Screening for identification of shoulder pathology in yoga practitioners - an observational study

Author: 
Sidhpura Disha S., Desai Manali S and Kumar Ajay

Background: Yoga demands strength and flexibility to be performed safely. It has been reported that yoga has also been known to cause musculoskeletal pain in healthy individuals due to unsafe practices, advanced techniques. Previous retrospective studies showed that along with knee, shoulder is the second most common injured joint in yoga practitioners. So there was a need to identify and screen shoulder pathologies in regular yoga practitioners.
Method: A cross sectional observational study conducted in yoga classes for 1 year and included 70 yoga practitioners, aged 20-40 yrs. Subjects were selected on the basis of inclusion and exclusion criteria. Those subjects with shoulder pain were identified and selected for clinical testing for shoulder pathology. 8 special tests were performed on the affected shoulder.
Results: Among 70 subjects, 51 (72.85%) were identified with no shoulder pain, 17 (24.28%) had shoulder pain. Among 17 shoulder pain subjects, 11(64.70 %) gave negative response on special tests, 6 gave positive response for special tests i.e. Hawkins’s Kennedy, Empty Can test and drop arm test.
Conclusions: Our study showed that supraspinatus muscle and rotator cuff muscles of shoulder joint are more prone to get injured due to unsafe and unsupervised Yoga practices, wrong biomechanics and advanced postures.

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DOI: 
http://dx.doi.org/10.24327/ijcar.2018.14241.2573
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