My Yoga Journey - By Physiotherapist Dr Chris Norris

My Yoga Journey - By Chris Norris Phd 

I first became aware of yoga over 40 years ago while still at school.  Someone mentioned that his mother taught yoga and showed us all a couple of poses, and I bought a yoga book and started practising to see what it was all about.  At the time it was the Bruce Lee martial arts craze (the films had just come out) and I used yoga as stretching exercises and took up Kung Fu while in my sixth form.  When I went to physiotherapy college I got more into the science of stretching and also took a meditation course which was open to students.  From then on I used stretching as part of a gym based fitness programme and meditation in the mornings never really connecting the two.

Later in life after my daughter was born I took up yoga again, seeing a Hatha yoga class advertised and practiced it again mostly as stretching in parallel with martial arts, which by this time had become Ju Jitsu.  Following an injury, the martial arts took a bit of a back seat, and I went to another yoga course, this time from the Iyengar style.  It immediately struck me that this style (very traditional) was precise in the application of poses, which appealed to me as a physio.  I took two classes a week and then decided to train as a yoga teacher, more to enhance my own practice really.  The Iyengar teacher training is quite intense (two years) and, although it enabled me to further my own practice as a traditional Indian practice, there were elements that did not align with physiotherapy evidence-based practice.  Although now a qualified Iyengar teacher, I decided to augment this with a more science-based level 3 instructor course as I had already qualified as a level 3 Pilates teacher and taught instructors in Pilates.

The thing which really appealed to me about yoga was the combination of meditation type practice (mindfulness) with movement, often using the breath.  As with many traditional exercise forms they are safer practised under the lens of modern science to avoid many of the injuries therapists see.  The 3-day yoga-as-therapy (YAT) course takes precisely this approach – combining science with traditional practice.

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