“I like difficult cases,” says Dr Robin Monro, greeting us at the Yoga Therapy Centre he founded in King’s Cross, London.

This is good, because I’ve brought him the most challenging patient I could find: my 46-year-old friend Sharif, who for the past three weeks has been suffering shooting pains in his lower back. Tall, strong and not very flexible, Sharif has also never been near a yoga mat in his life.

The details

Yoga Therapy Centre,
90-92 Pentonville
Road, London N1 9HS,
020 7689 3040,
www.yogatherapy.org

Monro is older than I was expecting – a sprightly 76 – with a small, lithe frame. “Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to know how to do yoga to benefit from yoga therapy,” he says. Monro questions Sharif about the pain, then measures – literally, with a tape measure – his range of movement. He diagnoses a problem with the facet joints – not a slipped disc, as Sharif had feared.

Back pain is Monro’s speciality, but the centre claims to help a huge range of conditions, from arthritis and diabetes to asthma and depression. Yoga is tailored to individual needs in one-to-one sessions, with clients graduating to small groups.

Lying on our backs, Sharif and I are shown a series of gentle exercises – lifting our heads to look at our toes, then bending a knee and rotating it gently, or pushing it to the side – designed to relax Sharif’s muscles, bring restorative blood flow back to the damaged tissue and begin to strengthen his postural muscles. By the time we’ve finished, Sharif has a big smile on his face. “I feel different already,” he says.

I notice that the session has passed without a word of Sanskrit being uttered – and we haven’t done any of the classical yoga poses. Is what Monro has done any different to what a physio might do? Monro insists it is. “First, there’s our emphasis on relaxation, breathing and awareness,” he says. “The effects of yoga on the immune system are well documented – your heart rate and blood pressure go down, there are chemical changes in the blood, your endorphin levels go up...” For someone who was in as much pain as Sharif, the full asanas (postures) will have to wait.