Yoga can be beneficial for seniors

The elegant, silver-haired woman poked her head tentatively into my classroom as students were setting up their mats and chairs for a “gentle yoga” class. “Is it OK if I just watch?” she asked, then told me she had tried a yoga class to ease pain in her neck and back, only to find that actually made her problem worse.

It’s a complaint I’ve heard many times, particularly from older adults: that the supposedly healing practice of yoga caused pain. As a teacher specializing in therapeutic yoga for seniors and people with health challenges, I often work with those who have had a negative experience in a yoga class, frequently because it was an inappropriate style or level for the participant or was taught by an inexperienced or poorly trained instructor.

“Teaching yoga at a senior center is an entry-level job in many communities, which means they’re putting the least-trained people with the hardest crowd,” says Gale Greendale, a professor of medicine and gerontology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. “There’s often a cacophony of pre-existing conditions in this age group, and a yoga teacher has to be very skilled to not get older adults into trouble.”

With studies suggesting that yoga may be helpful in reducing heart rate and blood pressure, relieving anxiety and depression, and easing back pain, studios are filling up with baby boomers and older adults. Yet, seniors pose a special challenge for yoga instructors, because of their very mix of abilities and condition: Some 80-year-olds are still running marathons, and some 70-year-olds are unable to get up out of a chair.

“In general, older adults have less joint range of motion, less strength and poorer balance than younger men and women,” Greendale notes. “They also have more limiting musculoskeletal conditions, such as osteoarthritis and low back conditions, that may put them at higher risk of musculoskeletal side effects from yoga.”

Greendale first recognized this phenomenon when she led a study to assess whether yoga could decrease hyperkyphosis, an exaggerated curve of the thoracic spine sometimes called dowager’s hump. Her research, published in 2009, found that yoga improved the condition. However, during the six-month study, approximately 60 percent of the 120 participants — ambulatory people ages 60 to 90 — developed musculoskeletal soreness and/or pain significant enough to require modifications of their poses. Also, those with pre-existing musculoskeletal conditions who hadn’t been bothered by those conditions were particularly likely to experience significant muscle or joint side effects.