Yoga is widely taken up for its protective effects on the body, and injuries within it are common enough to be studied. The pattern they follow is informative about how the practice works.
The mechanism is usually accumulation rather than accident
Injury reports in yoga cluster around gradual onset rather than a single traumatic moment, which places most of them in the overuse category.
Positions held at the end of a joint's available range place load on the passive structures — ligament, joint capsule, cartilage — rather than on muscle.
Those structures adapt slowly and repair poorly, so repeated loading over months can exceed their tolerance without any session feeling excessive.
Certain regions appear repeatedly
Wrists take substantial load in weight-bearing positions that most people's daily activity has not prepared them for, and the joint has limited capacity to distribute it.
Shoulders, lower back, knees and hamstring attachments also feature consistently, and each corresponds to a position commonly taken to the end of its range.
The recurrence of the same regions across different styles points to the positions rather than to any particular method.
Flexibility can increase the exposure
People with naturally large range reach positions others cannot and receive praise for doing so, which encourages going further still.
Range beyond the strength available to control it transfers load directly to passive structures, so the most flexible practitioners are not the least exposed.
Hypermobility is a recognised clinical condition, and practising as though it were an advantage rather than a consideration is a documented route to joint problems.
Group instruction limits what can be corrected
Large classes make individual observation difficult, and a teacher cannot see whether range is coming from the intended joint or from an adjacent one compensating.
Verbal instruction to a room is necessarily general, while the relevant limits are individual and depend on anatomy that varies considerably between people.
Some variation in joint structure is skeletal and cannot be changed by practice, which means certain positions are simply unavailable to particular individuals.
What reduces the exposure
Working within a range that can be held actively rather than settled into passively keeps load on the muscle, where adaptation is faster and tolerance is higher.
Treating props as tools for maintaining position quality rather than as concessions is the practical form of that principle.
Pain during a position, pain in a joint rather than a muscle, or discomfort persisting beyond a couple of days warrants assessment by a clinician rather than continued practice.