Yoga for osteoporosis
A diagnosis of osteopenia or osteoporosis is not an instruction to stop moving.
If you have been told you have osteopenia or osteoporosis, you have probably also been told to be careful — and then left to work out for yourself what careful means. Bone loss speeds up after menopause, which is when most women first hear the word.
It does not mean stopping. Bone responds to being loaded. Balance is what keeps you off the floor in the first place, and it is falls, not stillness, that break things.
It does mean some familiar shapes come out of your practice — deep forward folds, rounded spines, twists cranked from the ends. A general class will not necessarily know that. I will.
Loading the bones
Hold a posture twelve seconds and the bone-building cells go to work. Bone builds itself where it carries weight, and gives back what it doesn't.
Balance, from the feet up
Fractures happen in falls, not in stillness. We start at the feet and build upward, until you have a base you trust on an icy pavement.
Length through the spine
Osteoporosis goes for the spine first, and the rounding shows long before a scan mentions it. So we work on length. It changes how you walk into a room.
Knowing what to leave out
Some ordinary yoga shapes are a bad idea for you now. A general class won't know which. That is what I was trained for.
If a doctor or physiotherapist is already guiding you on this, bring me what they have told you and we will work with it.
The approach and the goals of Yoga vs. Osteoporosis
What you have probably been told
That you have osteopenia, or osteoporosis. That you should be careful, that you should take medication — and, in most cases, very little else.
So people do one of two things. They carry on exactly as before, including the shapes that are now a genuinely bad idea. Or they become frightened of their own body and stop moving altogether, which over time is the worse of the two.
What we do
We load the bones
Bone is living tissue and it responds to carrying weight. Standing work, weight through the legs and the arms, and we build up what your body is able to hold rather than avoiding it.
We train balance, slowly and seriously
Fractures do not happen in stillness. They happen in falls. An hour a week on single-leg work, on ankles and feet, on knowing where you are in space, does more for you than almost anything else on the mat — with a chair or a wall to hold for as long as you want one. There is no prize for letting go early.
We build strength for ordinary life
Not strength for its own sake. Strength for stairs, for lifting a case into an overhead locker, for getting up off the floor unaided — which is the single most useful thing a body over sixty can do.
And what comes out
Some shapes carry more risk once bone density is low, and they are, unhelpfully, among the commonest movements in a normal yoga class.
- Deep forward folds — loaded flexion of the spine, particularly with a rounded back.
- Rounded, curled shapes — anything asking the front of the vertebrae to take the compression.
- Impact and jumping — jump-backs, jump-throughs, anything that lands hard.
This does not mean you cannot practise. It means the practice is built differently from the start, by a teacher who is watching for it.
What I trained in
I am certified in Dr Loren Fishman’s Yoga vs Osteoporosis method. I did his teacher training in Chicago in 2017, and I have been teaching it for nine years. He is a physiatrist — a specialist in physical medicine and rehabilitation — who practises in New York, teaches at Columbia, and has spent years studying what yoga does to bone. The sequences I use in these sessions are his.
I trained in this method five years before my own hips were replaced. Then I had to use it on myself.
I mention it because it is unusual. As far as I can find, no one else in Geneva teaches this method, and very few yoga teachers anywhere have trained directly with a physician on this particular question.
Why me
I have two artificial hips and I swim up to three and a half kilometres in a go. Both were replaced inside twelve months — the right in June 2022, the left in June 2023 — and I went back to teaching, back to the water, and back to a full practice, not a careful diminished version of one.
I know what it is to rebuild from the inside, slowly and in the right order, with a great deal of unglamorous repetition. It is why I am not frightened of whatever your body is currently doing.
« Ça m’a complètement transformé ma vie, et c’est le meilleur pour… not aging. »
Marc Lüthi · in her class since 2008
How to start
Begin with one private session, so I can see how you move before you are in a room with other people. An hour is enough for me to know what your spine does under load, how your balance is, and which of the usual shapes we are leaving out. Then join a group class that suits your week.
Bring what your doctor has told you. If a physiotherapist or rheumatologist is already guiding you, we work inside their instructions. I am a yoga teacher and a movement educator, not a doctor, and I will not contradict someone who has seen your scan.
One honest caveat
You will find it claimed online that this method increases bone density, and the claim comes from Dr Fishman’s own research. I would rather you heard the limits of it from me than discovered them later.
His 2016 study reported gains. It was not randomised, it had no control group, and of the 741 people enrolled, 43 completed it with full before-and-after scans. The paper itself lists those limitations. It is suggestive work, not settled work.
So I will not promise you bone. What a regular practice reliably gives back is more modest and more useful: strength you notice on the stairs, balance that makes a stumble a stumble rather than a fall, a nervous system that settles more easily, and one hour a week entirely for yourself.
