I have been practicing yoga since the year 2009. It has transformed my life in many ways. Aside from its benefits on my health and well-being, the connections I have grown through meeting them in yoga class is amazing. It has also transformed my way of thinking and the way I am connected with my body.
My History With Yoga
Just to backtrack a bit, I started to go to yoga classes when I had a bout of back pain. I had been experiencing back pain, on and off, since I was 18 years old when I had injured myself during a tennis match. I did physical therapy, which did help, but whenever I was sitting a lot or more stressed out, I would notice my back pain would come back.
When I moved to California, I met a patient at a clinic I was working at, who told me to come and try a yoga class of hers. Since then, it’s been history.
What I Thought About Yoga
Initially, I thought that yoga was just about sitting around and touching your toes. I didn’t see myself doing it consistently because I liked doing things that were more physical. I started doing power yoga and I liked how much I was sweating and working during class. I stuck with it since that first power yoga class.
What I have noticed is when I am consistent in practicing yoga, my back pain is basically non-existent. So, I got interested in why this is the case because I always like to know why something works. Especially, since I am a Physical Therapist, I want to be able to share treatments with my patients that I know why they work.
How Yoga Helps With Back Pain
So, a few years ago, I did a pain certification and learned more about why yoga works for back pain. Here are a few of the main reasons why yoga works for back pain.
1. When you have an episode of back pain or pain in general, your body and nervous system switches into fight or flight mode. When this is turned on, you can experience more pain because you are a little more heightened to your senses. In yoga, particularly power yoga, we use Ujjayi breath, which is essentially breathing in and out of your nose. This particular breathing helps to stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system, also known as the rest and digest part of your nervous system.
When you tap into this nervous system, your brain is no longer on high alert. Therefore, the pain signals are not quite as strong going out as they were previous to doing this type of breathing or doing this style of yoga. Getting your nervous system out of the fight or flight mode is really important to decrease your pain, whether it is back pain, or any other kind of pain.
2. Another thing that research shows that helps with pain is getting your heart rate up. Power yoga is really great in doing that. The beginning of the power yoga sequence is doing sun salutations. We do them at a quick pace and that can be overwhelming if you are new to yoga. However, that increase in your heart rate generally helps to decrease an episode of pain.
It seems as if it’s counterintuitive because when we are in pain, we don’t really want to move. However, increasing your heart rate and moving your body is actually going to decrease that pain, which is super helpful in a back pain episode.
3. Yoga also helps increase your strength and flexibility within your body. Having a generalized improvement in strength and flexibility creates a safe space. If your brain feels safe with moving, then you are not going to have any pain when you are moving.
Creating this safe environment for the brain makes things like picking up something from the ground or turning to your side when you get out of bed not be pain inducing.
4.The last thing that’s great about yoga in relation to back pain is something you might have considered. Taking yoga in group classes is a social environment. When we are more social, it in general helps to decrease the flight or fight response in our body, which in turn will help with decreasing your back pain.
There are studies that prove that being in a social environment, it could help improve back pain. They are not sure why this is the case but I think that the reason behind this is that when you are with the right group, you feel safe. And when you have that feeling of safety, you start to push your body to end range movements that you did not think were possible before.
So when you are off your yoga mat, when you go into such movements again, it will not flare up your back pain as it did in the past.
In conclusion, getting yourself into a social group class is helpful for your back pain.
I hope this week’s podcast helped you understand and gave you some insight about how yoga can help you with your back pain. If you want to hang out with me or my studio for yoga classes, you can hang out with us at BrightHeart Yoga Studio.
Follow me in my social media accounts, too, as I discuss more about pain, movement, and the like. See you next week!