Why yoga teachers learn to dissect cadavers

Jane Sato thought she understood abs. During her first ten years of teaching Pilates and yoga in New York City, she told her students to pull their navel into their spine to strengthen their core.

But when she saw what the abdominal muscles actually looked like during a human cadaver dissection workshop at Mount Sinai Hospital—the intersected layers of tissue and fascia, the way the muscles also ran from front to front and up and down—she realized that her words were not true. almost as educational as they can be.

“There’s just a lot more to the picture,” she said. “When you see it in real life, your signals automatically change.”

Instead of telling clients to suck in their belly button, she now tells them to pull in all their core muscles, “like a hug.”

Ms. Sato is one of thousands of fitness professionals who have completed cadaver workshops to better understand anatomy and improve their teaching skills. Over the past two decades, at least a dozen dissection courses have emerged—most outside the traditional medical system—targeting people like yoga teachersmassage therapists and Peloton trainers.

While most of these professions require some anatomical training to become certified, it can vary widely and usually relies on two-dimensional images, plastic models, and even anatomy coloring bookswhich can create a misleading picture of how the body works.

“They are looking for more information,” says Rachele Pojednic, director of exercise science at Norwich University and research associate at the Harvard Institute of Lifestyle Medicine. But often, she added, “they don’t know who to go to.” Why not “arm these professionals with as much knowledge as possible?”

A visceral experience

Experts say you can’t fully understand the value of a dissection until you participate in it. So on a sunny Saturday in October, fueled in part by morbid curiosity, I went to a lab called Experience Anatomy, in an office park near the Charlotte, NC, airport. I was both excited and nervous, and I was acutely aware that I might not be able to see what I was seeing.

The two-day dissection was led by Fauna Moore, an Ashtanga yoga instructor and massage therapist who began attending, studying, and then teaching dissections after being disappointed with the anatomy instructions she received during the training. (You don’t need any special certification to supervise a cadaver dissection, although she has shadowed experienced dissections for years.)

After a brief orientation, the course’s five students gathered around the cadaver, scalpels in hand. While some courses for fitness professionals teach with bodies (or body parts) that have already been dissected, in this workshop the students would dissect a complete cadaver themselves. In all cases, the donors or relatives have specifically donated the body to scientific research – although they do not always know the specific way it will be used.

As the group stood in silence under the bright light of fluorescent lights, Ms. Moore removed a white sheet covering the body. Dissecting a human can be an emotional and harrowing experience, she said, so she suggested the students name the cadaver, a 75-year-old woman, in recognition of her humanity.

The group chose ‘Betty’.

New technologies, such as three-dimensional virtual software, have made the human body easier to study – and, some argue, made cadavers obsolete. But medical students still say that seeing, touching and holding real human tissue is much more educational than images or models. And it leads to better, more compassionate care, says Jeffrey Laitman, who has led Mount Sinai’s anatomy lab for more than 40 years.

“It’s an extremely humbling experience,” he said. “If you hold a heart in your hand, you will never be the same.”

In the dissection room, Ms. Moore demonstrated how to properly hold a scalpel (“like a pen”). Then she made the first cut, on the thigh, and showed how to carefully pull back layer by layer: first the skin, then the sticky white fascia, then the bright yellow fat and so on. The body was “gently embalmed”, a technique that requires very little formaldehyde, preserves colors and textures and, as I quickly learned, makes things very messy.

“I don’t know where to start,” said one student, a massage therapist.

“You can’t screw it up,” Mrs. Moore replied. “Even if you go a little too deep, you can start over somewhere else.”

A new view of the body

For people who handle clients — such as massage therapists and Pilates, yoga or strength trainers — touching real tissue provides an unparalleled learning experience, said Dr. Carrie McCulloch, a physician and Pilates instructor who co-taught the dissection course at Mt. Sinai co-founded. husband, a Pilates instructor and former dancer named Matt McCulloch, as well as Dr. Laitman.

“They work with real human bodies,” said Dr. McCulloch, “and they should also learn from real human bodies.”

Courses range from about $1,200 for a weekend workshop to $4,500 or more for a six-day program. Anna Kaiser, owner of two popular cardio dance studios in New York and who took the Mount Sinai course in 2012, said the course left her feeling better equipped to help certain postpartum clients.

Ms Kaiser, who has worked with celebrities such as Shakira and Alicia Keys, was able to study a donor body that had undergone a caesarean section and was struck by the number of layers of abdominal muscle that had been severed. This deepened her appreciation for the seriousness of the recovery, but also the work required to rebuild core strength, layer by layer.

Now, “I can imagine what that looks like,” she said. “It’s very different from seeing a picture in a book.”

Back at the dissection table, the students began to reach muscles. “It’s so much more delicate than I thought,” someone commented, as he pulled apart the four long strands that made up the quadriceps.

In contrast, they noted the toughness of the fascia, or connective tissue, that surrounds each muscle. “It is very flexible but also very durable,” said one student. “You need to put a little pressure on your scalpel.”

One student handed me the iliotibial (or IT) band, which went from Betty’s hip to her knee and felt strong but surprisingly light and thin, almost like duct tape. During all those years of aggressively foam rolling mine, I imagined it being thicker and gnarlier. I made a mental note to go easier.

The case for carcasses

Over the past two decades, as research into the health benefits of exercise has expanded, more and more primary care physicians are recommending exercise to their patients. according to the National Center for Health Statistics. As a result, many fitness professionals now work with clients with complex conditions, from knee replacements to high blood pressure.

“Health, fitness, treatment and doctors are part of a continuum,” said Dr. Laitman. “Fitness professionals – they often see people before they see a doctor.”

Sometimes, after taking a dissection course, “instructors realize that some of the choices they made for their clients were not well informed enough,” says Mr. McCulloch, who has co-authored books on anatomy. For example, after seeing the bones of cadavers with osteoporosis, some students realized that the bends and twists during their workouts might be too aggressive for a client’s delicate body.

Natasha Standley, a massage therapist and former step aerobics instructor in Ms. Moore’s course, later told me that she learned what she can and cannot control when working with clients.

“Some of the muscles are really deep,” she said. The dissection made it clear that the psoas and quadratus lumborum (QL) muscles, which can cause back, pelvic and hip pain, are not accessible, despite what the diagrams might suggest. Instead of trying to reach them through massage, she says, she plans to incorporate more stretching into her work.

After the students finished lunch (most opted for vegetarian), they returned to their posts at the dissection table. Mrs. Moore and a laboratory assistant had turned Betty over and put on music to revive the group. As REM’s ‘Losing My Religion’ started playing from an overhead speaker, everyone picked up their scalpels.

The day went smoothly, but afterwards I felt shaken. When I arrived at the airport that evening, I saw no travelers; I saw walking carcasses.

But as time has gone by, I have come to appreciate the complexity and interconnectedness of every muscle, tendon and bone. Spending time with a body that will never move again gave me a new appreciation for my own body’s ability to move. When I got home, I couldn’t wait to go for a run.