The Science of Yoga: The Risks and the Rewards
centuries—with new ones appearing all the time. Three phases stand out. First was the original Hatha, which debuted as a forceful branch of Tantra. Then, as we saw in the previous chapter, the yoga innovators of the early twentieth century produced a sanitized Hatha. Today, the newest styles represent another step in yoga’s development, their moves more vigorous than the old. It turns out that modern yoga, by accident or design, has lost much of its contemplative nature and adopted some of the sweatiness of contemporary exercise.
    Gune taught a style of yoga that epitomized the slow, tranquil approach. His emphasis was on holding poses for long periods of time and learning how to relax even amid extreme states of bending, flexing, and upending. It was a point he drove home with his measurements of how challenging inversions were gentle on the heart. By contrast, the newer styles tend to be hyperkinetic, some done to the beat of rock music. The objective is to get the heart pounding and the body exhausted. That makes them more aerobic (“requiring air”)—in other words, more focused on reinvigorating the blood. Incontrast to Gune’s style of yoga, the new goal is to maximize rather than minimize the energetic costs.
    Brands that focus on aerobics include YogaFit and Power Yoga. To a lesser extent, the vigor extends to older styles such as Ashtanga and Vinyasa. And then there is Bikram. “My classes are so hard,” Choudhury boasts, “you use your heart more than if you run a marathon.”
    Fortunately, that kind of pronouncement is open to investigation.
    The analytic lens of the sports establishment began to form in the nineteenth century as health authorities struggled to identify universal factors that determine the origins of human fitness. The question was seen as urgent. Around the globe, waves of people were leaving farms and giving up agrarian lifestyles that had kept them physically active from dawn to dusk. Medical experts agreed that the new sedentary lifestyles of the cities were often unhealthy but could achieve no consensus on what forms of exercise to recommend—even as entrepreneurs and hucksters got rich promoting their own methods. It was an age of dumbbells and medicine balls, of weighted clubs and chest expanders, of gimmicks and gadgets. The scientific goal was to develop objective standards that would let investigators cut through the competing claims and document what was truly beneficial. The resulting programs of exercise were seen as important to help city dwellers improve their health, avoid fatigue, and better enjoy their lives and leisure time.
    By 1900, investigators had identified a factor that they called vital capacity. It measured a person’s ability to breathe deeply—seemingly a good measure of fitness because breathing is considered a foundation of the metabolism and, in earlier days, was viewed as an expression of the human spirit and soul. Science saw deep breathing as similar to blowing on a fire—in theory it fanned the body’s metabolic flames.
    Seeking precision, scientists defined vital capacity as the maximum volume of air that an individual could exhale after a deep inhalation. A sedentary life was found to reduce vital capacity, and an active life to increase it. Scientists quickly developed a refinement known as the vital index, which sought to eliminate differences due to age, size, sex, and other individual factors. It consisted of the ratio of vital capacity to weight. Early in the twentieth century, athletes aspired to a high vital index as an indication of competitive excellence.
    Gune became an enthusiasticfan of the vital index and cited yoga’s impact on the physiologic measure as evidence of the discipline’s power to raise human vitality. Viewed narrowly, his claims were exactly right. Pranayama gave the lungs, the chest, and the abdominal muscles a comprehensive workout and improved the flexibility of the rib cage. The natural result was an aptitude for

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