How I proved that yoga is useless

While you will feel better for a few days after doing yoga, you do not make any true long-term progress. And I proved it.

So I love testing out these provocative clickbaity-titles… so please don’t get offended by them.

If you do yoga and think it brings you lots of benefits… please accept my apology.

I have no intention of offending you, rather I just want to shed some light so that you are making an ‘informed’ rather than an uninformed decision.

Laying the context to my yoga experiments of 2016-17

So back in 2016 I was playing around a lot with with flat plane splints. You see in early 2016 I started seeing an ALF dentist named Dr. Hurme and he’d given me my first flat plane splint.

And since I was in Vietnam at the time and he was in Texas he gave me instructions on how to adjust it.

Now i think you were only supposed to adjust it like every 6 weeks or so… but me being the nut I am, I began adjusting it daily or even several times a day at some point.

Now what do I mean by ‘adjusting’ it. Well it means that you are using ‘articulating paper’ to figure out where the contacts between the upper and lower teeth are.

So imagine you’re wearing a splint on your lower teeth like this one… and then you put the articulating paper in your mouth and bite on it a few times.

It will leave marks like the little green spots you see above.

And i would take my dental drill out and basically drill down any ‘heavy’ spots, then i would bite on the articulating paper again.

And i’d drill down the heavy spots again. Sometimes they’d be on different teeth.

I would keep repeating this process until all back four teeth on the left and right side of the flat splint had nice even ink marks with the articulating paper.

This essentially meant that the plane of the lower splint matched the plane of contacts made by the upper teeth.

Next I would do some yoga

So I’d go and do an hour or two of really hard yoga. I had a couple of Youtube yoga videos i would use to do this (like the one above).

After finishing the yoga i would use the articulating paper to check the contacts again.

And i’d always find that they were no longer even. Some spots were now entirely missing.

For example here is an example of a splint i used to use back around that time.. but it’s not the one i used in this experiment as it doesnt cover all back four teeth.

If you look at the two red arrows there are no ink spots there despite the fact that there had been ink spots there just 2 hours ago.

So what happened? What does this mean?

Well this means that some combination of your jaw and spine had repositioned. And most likely they have improved since you did yoga and you stretched the spine out.

This is great news!! Yoga works!

Wait… not so fast!

So a few days later i’d put the same dental splint in my mouth and check it for contacts with the articulating paper.

All of the spots were even again!

Meaning that the contacts were exactly as they were before I had done the yoga.

Or another way of interpreting this is that your jaw and spine had reverted back to the exact same position that they were in before doing the yoga.

Yet another way of saying this is… you had gone right back to where you were!

I repeated this experiment at least 4-5 more times with yoga to make sure it was correct.

This is true not just of yoga but most body work

As I was seeing an osteopath I would do the same thing before and after I visited the osteopath. Same thing happened!

I also occasionally got massages. Same thing happened!

I’m willing to bet it’s also true if you did acupuncture or did any exercise in general.

What can you conclude?

Well you can conclude that body work does indeed change the position of your spine and jaw… as reflected by the fact that the contact points of the upper and lower teeth always change (as evidenced by the articulating paper).

The problem is that they always go back to where they were within a few days.

That is… unless you do the yoga again!

And this is where this matches up so tightly with what you hear from folks that love yoga. They do the yoga and feel great.

But after some days if they do not do the yoga they feel tight and want to do the yoga again.

Why? Because everything had gone right back to where it was.

They’re not actually making any real progress. They’re just making a bit of progress, regressing to where they were, and then repeating the cycle all over again.

Kinda like a hamster wheel!

Show me the person that truly changed the shape of their spine over a period of years using yoga… I have been paying attention to this and asking folks that do yoga for something like 8 years ever since I first ran this experiment in 2016.

And guess what…I haven’t found one!

Rather when I talk to folks that do yoga regularly they literally ALWAYS fit into the pattern that i explain above.