The Science of Yoga: The Risks and the Rewards by William J Broad Page A
Authors: William J Broad
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deep breathing. The big question was whether the pulmonary skills translated into heightened fitness.
Gune had no doubts. In his estimation, yoga, with its proven ability to expand the lungs, outshone all other sports and systems of exercise. And he said so bluntly. Shortly after starting his ashram, he declared that the discipline excels at “increasing the vital index” and improving all aspects of life. Yoga, Gune insisted, let students attain the “physiological perfection of the human body”—not improvement or development but perfection. “There can be no other system more suitable.”
Unfortunately, just as the guru was seizing on the vital index as evidence of yoga’s superiority, scientists in Europe and the United States were abandoning the measure as deceptive and potentially meaningless. For instance, they noted that the vital index of a growing child usually fell steadily between the ages of, say, ten and twenty, since body weight during those years increases faster than lung size. Yet common sense suggested that those same years saw great rises in athletic prowess.
So the question arose with new urgency: What did, in fact, define the human capacity for physical vigor and, if such a factor existed, could science find a way to measure its development?
In the 1920s, as Gune was beginning his program of experimentation, some of the world’s best minds took up that question. A star was Archibald V. Hill, an English physiologist who won the Nobel Prize in 1922 for showing how muscles use energy.
Thirty-seven at the time of the award, Hill wore a proper British mustache and was married to Margaret Neville Keynes, the sister of the economist John Maynard Keynes and a social worker who had written extensively on child labor. The couple had two boys and two girls. Hill, as it turned out, was just starting a long, productive career. After his Nobel work, he turned to the related question of how muscles get their oxygen. It was the flip side of the energy coin—focusing on origins rather than ends. His agenda was quite sensible for an ambitious scientist curious about the fundamentals of biology.
Hill brought to hisresearch an abiding personal interest in sports and fitness. As a young man, he had run competitively, covering two miles in a little more than ten minutes—a fast pace for the day. As an adult, Hill often ran a mile before breakfast. For his studies of oxygen, Hill and colleagues designed experiments meant to reveal the exact dimensions of its invisible uptake. His main venue was a grassy track. His runners strapped to their backs bags into which they would breathe at set intervals. Later, analysis of the contents revealed the quantity of oxygen consumed.
Careful measurements showed that the runners—once achieving a certain intensity of effort—could increase their oxygen uptake no more. The situation held steady no matter how much they sped up their pace or how hard they pushed themselves. It was a hidden barrier. Like a bellows blowing air, the heart and lungs turned out to work beautifully at fanning the body’s inner fire but had intrinsic limits that no level of effort could overcome.
In pioneering reports of 1923 and 1924, Hill and his colleagues coined the term “maximal oxygen uptake,” defining it as the peak consumption of oxygen during exercise that got incrementally harder. It soon became the gold standard of physical fitness and exercise physiology—the single most important factor in determining what made for athletic excellence. The vital index, meanwhile, was cast onto the scrap heap of history.
What determined the maximum uptake? Amazingly, peak oxygenation of the body was found to have little or nothing to do with lung size, lung elasticity, the depth of breathing, eating habits, vitamins, the amount of sleep, good posture, body weight, or whether an individual possessed an unusually potent form of hemoglobin or some other energizing factor in the bloodstream. No. The
Gune had no doubts. In his estimation, yoga, with its proven ability to expand the lungs, outshone all other sports and systems of exercise. And he said so bluntly. Shortly after starting his ashram, he declared that the discipline excels at “increasing the vital index” and improving all aspects of life. Yoga, Gune insisted, let students attain the “physiological perfection of the human body”—not improvement or development but perfection. “There can be no other system more suitable.”
Unfortunately, just as the guru was seizing on the vital index as evidence of yoga’s superiority, scientists in Europe and the United States were abandoning the measure as deceptive and potentially meaningless. For instance, they noted that the vital index of a growing child usually fell steadily between the ages of, say, ten and twenty, since body weight during those years increases faster than lung size. Yet common sense suggested that those same years saw great rises in athletic prowess.
So the question arose with new urgency: What did, in fact, define the human capacity for physical vigor and, if such a factor existed, could science find a way to measure its development?
In the 1920s, as Gune was beginning his program of experimentation, some of the world’s best minds took up that question. A star was Archibald V. Hill, an English physiologist who won the Nobel Prize in 1922 for showing how muscles use energy.
Thirty-seven at the time of the award, Hill wore a proper British mustache and was married to Margaret Neville Keynes, the sister of the economist John Maynard Keynes and a social worker who had written extensively on child labor. The couple had two boys and two girls. Hill, as it turned out, was just starting a long, productive career. After his Nobel work, he turned to the related question of how muscles get their oxygen. It was the flip side of the energy coin—focusing on origins rather than ends. His agenda was quite sensible for an ambitious scientist curious about the fundamentals of biology.
Hill brought to hisresearch an abiding personal interest in sports and fitness. As a young man, he had run competitively, covering two miles in a little more than ten minutes—a fast pace for the day. As an adult, Hill often ran a mile before breakfast. For his studies of oxygen, Hill and colleagues designed experiments meant to reveal the exact dimensions of its invisible uptake. His main venue was a grassy track. His runners strapped to their backs bags into which they would breathe at set intervals. Later, analysis of the contents revealed the quantity of oxygen consumed.
Careful measurements showed that the runners—once achieving a certain intensity of effort—could increase their oxygen uptake no more. The situation held steady no matter how much they sped up their pace or how hard they pushed themselves. It was a hidden barrier. Like a bellows blowing air, the heart and lungs turned out to work beautifully at fanning the body’s inner fire but had intrinsic limits that no level of effort could overcome.
In pioneering reports of 1923 and 1924, Hill and his colleagues coined the term “maximal oxygen uptake,” defining it as the peak consumption of oxygen during exercise that got incrementally harder. It soon became the gold standard of physical fitness and exercise physiology—the single most important factor in determining what made for athletic excellence. The vital index, meanwhile, was cast onto the scrap heap of history.
What determined the maximum uptake? Amazingly, peak oxygenation of the body was found to have little or nothing to do with lung size, lung elasticity, the depth of breathing, eating habits, vitamins, the amount of sleep, good posture, body weight, or whether an individual possessed an unusually potent form of hemoglobin or some other energizing factor in the bloodstream. No. The
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