Yoga can be great for back pain, especially lower back pain. I would spend all day on campus carrying a very heavy backpack with my laptop, battery, and giant textbooks, so it wasn’t too surprising when I started to develop some pretty intense aches. I have a friend who is a certified yoga instructor, and she explained to me that a lot of people have weak back muscles in general, so our lower back picks up a lot of the slack. Yoga helps to strengthen and stretch all of your back muscles, so when you use your back, weight is distributed evenly and you use more muscles groups. Your muscles also tend to tighten and tense which cause pain, so the stretching and increased blood flow help to loosen up the tense spots. She worked with me personally and I had amazing results!! (I also lost some of the unnecessary weight in my bag)
It worked great for me, and almost all of her pre-natal yoga clients see immediate results as many of them come in with back pain. Yoga helps to give you better posture and alignment that stays with you for the entire day, so you don’t end up slouching in positions that can cause pain. She also said that yoga can give you tools to breathe into strong sensations. When we feel pain, especially in the back, we tend to tighten and tense, which causes more restriction and pain. Yoga teaches you how to breathe through strong sensations and keep the muscles relaxed, thus reducing the amount of discomfort significantly. You should definitely let your yoga teacher know what your dealing with when you start, and they will totally help to customize a practice best for you!
Yoga can be great for back pain, especially lower back pain. I would spend all day on campus carrying a very heavy backpack with my laptop, battery, and giant textbooks, so it wasn’t too surprising...
... (more)I first started yoga because I wanted an alternative to going to the gym. They gym cultivated a strange mindset for me. I was never at ease, I was self-conscious, there were so many egos walking around, and I would usually end up more stressed by the time I left. If I wanted to feel better about myself, the gym was not the place to do it. My first yoga class, although challenging, really helped to show me how “working out” was really about honoring myself, and my body. The practice of yoga is born out of a philosophy of Universal love. It is about opening to, and working with our connection with everything around us. I found that by opening my body the way yoga forces you to do, it also started to open my heart. For the first time in a long time, I felt really good about myself, dare I say I even loved myself. I felt more accepted in the world and more present in the world. Yoga keeps me from returning to that dark place of self-loathing that so many of us return to. I can truly say that it changed my life.
I first started yoga because I wanted an alternative to going to the gym. They gym cultivated a strange mindset for me. I was never at ease, I was self-conscious, there were so many egos walking...
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