The Yin Yoga Podcast
The Yin Yoga Podcast
Becoming an Evidence Informed Yin Yoga Teacher or Student: A Guided Journey Part One
In this solo episode I share invaluable insights that will empower both teachers and practitioners to deepen their understanding of Yin Yoga, as well as underscore the importance of employing research-backed knowledge for the betterment of physical and mental health.
I'll share the top reasons why Yin Yoga is the perfect canvas for evidence informed practice and teaching. I'll also teach you how to find research that is relevant to your needs as a student or your niche as a teacher.
By the end of this episode you will know the main types of research that will be useful to you as a Yin-thusiast and some handy use cases for each. My intent is to make the transition to evidence informed practice as simple as possible.
In our exploration, we also delve into the realm of anatomy and pain care in relation to Yin Yoga and the critical role randomized control trials (RCTs) play. But I don't just leave you with the theory, I show you how to practically apply this knowledge, addressing topics like exercise recovery, research bias, and the significance of lifestyle changes for those with chronic pain. To demonstrate how vital understanding where to find research and read it really is, I expose some truths about knee arthroscopy and spinal surgery.
So, buckle up! Whether you're a yoga teacher seeking to expand your knowledge, or a student looking to deepen your practice, this eye-opening episode is a must-listen. Let's be seekers of truth in the world of Yin Yoga together!
Become an evidence informed Yin teacher or student, enroll in my Yin Yoga Teacher Training Module I: https://yoga.mandyryle.com/yin-teacher-training-module-i/
Join the conversation in my FREE Facebook group, Movement for Healing https://www.facebook.com/groups/710104050217437/
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A Late Winter Wellness Retreat in the Dominican Republic
March 3-10, 2023
Join me for a 7 day Caribbean wellness retreat. Each day we will focus on a pillar of self care. By the end of the week you will have a group of new friends, some unforgettable memories and a personal self care strategy to enhance your life back at home. Learn More
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Master the Yin Yoga Pose Repertoire: 7 Day Email Course
Introduction to Pain Care Yoga
Practice Gallery Workbook - 6 go to sequences with pictorial instructions
Welcome to the Yin Yoga podcast. I'm your host, mandy Ryle, and today I am doing a solo episode where we get to dive into something that I am really, really passionate about, which is evidence informed teaching. I get a lot of questions from my training groups and students, clients and other teachers about how to incorporate more evidence into their teaching, but I think that this topic is also really relevant for people who are just very, very passionate about yoga practice, as so many of us come to yoga practice because we have a problem that we're trying to solve whether it's anxiety or depression or maybe a pain issue and so learning how to apply evidence to practice can be really incredibly empowering. So I will be discussing today some of the reasons why I think that Yin Yoga especially lends itself to being a perfect canvas for evidence informed practice, and I'm also going to give you a high level overview of how to start to read research. This is going to be a multi episode series about becoming an evidence informed Yin Yoga teacher or student, so in following episodes, we're going to kind of dig in a little bit deeper with each successive episode. So I really recommend, as you are today, starting with this episode so that you can get a little bit more comfortable, one tiny baby step at a time. I really hope that this information is useful to you, but I think that there is a lot of information here. So if you end up having any questions or you would just like to join the discussion about this, I would recommend that you join my free Facebook group. It's called Movement for Healing. I'm in that group all the time, so if you have questions, you can certainly pop them in there and just join the conversation. I'll leave a link to Movement for Healing in the show notes On this podcast. All the time you hear me talk about being evidence informed.
Speaker 1:In my opinion, evidence informed teaching is the future of yoga. Why? Because our students, more than ever, are needing sustainable, inexpensive and accessible tools to lean on for reducing stress and improving mental and physical health. And, by the way, there is evidence that Yin Yoga can be effective for all of those. A more comprehensive system to address the needs of the whole self simply does not exist. Yoga includes all of the things that modern humans need but currently lack. It contains movement that is scalable and novel mindfulness practice that helps us to reduce stress and its pernicious effects, like inflammation, and awareness practice that facilitates an enhanced sensitivity to the body and its needs, which ultimately encourages the adoption of important health enhancing lifestyle changes. Yoga also provides a community aspect which improves longevity, overall health and even reduces inflammation. And, by the way, there are studies to cite all of these great benefits.
Speaker 1:So the other reason why I think evidence informed teaching is so important is because many of you yoga teachers out there are learning how important it is to focus on a niche. This is such a vital strategy, not just for staying inspired in your teaching and being sure that you present yourself with the most possible skill, but also for improving your earning capacity as a teacher. Our students need teachers who have the skills, tools and curiosity to provide these as effectively as possible, and that is where evidence comes in. For those of you who aren't teachers, more and more students of Yin are finding the practice on the recommendation of a health professional, whether it be for a pain issue, recovery from illness, sports recovery or, probably most importantly, just stress relief. Yin yoga ticks so many boxes. So knowing where to find evidence that is relevant to you and your needs and how to read it can enhance your personal practice inestimably. So there are a few things that I think make Yin a perfect canvas for an evidence informed approach, maybe more so than traditional Hatha yoga styles.
Speaker 1:For those of you who kind of know the history of Yin yoga, the founders of the practice teachers like Paul Grilly and Bernie Clark have always endorsed a more informed practice perspective. That's one of the things that really attracted me to the practice initially. So just the initial concept of Yin, which that it is influencing our connective tissue, led to a need for a more informed practice perspective to confirm or disprove this right, which led to a huge interest in not just the yin yoga community but the yoga community in general in fascia and connective tissue. And so, all of a sudden, you have this army of people who are consuming all kinds of evidence about connective tissue. One of my most popular episodes on the podcast is called understanding yin yoga and fascia. This was just a tiny piece of what we know about yin yoga and fascia and people loved it. I mean, it is still one of the most popular episodes that I've ever published, which, by the way, if you want to go back and check that out, it's in season four, so this same season, episode 11.
Speaker 1:Teachers and students alike are incredibly engaged right now in learning about connective tissue. What makes connective tissue unique, how we can train it, what goes wrong with it? That seems to be most of what we're talking about, and this, unfortunately, has also led to a great deal of misinformation, which makes it even more imperative that we learn to find, read and understand research, so that we can be truth tellers, truth followers. If we're going to be making claims that yin yoga impacts or targets connective tissue, don't you think we should probably know first of all what even is connective tissue, how would one target it and what does that mean?
Speaker 1:In general, holistically for a self, I would argue that a lot of us are getting a lot of pseudoscience about this, a lot of misinformation, which to me seems pretty unfortunate, because there actually is a fair amount of data out there, if only we know how to access it. Likewise, if we are going to claim which I see all the time, by the way that yin yoga can help with posture which is good, because bad posture causes pain then we should probably verify that with the best and most recent data, because if all of the people who are claiming this had the ability to find, read and understand research, they would know that there is no credible evidence that quote bad posture causes pain. They would know that there's really no good evidence that we can change posture permanently. And they would also know that even when we do manage to make some small changes to someone's resting posture, that does not reliably eliminate their pain. So yin yoga can be amazing for being more comfortable in your body, but that doesn't mean that we should be saying that yin yoga fixes your posture and that's good, because bad posture causes pain. This is misinformation, and so when we don't really understand evidence, then we really become susceptible to becoming part of the misinformation problem.
Speaker 1:And then the second reason why I think yin is really the perfect canvas for evidence-informed teaching is that yin really attracts a certain kind of student due to its gentleness and to the amount of time we spend in the poses. It is attractive to athletes, for example on recovery days. It's attractive to people who have anxiety, who may find other forms of mindfulness difficult to understand and so on, difficult to well, in my case nearly impossible. It attracts people with pain conditions, like we talked about, a lot of people's doctors are recommending yin yoga to them these days, people who have pain conditions. It's attractive to aging populations because it's gentle. So if we can learn to apply the evidence to each of these populations, just think of how much good you can do for your students and also then for your own income needs as a teacher.
Speaker 1:Finally, I think that the duration component of yin lends itself to the exploration of deeper concepts during practice. So I'm not advocating a science lecture, rather an experiential practice model where an evidence-informed teacher can present discrete concepts for the student to explore in a body, in a breath, in the nervous system, the brain, the mind, the social self. And if you're wondering what this looks like, just hit play on any of the pod practices in the Yin Yoga podcast. This is what I'm doing every single time I publish a pod practice. And when we can employ this practice model, it opens up so much opportunity for us teachers to explore the stuff about practice that really lights us up. Having a deeper understanding of the data around our passions or our target populations enhances our ability to guide our students in meaningful, transformative experiences. So you're probably wondering how you might become a little bit more evidence informed. Hopefully I've convinced you that it's a good way to spend your time and effort as a student or teacher of Yin.
Speaker 1:So I'd like to give you a few tips on both finding and reading research, but I want to let you know that this is a multi-part series of episodes, so in the future episodes in this little series, I'll be discussing some tips on getting started reading and understanding research, and then I'm also going to be talking about some of the papers that have heavily influenced my teaching or that I think are particularly important for understanding how to apply evidence specifically to teaching Yin Yoga. But for today, let's keep it a little bit smaller. Remember discrete concepts. So today we're just going to break down some of the basics, just like the most high level stuff that you need to start in your evidence informed teaching. So let's start with this, the simplest thing finding evidence.
Speaker 1:When this episode is over not right now, because I want you to keep listening, but when you finish this episode I'd like for you to just go into Google and type quote scholarly articles, yin Yoga into the Google search bar, and immediately you will see a number of papers, and so you'll know. Okay, this is a pretty good place to start, by the way, all of the evidence that I included in the introduction talking about how Yin Yoga is so beneficial for anxiety, chronic stress, physical health, mental health. Those articles will give you a great place to start on learning more about that. Okay, so anytime you want to see if there is specific data on something that you're interested in, you can just add the words quote scholarly articles to your Google search term. So that's my first quick hack for finding out number one, if there is evidence, and then starting to sort of determine what articles you might like to read to see if you can broaden your understanding and knowledge of what's available.
Speaker 1:Another great option is just to go right to pub med P-U-B-M-E-D all one word. This is a huge, huge library of published research. So the problem with both of these is that and you may have encountered this before if you tried to look up research a lot of research is behind a paywall, and that is definitely a bummer, although of course, we try to understand that research is very expensive and somehow those costs need to be recouped or at least minimized. But I'll let you know that sometimes it's okay, because you can just read the quick abstract, which is going to tell you what the study was about, and then you can read the conclusions, and so that's a good place for you to say is this even relevant for me? Because sometimes you read that abstract and you're like that's not a question that needs answering for me, that's not going to be applicable to my students or to my personal needs, and so that can really be helpful, just to know if it's even useful to you. But the other part of that is, if the conclusions are there, it might just add to your body of knowledge about the topic, because just reading one study on something is not going to make you evidence informed. It's having a great deal of studies that you can draw from to help your students or to improve the quality of your practice.
Speaker 1:However, if you really, really, really would like to view that whole article and that happens quite a bit there's a couple of options that you could use. If you have any access to institutions of higher learning so say, you're currently in college, right? Or maybe you have a friend who's a college professor, maybe your kid is in university right now they might be able to access the study for you through their academic institution. If they'd be nice enough to just call the librarian and see what they have access to and then, of course, send it to you via email. I've done that several times. I find that very useful, so that's a really good option. Another place that might have some access to different research publications would be your public library. So you can call your librarian and see what they have and see if maybe they could provide you with the article. And then there's one other option for them the more brave among you and that is to just email the author and ask for access. So generally, the author's email is included in that abstract.
Speaker 1:In conclusion, so that could be a really great option and hopefully, with all of those options, you can find a way to get the articles that you really really need to read. And sometimes that is extremely important, right. Sometimes the conclusion is a 12 week yoga program, significantly reduced cortisol or something. I don't know if that's a thing, right. But you're like oh great, it worked. Okay, but what was the yoga program? What did they do? What was the control? So sometimes you really just have to have your hands on that whole paper. So now that you know where to find relevant research, let's talk about what to do once you've found it. I'm just going to be real with you, and you may already know this If you've kind of delved into this already.
Speaker 1:Research can be very difficult to read, so I want to make it clear that this is also a work in progress for me. I am by no means completely comfortable with every aspect of reading research, mostly the statistics. I still really struggle with that and, if I'm honest, I actually don't see myself getting a whole lot better at that In this lifetime. I just I am not a numbers person, I just have a block around numbers. So I'll let you know that even if you don't understand all of the statistical terminology, you can do just fine. You can learn quite a bit and then, as you're reading, you'll start to learn what those terms mean and it won't be quite such a chore to try to decipher all of those numbers. But that should not be the thing that scares you. So if you're seeing all of those weird symbols and numbers and you're like I have no idea what that means, it's okay, just keep reading. I promise it will get easier over time. And the other part of that is that Google is right there, right At any time. You can just copy and paste that term into Google and it will explain it to you. And while this may be kind of time consuming at the beginning. Over time, you'll find that you are so much more skilled and so much more efficient at reading research.
Speaker 1:So the first thing that I think you need to understand to read research is that there are lots of different kinds of research. Each of them has its particular use case, but there are a few types of research that I think are probably the most applicable to us as enthusiasts, and so we're going to focus on those, because I'm trying to make this really simple and accessible for you. So let's talk about where these three types of research might be the most useful, and for each of the three types of research I want to introduce you to, I will also provide some context about how they might be applied by us as teachers or students of YIN. So make sure to keep your ears perked for that, because that's, I think, where this really starts to take shape.
Speaker 1:So the first type of research is known as observational research. If you're interested in learning about connective tissue, for example, or you want to learn about the respiratory and pelvic diaphragms, or you want to learn about any other component of human anatomy, say the gastrocnemius muscle, the rotator cuff, the splinus capitis, whatever it is, if you're going to find research on these things, it's going to be observational. It's basically going to be researchers talking about all of the different aspects of this particular part of the anatomy, so things like their origin and their insertion and the angle of panation. It's going to be talking about the innervation and how they get their blood supply, these tissues, and it can be pretty dense but also really incredibly informative if anatomy is your thing. So in observational research, the research's task is to observe something in its natural environment and report on that. So it's sort of like you've got the benefit of being in the cadaver lab without actually having to be in the cadaver lab.
Speaker 1:And I will say that a lot of times this can be challenging because the terminology will probably be pretty unfamiliar, even for somebody who's been studying anatomy for a long time, like me. My recommendation is that you print the article and you keep your phone or your tablet nearby so you can just Google the stuff you don't know and go right to the image search, because most of us learn best when we have multiple forms of input. So having that image to pair with what you're reading, and then maybe if you've got somebody, you can kind of poke and prod that place on them or on yourself. All of these different ways will help to increase your capacity to learn these different anatomical points over time, which means that you will eventually get better at it. You'll be able to get through that research in a more efficient way in the future.
Speaker 1:And my other recommendation is that you give yourself a good long time to get through your first few studies and that you do a mindset check every time you sit down to read this type of research. Remember that you're not just reading to learn about the conclusions or observations of the paper, but you're also here to learn more about reading this kind of paper. You won't understand everything, but you will definitely know more than you did each time you take the time to practice. So that's observational research. And for those of you who are interested in anatomy and you know you've got like a group of students who are really, really struggling with tight hamstrings find some articles about the hamstrings. Learn all about the hamstrings. Okay, you will not regret the time you spend. And especially for those of you who are really interested in connective tissue, that's a big part of your teaching. You need to start reading data about connective tissue as soon as possible.
Speaker 1:So the next type of research I want to introduce you to is the randomized control trial. This is the gold standard for research and probably what you think of when you think of research. So a randomized control trial, rct, is a quantitative, comparative controlled experiment, and in RCT, participants are randomly assigned to one of two groups the experimental group, which will be the one that receives the intervention being tested, and the control group, which receives an alternative treatment or sometimes nothing at all. So the randomization ensures that the intervention and the control groups are comparable at the beginning of the study. The only expected difference between the groups is the outcome variable being studied, which I'll talk a little bit more about in a second. So honestly, I just love to snuggle up to a relevant RCT on a lazy Sunday morning. I think it's really fun actually to see how the researchers set up the experiment and if their hypothesis will be confirmed or not. I also really like to think about what was missing from the methods which would have made the results more conclusive, or generally it's more selfish. So sometimes all the methods and everything and it's like great, that was their hypothesis. But if they had just tested for one other thing, it would be like the perfect study for me. I'll give you an example A lot of my pain care clients are also suffering from metabolic issues and overweight or obesity, and especially over the last year I've seen quite a few of my clients go on semi-gluteide-based weight loss drugs like Osympic or Wagovi or Manjaro.
Speaker 1:So the research around these drugs obviously shows that they work. They work really, really well. But the problem with this research from my perspective, as someone who also specializes in strength training and provides that for my clients is that so far, none of the studies that I'm aware of also test for body composition. So we know that the drugs can help people to lose weight. What we don't necessarily know yet is what is the proportion of fat to lean mass loss, and this is really stinking important because lean mass is so vital for overall metabolic health, quality of life and even the ability to keep the weight off should the person stop taking the drug. So I always wish this was present. So that's kind of what I mean by. Sometimes you're like, oh, if only they put that in there.
Speaker 1:So RCTs are also fun in the sense that, as yoga people, our paradigm starts and ends with this comprehensive wholeness, but RCTs can only ever address one discrete data point. Otherwise the data would be useless. So I like to think of the findings as one of many potential strategies that I can suggest to my client or student as part of a holistic approach and depending on their personal needs and preferences, because really all true healing is just a consequence of many small actions, many small variables that over time and with dedication, combined to create a huge shift. So knowing how one small intervention can contribute to overall health can be very valuable. It's that 10% rule right. I'm never going to get 100%, but if I can add something to someone's program that will help them improve 10% and I can do that 10 times, it's the same right. So how would a yoga teacher, a yen teacher, use an RCT to support their students or their population?
Speaker 1:So let's say you work mostly with college students, for example, and your students practice yen yoga to reduce anxiety, to help improve attention, for studying and for testing. Is there a randomized control trial about this? Yes, there is. Though the paper currently is not public, it does appear that yoga, when combined with an interoception focus, can help with mood and attention in community dwelling adult participants. So your college students are living in communities, typically dorms, right? A lot of college students are managing some depressive symptoms, and so this paper really is very well correlated with their needs, because they want to improve their mood, their stress level and, of course, their attention.
Speaker 1:So the final type of research that I would like to present to you that I think is really useful, especially for us yoga yen teachers and students, is the systematic review. So a systematic review is a piece of research that pulls together a whole lot of studies that are similar and tested for the same variables, right? So if we're looking how yen yoga can improve attention in community dwelling individuals, then one study is great. It's like, oh, that's really good to know, but if you had 10 studies that looked at this, that would be a much more compelling data set, would it not? So that's what the systematic review does, because even though an individual study might only have like 20 or 80 subjects, when you multiply many studies, you can make extrapolations based on a much larger data set, sometimes thousands of subjects.
Speaker 1:Systematic reviews are typically compilations of randomized control trials, so the idea is very much the same and how you would read it and potentially use it. So the nice thing about the systematic review is that you'll have access to tons of charts to show you how each of the included studies contributed to the overall conclusions, right? So you can sort of quickly go through all of the different studies that the researchers included, which, by the way, is usually a fairly rigorous process, so they've already vetted out for the very best data and you can go through and you can read that chart and you can see, oh okay, this did this, this did this, this did this and you can get a lot of information about a lot of different studies very quickly. And, of course, all of the citations will have links to those studies. So if you want to read more right and really truly increase your body of knowledge, it's all right there. All you have to do is click the link, right?
Speaker 1:So how would you use the systematic review and your practice and teaching? So maybe you work with athletes, for example, or weekend warriors, or maybe you work in a yoga studio that's like mostly power-based, right and mostly hot yoga-based. It's very, very young and you would like to recommend a certain type of practice or stretches or a recovery routine, if you will, as Yen Yoga practice. So ask Google for scholarly articles related to work out recovery and static stretching. And I will let you know that I have already done this because I'm a Yen Yoga teacher and I am also a strength coach, right?
Speaker 1:So in the case of workout recovery, I can tell you, based on a recent systematic review, that there is not sufficient evidence that static stretching can help with exercise recovery as compared to passive or alternative recovery methods. I'm sorry, but it's true. It's not. It's really not that effective, at least when your recovery markers are things like recovery of range of motion, right. So it's not going to help with that stiffness after a big workout, it's not going to diminish delayed onset, muscle soreness, the dreaded domes, and it's not going to help to recover peak strength any better than just resting or alternative recovery methods.
Speaker 1:So this is a really good example of how sometimes we're looking up research so that we can confirm our bias, right. But sometimes we actually find that we were wrong. Our bias was wrong, and this is super valuable, because the best way to search for and consume research should not be to validate your current bias. It should be to simply learn more about the topic, increase your body of knowledge, because to be evidence informed does not only mean that we have one study to back up all of our tools and strategies, although if you had a systematic review, that would be pretty good. It means that we retire stuff that isn't validated, like recommending static stretching for athletes with the promise that they will recover faster.
Speaker 1:So those are the three types of studies that I think are most important for you to know about as a Yen yoga teacher, and I hope that you have been able to see how you might be able to apply that information specifically to boots on the ground Yen yoga teaching or practice. I've also let you know how you can find this research. Now there are so many more questions about research, like what do you do once you've found it? How do you even know it's a good article and it's not completely bogus. So these are huge questions, which is why this is a multi part series, because in the next part we're actually going to talk about reading the scientific literature and some tips on how to make sure that it is a reputable study.
Speaker 1:I want to give one more note here in this introduction to becoming an evidence informant teacher or student, and that is really specifically to the population that I love to work with, which is people who are healing chronic pain. Now, what's really cool about this, about this particular population, is that we actually have quite a bit of evidence which is not specifically about Yen yoga for chronic pain, but is peripheral and includes things like diet, exercise, mindfulness, interoception right, so I can apply all of those to my work and blend Yen in as well. But honestly to me, I just can't help but think if all adults, not just us yoga teachers in the US had the ability to find and read research, we may not even actually have a chronic pain epidemic, right, because we have such good information and so many more strategies than we have ever had before, which are largely based on lifestyle changes. Right, what I just talked about diet, exercise, mindfulness, interoception, having a strong support system and community bonds. But the other part of this is that I encounter people all the time probably you do too family members, friends or the students in your classes, if you're a teacher who are struggling with a pain issue, and they are not my clients, right? They don't believe that my approach can help them, and so they're usually going down the surgical route. And it is not my place, right? I am not a doctor, I'm not a physical therapist. It's not my place to say if this is good or bad or what, and I certainly will support anyone in making healthcare decisions for themselves with the collaboration of a skilled and hopefully evidence informed physician.
Speaker 1:But I do find frequently that my students are doing procedures and surgeries and drugs that actually are not evidence informed. So here's just a couple of examples. A common procedure that people have maybe you've had this all the time for knee issues which have been attributed to a damaged meniscus this is the knee arthroscopy. Multiple studies show that knee arthroscopy is no more effective than a sham surgery. So in your randomized control trial, the intervention group will receive the actual meniskectomy or arthroscopy of their meniscus right. The control group will simply go in under anesthesia, the surgeon will make a cut and then we'll sew it back up, and in the research both groups do about the same.
Speaker 1:I think if people understood this, they could save themselves a lot of partake in time and money and it would open them up to what does that actually mean to heal this part of my body? And are there other things that I could be doing that would be just as effective and not quite so invasive? Right? Or? This is when I hear a lot too, people who are having back pain and they go in for some kind of spinal surgery. I don't know if people are well prepared for the fact that spinal surgeries have not only a huge risk of major complications. I think people are informed about this, but I don't know if people understand that spinal surgeries have a very high risk of failure. So the success rate for back surgery is only about 50%. The risk of failure is 10 to 40%. So I think if people understood the numbers and of course, we could get more granular and talk about each different type of spinal surgery some slightly more effective, some way less effective, right but I think if people knew how to read the research, then they could be much, much more empowered to make good health decisions, which would save so much time and so much suffering, so much suffering. So this was part one of how to become an evidence-informed Yin teacher or student.
Speaker 1:Next week I'm going to be giving you some time-saving tips on how to read research. If you have had your interest peaked and you are ready to become a more evidence-informed teacher, I recommend that you check out module one of my Yin Yoga teacher training. There is information about teaching in module one, but it's actually mostly the science of Yin which, if you really dug this episode, you will love. If you would like more information about enrolling in module one, I will put a link in the show notes. I'll let you know that for the cohort that's joining here in October and November of 2023, I'll be doing a couple of cohort calls in November, which is not usually something that I offer. It's usually completely self-guided, so if you want to opt in now, you could get a little bit of extra content and have an opportunity to pick my brain on those two cohort calls in November.