Incorporating a regular yoga exercise routine into your daily life schedule is an excellent way to stretch, tone, and strengthen your body.
The plank pose (uttihita chaturanga dandasan is its full Indian name) is one of those yoga poses that will benefit your entire body by doing it just for one or two minutes every day.
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This compact and powerful exercise is in fact a mini, super-fast total body workout in its own right.
You can do it by using your own body weight as resistance, and you don’t need anything else.
As simple as that.
However, as it has been allegedly argued in an online newspaper article, the plank pose can potentially harm your health.
In the case under discussion, a woman’s daily effort to gradually increase the number of minutes that she could hold the plank pose finally caused her to suffer from costochondritis.
While there is not any reason, of course, to challenge this story line, I would definitely doubt whether it was doing the plank exercise that really caused her to suffer from costochondritis.
There could be so many other reasons as well, for example leading a sedentary life without moving, or staying in front of a computer screen for hours every day.
These could very well explain her health condition as well, although they are not stressed in the article, either by her or the physician that examined her.
Another important point that should be highlighted is that yoga itself is always intended to do good rather than harm to one’s health.
As it is clearly advised by yoga practitioners and gurus, any particular pose should not be held for more than one to two minutes at most.
Contrary to that, the woman mentioned in the article made the “purpose of her life” to be able to hold the plank position for over five minutes!
This practice is completely wrong, and totally contradicts the recommendations of top yoga gurus.
While doing any yoga exercise, focus should be placed on your breathing, and definitely not on how many minutes you can hold a specific exercise.
