15: In Defense of Vinyasa Flow

In Defense of Vinyasa Flow: Modern Yoga History and the Science of Exercise Benefits

In episode 15 of the Enlightened Anatomy Podcast, host Matthew Huy defends strong vinyasa flow against claims that it’s “just gymnastics” or not “real yoga,” arguing that modern postural yoga itself is a recent synthesis rather than an unchanged ancient tradition. Drawing on Mark Singleton’s 2010 book Yoga Body, he explains how modern yoga developed through cross-pollination of Indian traditions and Western physical culture, with many iconic poses absent from classical texts like Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. He then shifts to physiology, presenting strong vinyasa as intermittent bodyweight resistance work plus low-to-moderate aerobic stimulus that can improve cardiorespiratory fitness, mitochondrial function, metabolic flexibility, insulin sensitivity, and glucose regulation. He highlights benefits for muscle preservation against sarcopenia, bone and connective-tissue health via mechanical loading, and nervous system skills such as coordination, balance, motor control, breath regulation, attention, and interoceptive awareness, concluding that usefulness matters more than purity.

00:00 Vinyasa Flow Intro

01:19 Is Vinyasa Real Yoga

02:03 Modern Yoga Origins

05:40 Myth of Ancient Purity

06:36 Yoga as Exercise

07:57 Cardio and Metabolism

10:46 Muscle and Longevity

12:30 Bones and Tissues

13:51 Nervous System Focus

15:45 Final Defense of Flow

16:39 Wrap Up and Farewell

Transcript

Matt Huy 0:00

Hello my friends and welcome to episode 15 of the Enlightened Anatomy Podcast. We're going to be looking at. Vinyasa Yoga and the title is In Defense of Vinyasa Flow. It's my favorite type of yoga. I just love flowing through a class where you're getting sweaty, moving through lots of postures, challenging yourself with handstands, forearm stands, whatever else the teacher might throw at you. And the reason I wanted to talk about this episode or this topic is because in last week's episode with Dr. Sarah Samaan, I mentioned how some people say yoga is not cardiovascular exercise. I also mentioned yoga in the same breath as resistance training. What does the science say is yoga, exercise? What are the benefits of exercise? And actually, historically, what does even modern postal yoga mean? Strap yourself in for a good episode all about vinyasa flow. Cue the intro music. Here we go.

Saz 0:58

Welcome to the Enlightened Anatomy Podcast, where we take a deep dive into the worlds of anatomy, physiology, and science to help you deepen your yoga practice. Now he's your host, Matthew Huy.

Matt Huy 1:20

Apparently strong Vinyasa yoga is just gymnastics with Sanskrit names. That's something I've heard online. I like that. And it's, it is often said things like Vinyasa is too physical. It's not real yoga, and it's basically exercise with spiritual branding. There's probably some truth to this. And that makes it an interesting claim rather than just a dismissible one. But the real question here is, does the fact that Vinyasa is physical somehow make it less authentic or less valuable? Because once you start digging into the history of yoga, things get a lot more interesting. First of all, modern yoga is modern and that includes even the quote, unquote classical styles that we often attribute to hatha yoga. In 2010, Mark Singleton came out with the book Yoga Body, and I loved this book. It was all about how modern postural yoga was formed, and in short, it was formed from a variety of different inputs, including uh, European gymnastics, British military drills, and even circus arts. Singleton's book Yoga Body completely reshaped how yogis understand modern yoga. And the central thesis to the book is basically modern postural yoga is not a direct continuation of ancient practice, but rather it is a modern synthesis. Basically all the yoga that you're practicing today has emerged out of the last hundred years or so. According to Mark Singleton, modern postural yoga has emerged largely in the late 19th and 20th centuries. It developed through a cross pollination of Indian yoga traditions and Western physical culture. He writes that modern yoga represents a dialogue between modern body culture techniques and Indian yoga traditions. He notes that some standing postures and dynamic sequences resemble systems like Niels Bukh's Primitive Gymnastics," and if you've ever been to the gym and had a personal trainer or a fitness class and you've heard of a burpee, you'll realize a burpee is really similar to our sun salutation. It's much faster, more cardio focused. But in terms of human movements, there is a forward fold, there's a jumping back, there's a lowering down, there's a coming back up, there's a jumping forward, there's a coming back up to standing Many of the iconic poses in modern yoga, things like downward dog or various standing poses don't appear in classical yoga texts In fact, in Patanjali Yoga Sutras, he only mentions two postures. That one being Sukhasana, easy sitting position and Padmasana lotus position, and these as gateways for meditation to reach a higher level of consciousness. Now already, those facts can really surprise people, but the takeaway is not that modern yoga is fake. The takeaway is yoga has always been evolving and it still is. It adapts. It integrates new ideas. We learn about strength, science, exercise science, and we change our opinions, and that's good. It reflects the culture and physiology of the people practicing it. So when someone says Vinyasa isn't traditional, the historian's answer might be,"Neither is most of the yoga you practice," and that's okay. For me, what I've read of yoga philosophy such as the Bava Gita and the Sutras of Patanjali is that the yoga is not so much what you're doing with your body, but it's what's happening in your mind as you're moving your body. Yoga is really a practice of the mind. Now let's look at the myth of a frozen tradition. In a lot of teacher trainings, there's this kind of idea, this romantic myth of ancient purity that the sun salutation we do today has been passed down through generations and generations through millennia, but the history, the evidence just doesn't support that. Even though a lot of yoga styles are marketed as ancient and unchanged and fountains of years, old traditions rarely work like that. Singleton also points out that innovations in yoga are often presented as ancient transmission. But you know what, that's not unique to yoga. Every tradition does it. Religion does it? Martial arts, even food traditions, do it. So instead of asking, is Vinyasa yoga authentic? A better question would be: is it beneficial? Which brings us to the physiology side of exercise. There's actually a really good physiological case for strong vinyasa yoga. I remember as a newer teacher, when I heard yoga described as exercise, that put me off.'cause to me, yoga was so much more than that. It was, It was a spiritual practice. It was a lifestyle. And it know it many ways. I still believe that, but at the end of the day, in terms of what you're doing with your body, you are exercising, you know. Whether you're doing a lunge in a yoga class or with your personal trainer, a lunge is a lunge and your body is going to respond in the same way. You're gonna stretch the hip flexors of the back leg. You're gonna strengthen the glute to the front leg, or at least activate them. So if strong vinyasa is just exercise, even if we just say that, that might actually be a very good thing because we have a major problem in our modern world. That is people are sedentary, meaning a lot of people are not moving enough. Yoga that elevates your heart rate loads, large muscle groups and challenges the body might be exactly what many people need. Strong vinyasa is essentially intermittent body weight training combined with some aerobic activity. Now, how much aerobic activity? There have been studies on this. Usually in the low to moderate level of aerobic activity with certain people who are less trained, it might be considered high intensity aerobic activity and the physiological benefits of any aerobic activity are the same. It is a cardiovascular stimulus, so dynamic flows can elevate your heart rate into a moderate aerobic zone, and that means improved cardiorespiratory fitness, better mitochondrial function. You might remember mitochondria from your high school. Biology is the quote unquote powerhouse of the cell. It's where you turn glucose into ATP. It is really important in overall cell health and just overall body health. And another benefit of aerobic exercise is improved metabolic flexibility. Your ability to move between different forms of energy, fat to carbohydrate, vice versa. And these are actually among the strongest predictors of longevity or how long you'll live. This is why, so many studies have found that people who are more physically active, people who exercise more, live longer, have healthier lives. Hopefully that's not news to you. It is not just common sense, but it's actually very backed by evidence in science. Another benefit of strong exercise or strong physical activity is glucose regulation. So dynamic muscular work improves insulin sensitivity, and you might know that insulin insensitivity is what diabetes is. Also dynamic muscular work improves glucose uptake in skeletal muscles. And that matters because skeletal muscle is the primary site of glucose disposal in the body and the transition of glucose into ATP, the form of currency that cells can use to operate. And having elevated blood glucose or blood sugar is the definition of diabetes. It is blood glucose over a sustained period of time even after fasting. So building muscle and using muscle regularly is crucial for metabolic health. There's even this chemical known as myokines, which I would've mentioned in our book The Physiology of Yoga, but I hadn't learned about it by then. But Myokines are known to improve metabolic health. Again, boost cognitive function, aid bone health, and strengthen the immune system. So these beautiful compounds that are released by our muscles when we use them. Let's look even more closely at muscle and specifically building and preserving muscle. And this is where the argument becomes particularly strong Muscle mass declines with age. I'm 46 now, nearly 47, and yeah, I can notice, I don't put on muscle as easily, but I'm glad to be alive to this age, and I'll be saying the same thing when I'm 80. If I make it to that long, hopefully I will. But nonetheless, if we look at averages and just, the natural progression of the human body, muscle mass generally does decline as you get older. It's, no, it's a process called sarcopenia. Sarco, meaning muscle and penia referring to a decrease. By your seventies, people can lose 30 to 50% muscle mass if they're inactive. And resistance training is one of the most effective ways to slow or prevent this. Strong yoga includes isometric contractions of muscles,eccentric control, body weight resistance. You are moving from holding your weight all on one leg to coming into a side plank where you're bearing half of your body weight on your hand and the other half on your foot to lowering down, which is basically the same as a press up, strengthening the muscles of the triceps chest and others. Plank, of course, engages your core stabilizers. If you're doing a lunge, like I mentioned earlier, you have to be using your glutes and your quadriceps. You cannot hold a lunge without using your glutes and quads. And arm balances, those beautiful things, are actually a high neuromuscular demand, requires a lot of coordination, and then quite a good amount of strength to hold yourself in crow pose. So we're not just stretching in yoga, we're actually loading tissues and mechanical loading is the signal that maintains muscle and bone, which brings us to another benefit of yoga, which can be bone health and connective tissue health. Now you are certainly limited by your own body weight in yoga because we're not picking up extra weights. And the best way to really increase your bone mineral density is going to be to load your body beyond its own body weight. But nonetheless, dynamic yoga does still load the skeleton. And so weight bearing and impact transitions, stimulate bone remodeling. Your bones respond remodel based on how much compression, how much impact is put on them. I know we think of impact as a bad thing and low impact exercises better, but actually it's the impact. It's the compression on the bones that makes them stronger, that gives them the stimulus to then build more bone, increase their bone density. So this matters for osteoporosis prevention, connected tissue resilience, and joint health as our bodies adapt to stress and if you remove stress entirely, tissues weaken. One more benefit of strong exercise strong vinyasa is your nervous system. Sometimes the nervous system is thrown around too much in social media. People talking about a wound up nervous system or something like that. Basically, your central nervous system is your brain and your spinal cord. The thinking parts of your body the governors of all movement and strong vinyasa also trains coordination, balance, motor control and breath regulation under load. And that's actually quite sophisticated. It's not just exercise, it's movement skill combined with physiological training. Breath linked movement may also enhance attentional regulation and interoceptive awareness. Attentional regulation being the ability to consciously direct focus, sustain concentration, and ignore distractions. And isn't that exactly. What we're asked to do in a yoga class to keep our eyes focused on one point. This is what I'm always going on about when I'm teaching. Keep your eyes focused there, your Drishti, and stay present to not look at your smart watch, to not be distracted by the person next to you, just to be fully at attention in your practice. And interceptive awareness is the ability to detect, interpret, and respond to internal bodily signals. Now, this is a whole debate about how much yoga can improve it. I think most of us would agree that through yoga you get to know your body a lot better. You start to differentiate between the different sensations that you feel, whether those are actual pain or just a stretching sensation, knowing when to go further in a pose and when to stop. So, Yeah, I hope you can see there are a lot of benefits to a strong vinyasa. And some critics might say Vinyasa is just gymnastics, but historically movement disciplines have always blended together. Yoga borrowed from physical culture and physical culture borrowed from yoga. Pilates is borrowed from yoga, and yoga has borrowed from Pilates and other systems. Moving systems constantly exchange ideas. So the question isn't, is Vinyasa pure? The question is, does it help people move, live, and breathe better? If strong yoga improves cardiovascular fitness, builds muscle, preserves mobility and reduces sedentary behavior, then dismissing it as just exercise might miss the point because exercise is one of the most powerful interventions humans have. So, to wrap up today's episode, I just wanna say yoga has never been static. It's always been evolving, adapting, experimenting. Strong vinyasa might not look like the yoga of medieval aesthetics, people who renounced all worldly goods, but it might be the exact kind of yoga that modern bodies need. And perhaps the most yogic thing we can do is to stay curious rather than dogmatic. So if you love your strong sweaty flow, great. Have at it. Thanks for tuning in today and be sure to tune in next week for more great information on blending yoga and science. Until next time, peace out.

Saz 17:29

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