Back injury was beginning of teenager’s yoga training

Among the youngest yoga teachers anywhere, 18-year old Grayson Faught of North Little Rock learned the hard way.

Faught injured his back as a ninth-grader, power-lifting weights to train for football.

“I loved football,” he says. “I was all about football. When the doctor said I had to stop playing football, it was devastating.”

Faught had dislodged and cracked the fifth lumbar vertebrae (L5) in his lower back. If the bone slipped again, he faced surgery. The doctor allowed him only one form of exercise: yoga.

“I didn’t like the idea of being a hippie-dippy yoga guy,” he says. “I wanted to hit the weight room. I wanted to crack some heads.”

Worse, this prescription sounded to him suspiciously like the doctor going along with his mother, Stacey Faught. But Mom swears the doctor didn’t know she teaches yoga.

Her son “became very dedicated to his own healing,” she says.

He advanced through training to teaching at her Blue Yoga Nyla studio in North Little Rock, and plans a career in sports medicine and chiropractic treatment.

“It’s really a blessing I got hurt,” Grayson Faught says.

Yoga not only helped him recover physically, he says, but also “taught me to remain calm in stressful situations. Things just weren’t as hard anymore.”

Faught is a rock climber. He trusts yoga to keep his back in shape. He can do a seemingly effortless handstand to prove the physical benefits of yoga.

But “showing off,” he says, is not the point.

The point for him is that, “We live in a fast world, and yoga is all about slowing everything down.”

People who say, “Let’s do yoga and burn calories, get skinny,” he says - they just don’t get it.

ActiveStyle, Pages 28 on 01/20/2014

Upcoming Events