Injury in yoga asana practice: Assessment of the risks.

Background: The risk of injury from modern yoga asana practice is poorly characterized in the scientific literature, but anecdotal reports in the lay literature and press have posed questions about the possibility of frequent, severe injuries.

Design: We performed a cross-sectional survey of yoga asana participants assessing their experience with yoga-related injury, using a voluntary convenience sample.

Results: A total of 2620 participants responded to our survey. Seventy-nine percent were between ages 31 and 60 and 84% were female. The majority of respondents lived in North America or Europe. Forty-five percent of participants reported experiencing no injuries during the time they had been practicing yoga. Of those who did experience an injury from asana practice, 28% were mild (e.g., sprains or nonspecific pains not requiring a medical procedure, with symptoms lasting less than 6 months) and 63% were moderate (e.g., sprains or nonspecific pains not requiring a medical procedure, with symptoms lasting from 6 months to 1 year). Only 9% of those reporting injuries (4% of the total sample) had a severe injury. The strongest predictors for increased probability of reporting an injury over a lifetime of yoga practice were greater number of years of practice (p < .0001) and teaching yoga (p = .0177). Other aspects of participant demographics or yoga practice habits were not related to likelihood of reporting a yoga-related injury.

Conclusions: We found the number of injuries reported by yoga participants per years of practice exposure to be low and the occurrence of serious injuries in yoga to be infrequent compared to other physical activities, suggesting that yoga is not a high-risk physical activity. More work is needed to clarify the causal relationships between the yoga participant characteristics, the asana practice style, and the risk of significant injury.