To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t super excited to take my required Thai Yoga Anatomy course. I had two-semesters of human anatomy, comparative anatomy, gross human anatomy (yes, dissections), and kinesiology (I think it relates in this context). I had numerous courses in biology that covered aspects of anatomy. I studied cell biology where we went into detail of muscles, fibers, sarcomeres, blah-blah-blah. I knew I’d learn something, but I didn’t know how much.
Boy was I wrong!!
It started out with 12 hours of online instruction. The videos were well done and involved not only the rudimentary topics of names, origins, insertions, etc…. It also had sections on palpation, range of motion, and other tests of muscle function. When I arrived for the on-site training, we built heavily upon the online portion. Most of our time was spent feeling the muscles and doing various tests. It makes a huge difference from seeing something with your eyes or looking at inanimate models of bones and muscles, to actually evaluating muscles on different bodies.
So instead of poo-pooing the idea of learning more anatomy, its all I think about now. Mind you that in early Thailand, and maybe today, human dissections are not considered. In the West, we always seek a scientific reason for why things have worked so well for thousands of years. Yoga is 5,000+ years old and Thai Yoga Massage has roots to more than 2,500 years. They worked fine without human anatomy. Unfortunately, most of us aren’t raised as a child being around Thai healing and having decades of innate knowledge at our fingertips. We have to catch up with less intuitive studies and more scientific reasoning. But its all good, right? In a sense, we greater legitimize the practice by bringing it into mainstream science.
We had similar training when I did yoga teacher training. The focus was different in that it was solely about human movement. I think there is great value in taking this in depth course. It is actually listed as training for Yoga as well as Thai Yoga massage. There is a lot that was missing in my initial yoga training, not to mention the years of college anatomy. Not only has my Thai Yoga massage cranked up many notches, but also my yoga teaching. I had a yogi come up to me last week asking about pain in the back of her knee during wide leg forward folds. Before this training, I wouldn’t have been able to tell her confidently that it was her gracilis muscle. Now I know! And I gave her tools to work on to heal it herself.
If you’re interested, look up Thai Bodyworks in Evanston, Illinois. They have a lot to offer!
Andy Yoga 