poor People Than Anywhere Else on Earth. We don't have to be proud of it," one Indian minister says.