At the end of one of my leisure centre classes a student who is a serving police officer comes up to see me.
He has one knee strapped but walked into the class without difficulty so I made no comment at the time and he had no obvious problems in the class.
He tells me he recently fell 8ft off a ladder onto concrete and injured his knee. He went to hospital and had it checked out and fortunately nothing was broken. He goes on to tell me that he has had significant issues with that knee previously following a skiing accident and is confident that his yoga practice helped him avoid serious injury.
I tell him that yoga is many things and agree that, by giving us good awareness of posture and increasing both suppleness and flexibility, it provides an insurance policy against both sustaining injury and potentially limiting the extent of injury in case of an accident. So whilst there is no way of knowing whether his yoga made a difference to the outcome in this particular instance, it is certainly a possibility.
As a professional hedgelayer now in my mid sixties I am very aware myself how helpful yoga has been, over decades allowing me to maintain both good posture and the suppleness and flexibility I need to lay hedges day after day and to help with injury prevention/limitation. A hedgelayer spends much of his/her time bent forward and is often working in confined and awkward spaces.
Obviously there is an element of luck involved but as the legendary golfer Arnold Palmer once said, "The more I practise the luckier I get."
Yoga - perhaps the only insurance policy you'll ever enjoy taking out.