Is it possible to be too flexible? Yoga might make you too bendy without making you strong enough to handle it.

Pedro_P

Flexibility can get you hurt if you don't strengthen your muscles.
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▼ Yoga class is all about poses, from the basics, like bridge, chair, and cow pose, up to complicated headstands and one-armed, twisting backbends. Expert practitioners can seem to tie themselves in knots.
Their extreme flexibility isn’t necessarily a sign of anything dangerous. But being very, very flexible can put people at risk for injuries if their bodies don’t have enough strength to stabilize their muscles as they stretch and bend. Activities like yoga, which only use a person’s body weight, can run the risk of improving flexibility without ensuring that they get stronger at the same time.
“It’s not that yoga is over-stretching, it’s under-loading,” says Jules Mitchell, a yoga teacher and biomechanics specialist. “People aren’t strong enough.”
The old-school model of flexibility thinks of muscles as rubber bands, which stretch out to accommodate the movement of a particular body part. Pull the rubber band, and it will gradually become more pliable, and allow the body to move more freely. However, that idea has fallen out of favor, says Matthew Taylor, physical therapist and former president of the International Association of Yoga Therapists. “It's really about motor systems,” he says. Flexibility is more a combination of the stretch in your muscles, the mobility around your joints, and your internal awareness of where, exactly, each part of your body is—and how to get it where it needs to go.
It’s possible to change some aspects of flexibility: you can get better at monitoring the positioning of your arms and legs, and (although the evidence is  mixed) it might be possible to lengthen your individual muscle fibers. But your ability to, say, touch your toesalso depends on things you can’t change, like the bone structures where your hip meets your femur or the arch of your spine.
Flexibility is on a spectrum. If you’re on the stiff end, and your bones link up in particular ways, it might not be possible to get into certain positions in a yoga class without modifications. Some injuries occur, though, when people doing yoga try to force their bodies into those positions anyway. Take downward dog, Taylor says. Pushing your butt upwards from all fours means that your spine has to bend, slightly. But if your spine doesn’t move, and you still move into the posture, your shoulders have to bend, instead. It seems like you’re flexible enough—but you’re not.
“People still look like they’re in a downward dog,” Taylor says. “But they’re over-bending at the shoulder, and the soft, vulnerable tissues get pinched. That’s when we see a breakdown, and could have a shoulder injury.” Some yoga instructors can see and correct bad form that might lead to this kind of injury, but many don’t. (▪ ▪ ▪)

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sktorry

Yoga really makes one flexible and strong.